Climate change

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Energy

      MIT scientists contribute to National Ignition Facility fusion milestone

      by

      On Monday, Dec. 5, at around 1 a.m., a tiny sphere of deuterium-tritium fuel surrounded by a cylindrical can of gold called a hohlraum was targeted by 192 lasers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. Over the course of billionths of a second, the lasers fired, generating X-rays inside the gold can, and imploding the sphere of fuel.

      On that morning, for the first time ever, the lasers delivered 2.1 megajoules of energy and yielded 3.15 megajoules in return, achieving a historic fusion energy gain well above 1 — a result verified by diagnostic tools developed by the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). The use of these tools and their importance was referenced by Arthur Pak, a LLNL staff scientist who spoke at a U.S. Department of Energy press event on Dec. 13 announcing the NIF’s success.

      Johan Frenje, head of the PSFC High-Energy-Density Physics division, notes that this milestone “will have profound implications for laboratory fusion research in general.”

      Since the late 1950s, researchers worldwide have pursued fusion ignition and energy gain in a laboratory, considering it one of the grand challenges of the 21st century. Ignition can only be reached when the internal fusion heating power is high enough to overcome the physical processes that cool the fusion plasma, creating a positive thermodynamic feedback loop that very rapidly increases the plasma temperature. In the case of inertial confinement fusion, the method used at the NIF, ignition can initiate a “fuel burn propagation” into the surrounding dense and cold fuel, and when done correctly, enable fusion-energy gain.

      Frenje and his PSFC division initially designed dozens of diagnostic systems that were implemented at the NIF, including the vitally important magnetic recoil neutron spectrometer (MRS), which measures the neutron energy spectrum, the data from which fusion yield, plasma ion temperature, and spherical fuel pellet compression (“fuel areal density”) can be determined. Overseen by PSFC Research Scientist Maria Gatu Johnson since 2013, the MRS is one of two systems at the NIF relied upon to measure the absolute neutron yield from the Dec. 5 experiment because of its unique ability to accurately interpret an implosion’s neutron signals.

      “Before the announcement of this historic achievement could be made, the LLNL team wanted to wait until Maria had analyzed the MRS data to an adequate level for a fusion yield to be determined,” says Frenje.

      Response around MIT to NIF’s announcement has been enthusiastic and hopeful. “This is the kind of breakthrough that ignites the imagination,” says Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, “reminding us of the wonder of discovery and the possibilities of human ingenuity. Although we have a long, hard path ahead of us before fusion can deliver clean energy to the electrical grid, we should find much reason for optimism in today’s announcement. Innovation in science and technology holds great power and promise to address some of the world’s biggest challenges, including climate change.”

      Frenje also credits the rest of the team at the PSFC’s High-Energy-Density Physics division, the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester, LLNL, and other collaborators for their support and involvement in this research, as well as the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy, which has funded much of their work since the early 1990s. He is also proud of the number of MIT PhDs that have been generated by the High-Energy-Density Physics Division and subsequently hired by LLNL, including the experimental lead for this experiment, Alex Zylstra PhD ’15.

      “This is really a team effort,” says Frenje. “Without the scientific dialogue and the extensive know-how at the HEDP Division, the critical contributions made by the MRS system would not have happened.” More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Environment

      New nanosatellite tests autonomy in space

      by

      In May 2022, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the Transporter-5 mission into orbit. The mission contained a collection of micro and nanosatellites from both industry and government, including one from MIT Lincoln Laboratory called the Agile MicroSat (AMS).

      AMS’s primary mission is to test automated maneuvering capabilities in the tumultuous very low-Earth orbit (VLEO) environment, starting at 525 kilometers above the surface and lowering down. VLEO is a challenging location for satellites because the higher air density, coupled with variable space weather, causes increased and unpredictable drag that requires frequent maneuvers to maintain position. Using a commercial off-the-shelf electric-ion propulsion system and custom algorithms, AMS is testing how well it can execute automated navigation and control over an initial mission period of six months.

      “AMS integrates electric propulsion and autonomous navigation and guidance control algorithms that push a lot of the operation of the thruster onto the spacecraft — somewhat like a self-driving car,” says Andrew Stimac, who is the principal investigator for the AMS program and the leader of the laboratory’s Integrated Systems and Concepts Group.

      Stimac sees AMS as a kind of pathfinder mission for the field of small satellite autonomy. Autonomy is essential to support the growing number of small satellite launches for industry and science because it can reduce the cost and labor needed to maintain them, enable missions that call for quick and impromptu responses, and help to avoid collisions in an already-crowded sky.

      AMS is the first-ever test of a nanosatellite with this type of automated maneuvering capability.

