Tag: Climate Change

Why Optimism Can’t Fix Our Climate Politics

Ritchie notes in her Vox piece that she has adapted her “framework for bringing about societal change” from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s entrepreneurial bible, Zero to One. As Thiel does, she taxonomizes people along axes of changeability (“changeable” or “not changeable”) and optimism (“optimistic” or “pessimistic”). The ideal people, according to this framework, are optimists […]

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Four things on the agenda for Biden’s first trip to Canada as president

Four things on the agenda for Biden’s first trip to Canada as president | The Hill Skip to content AP Photo/Andrew Harnik President Joe Biden arrives or a news conference at the 10th North American Leaders’ Summit at the National Palace in Mexico City, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. President Biden is making his first trip […]

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MIT Center for Real Estate advances climate and sustainable real estate research agenda

Real estate investors are increasingly putting sustainability at the center of their decision-making processes, given the close association between climate risk and real estate assets, both of which are location-based. This growing emphasis comes at a time when the real estate industry is one of the biggest contributors to global warming; its embodied and operational […]

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Helping the cause of environmental resilience

Haruko Wainwright, the Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, grew up in rural Japan, where many nuclear facilities are located. She remembers worrying about the facilities as a child. Wainwright was only 6 at the time of the Chernobyl […]

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MIT-led teams win National Science Foundation grants to research sustainable materials

Three MIT-led teams are among 16 nationwide to receive funding awards to address sustainable materials for global challenges through the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program. Launched in 2019, the program targets solutions to especially compelling societal or scientific challenges at an accelerated pace, by incorporating a multidisciplinary research approach. “Solutions for today’s national-scale societal […]

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The U.N.’s Disturbing New Climate Report Is a Call to Battle

In my home, Norway, a similar attitude of delay pervades the government’s continued enthusiasm for discovering and exploiting new oil and gas fields. The mostly state-owned company Equinor plans to continue expanding until 2026, and it’s pretty safe to assume that somewhere in late 2024, that date will be pushed back. Just another few years, […]

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Biden administration announces nearly $200 million for wildfire resilience

Biden administration announces nearly $200 million for wildfire resilience | The Hill Skip to content FILE – Residents fight the Marshall Fire in Louisville, Colo., Thursday, Dec. 30, 2021. A wildfire that destroyed nearly 1,100 homes and businesses in suburban Denver last winter caused more than $2 billion in total financial losses — by far […]

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Detailed images from space offer clearer picture of drought effects on plants

“MIT is a place where dreams come true,” says César Terrer, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Here at MIT, Terrer says he’s given the resources needed to explore ideas he finds most exciting, and at the top of his list is climate science. In particular, he is interested in […]

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Biden Vetoes Anti-ESG Bill, Accomplishing the Barest of Minimums for Climate Change

The Tribune notes that such hesitation in the face of an AR-15 had led police in other shootings—including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando—to respond less quickly. Republicans, both in Texas and nationally, have opposed banning or further regulating weapons like the AR-15—even now as police […]

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Days After Biden Approves Willow, IPCC Says That Current Fossil Fuel Production Will Doom Us All

The Tribune notes that such hesitation in the face of an AR-15 had led police in other shootings—including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando—to respond less quickly. Republicans, both in Texas and nationally, have opposed banning or further regulating weapons like the AR-15—even now as police […]

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Who Is Biden Trying to Please With His Middle-Ground Energy Policy?

The problem with that win-win story is that it isn’t true. “Growing the energy pie,” i.e. increasing fossil fuels and increasing clean energy as well, means growing the emissions pie, too. Fossil fuel production will need to be reduced long before it becomes unprofitable. Domestic fossil fuel production has a tenuous relationship, at best, to […]

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Bored of Hot Takes in a Burning World

For this reader, one of the most meaningful passages in Saving Time came from an aside about the race to produce human-like artificial intelligence. Odell has always thrived at conceptualizing abstract technologies, and the recent public interest in DALL-E, ChatGPT, and related services has only served to amplify our confusion, fear, and excitement about these […]

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Minimizing electric vehicles’ impact on the grid

National and global plans to combat climate change include increasing the electrification of vehicles and the percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources. But some projections show that these trends might require costly new power plants to meet peak loads in the evening when cars are plugged in after the workday. What’s more, overproduction of […]

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Tucker Carlson’s Twitter Account Appears To Have Been Hacked, Unless He Really Does Consider Himself A ‘Climate Change Activist’ And ‘Zelensky Adviser’

Tucker Carlson has been on a tear lately trying, not very convincingly, to whitewash the Jan 6. riot as a peaceful gathering of “sightseers.” But on Tuesday, it appears the guy hated by some of his own colleagues had become the victim of fake news: As caught by The Daily Beast, the Twitter bio of […]

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Are Opponents of Alaska’s Willow Drilling Project Guilty of “Eco-Colonialism”?

“Not only a complete betrayal of his commitments to confront the climate crisis but is also an open violation of Indigenous rights.” The group Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic condemned the Biden administration’s approval of the project, calling it “a great disappointment” that “comes after years of grassroots, Iñupiaq-led opposition,” and represents “the continued prioritization of […]

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Environmental, Native Groups Slam Biden’s “Immoral” Approval of Willow Oil Drilling Project in Alaska

“Biden approved Willow knowing full well that it’ll cause massive and irreversible destruction, which is appalling,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “People and wildlife will suffer, and extracting and burning more fossil fuel will warm the climate even faster. Biden has no excuse for letting this project go […]

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Engaging enterprises with the climate crisis

Almost every large corporation is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but lacks a roadmap to get there, says John Sterman, professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, co-director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and leader of its Climate Pathways Project. Sterman and colleagues offer a suite of well-honed […]

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Celebrating a decade of a more sustainable MIT, with a focus on the future

When MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS) first launched in 2013, it was charged with integrating sustainability across all levels of campus by engaging the collective brainpower of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and partners. At the eighth annual Sustainability Connect, MITOS’s signature event, held nearly a decade later, the room was filled with MIT community members […]

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Why Is the Fossil Fuel Industry Praising the Inflation Reduction Act?

“There’s lots of great stuff across the board.” Allyson Baker Book—chief sustainability officer at Baker Hughes, an oilfield services (“energy technology”) company—was enthusiastic about the opportunities presented by the IRA. It’s already provoked “a little bit” more investor interest in carbon management technologies, hydrogen, and geothermal, which uses similar equipment and expertise to oil and […]

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Atlanta’s “Copy City” and the Vital Fight for Urban Forests

Forests also help to allay and mitigate the effects of climate change. Trees produce oxygen and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Cities—despite their overall climate benefits due to housing density and less car use—can act as heat islands, trapping heat and altering weather patterns. But urban forests can alleviate those problems, as studies […]

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Atlanta’s “Cop City” and the Vital Fight for Urban Forests

Forests also help to allay and mitigate the effects of climate change. Trees produce oxygen and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Cities—despite their overall climate benefits due to housing density and less car use—can act as heat islands, trapping heat and altering weather patterns. But urban forests can alleviate those problems, as studies […]

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Working to make nuclear energy more competitive

Assil Halimi has loved science since he was a child, but it was a singular experience at a college internship that stoked his interest in nuclear engineering. As part of work on a conceptual design for an aircraft electric propulsion system, Halimi had to read a chart that compared the energy density of various fuel […]

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What Fossil Fuel Executives Really Think About ESG

Whether fossil fuel executives agree with the anti-ESG movement or not—or are merely reluctant to be associated with its seedier elements—plenty are quietly supporting it through their paid memberships in trade associations and campaign contributions to politicians backing the push. In 2021, for instance, Sheffield donated $5,800 to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who provided a decisive […]

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Study: Smoke particles from wildfires can erode the ozone layer

A wildfire can pump smoke up into the stratosphere, where the particles drift for over a year. A new MIT study has found that while suspended there, these particles can trigger chemical reactions that erode the protective ozone layer shielding the Earth from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation. The study, which appears today in Nature, […]

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Nanotube sensors are capable of detecting and distinguishing gibberellin plant hormones

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that […]

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3 Questions: Antje Danielson on energy education and its role in climate action

The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world, and high school students who want to contribute to the energy transition. As MITEI’s director of education, Antje Danielson manages a team devoted to training the next […]

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Aviva Intveld named 2023 Gates Cambridge Scholar

MIT senior Aviva Intveld has won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students an opportunity to pursue graduate study in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K. Intveld will join the other 23 U.S. citizens selected for the 2023 class of scholars. Intveld, from Los Angeles, is majoring in earth, […]

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The Climate Case for Rationing

Rationing might come in handy for another, happier aspect of decarbonization. As economist J.W. Mason explains, rationing in the U.S. during World War II was less a response to the war using up essential commodities than to the way war mobilization created a booming job market, boosting demand for those commodities. “Civilian consumption might have been […]

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