      AMS uses an electric propulsion thruster that was selected to meet the size and power constraints of a nanosatellite while providing enough thrust and endurance to enable multiyear missions that operate in VLEO. The flight software, called the Bus Hosted Onboard Software Suite, was designed to autonomously operate the thruster to change the spacecraft’s orbit. Operators on the ground can give AMS a high-level command, such as to descend to and maintain a 300-kilometer orbit, and the software will schedule thruster burns to achieve that command autonomously, using measurements from the onboard GPS receiver as feedback. This experimental software is separate from the bus flight software, which allows AMS to safely test its novel algorithms without endangering the spacecraft.

      “One of the enablers for AMS is the way in which we’ve created this software sandbox onboard the spacecraft,” says Robert Legge, who is another member of the AMS team. “We have our own hosted software that’s running on the primary flight computer, but it’s separate from the critical health and safety avionics software. Basically, you can view this as being a little development environment on the spacecraft where we can test out different algorithms.”

      AMS has two secondary missions called Camera and Beacon. Camera’s mission is to take photos and short video clips of the Earth’s surface while AMS is in different low-Earth orbit positions.

      “One of the things we’re hoping to demonstrate is the ability to respond to current events,” says Rebecca Keenan, who helped to prepare the Camera payload. “We could hear about something that happened, like a fire or flood, and then respond pretty quickly to maneuver the satellite to image it.”

      Keenan and the rest of the AMS team are collaborating with the laboratory’s DisasterSat program, which aims to improve satellite image processing pipelines to help relief agencies respond to disasters more quickly. Small satellites that could schedule operations on-demand, rather than planning them months in advance before launch, could be a great asset to disaster response efforts.

      The other payload, Beacon, is testing new adaptive optics capabilities for tracking fast-moving targets by sending laser light from the moving satellite to a ground station at the laboratory’s Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. Enabling precise laser pointing from an agile satellite could aid many different types of space missions, such as communications and tracking space debris. It could also be used for emerging programs such as Breakthrough Starshot, which is developing a satellite that can accelerate to high speeds using a laser-propelled lightsail.

      “As far as we know, this is the first on-orbit artificial guide star that has launched for a dedicated adaptive optics purpose,” says Lulu Liu, who worked on the Beacon payload. “Theoretically, the laser it carries can be maneuvered into position on other spacecraft to support a large number of science missions in different regions of the sky.”

      The team developed Beacon with a strict budget and timeline and hope that its success will shorten the design and test loop of next-generation laser transmitter systems. “The idea is that we could have a number of these flying in the sky at once, and a ground system can point to one of them and get near-real-time feedback on its performance,” says Liu.

      AMS weighs under 12 kilograms with 6U dimensions (23 x 11 x 36 centimeters). The bus was designed by Blue Canyon Technologies and the thruster was designed by Enpulsion GmbH.

      Legge says that the AMS program was approached as an opportunity for Lincoln Laboratory to showcase its ability to conduct work in the space domain quickly and flexibly. Some major roadblocks to rapid development of new space technology have been long timelines, high costs, and the extremely low risk tolerance associated with traditional space programs. “We wanted to show that we can really do rapid prototyping and testing of space hardware and software on orbit at an affordable cost,” Legge says.

      “AMS shows the value and fast time-to-orbit afforded by teaming with rapid space commercial partners for spacecraft core bus technologies and launch and ground segment operations, while allowing the laboratory to focus on innovative mission concepts, advanced components and payloads, and algorithms and processing software,” says Dan Cousins, who is the program manager for AMS. “The AMS team appreciates the support from the laboratory’s Technology Office for allowing us to showcase an effective operating model for rapid space programs.”

      AMS took its first image on June 1, completed its thruster commissioning in July, and has begun to descend toward its target VLEO position. More

    • 50 Shares149 Views

      in Energy

      Decarbonization amid global crises

      by

      A global pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation. The first-ever serious challenge to the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.

      Forced to face a seemingly unending series of once-in-a-generation crises, how can the world continue to focus attention on goals around carbon emissions and climate change? That was the question posed by Philip R. Sharp, the former president of Resources for the Future and a former 10-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana, during his MIT Energy Initiative Fall Colloquium address, entitled “The prospects for decarbonization in America: Will global and domestic crises disrupt our plans?”

      Perhaps surprisingly, Sharp sounded an optimistic note in his answer. Despite deep political divisions in the United States, he noted, Congress has passed five major pieces of legislation — under both presidents Donald Trump and Joseph Biden — aimed at accelerating decarbonization efforts. Rather than hampering movement to combat climate change, Sharp said, domestic and global crises have seemed to galvanize support, create new incentives for action, and even unify political rivals around the cause.

      “Almost everybody is dealing with, to some degree, the absolutely profound, churning events that we are amidst now. Most of them are unexpected, and therefore [we’re] not prepared for [them], and they have had a profound shaking of our thinking,” Sharp said. “The conventional wisdom has not held up in almost all of these areas, and therefore it makes it much more difficult for us to think we know how to predict an uncertain future, and [it causes us to] question our own ability as a nation — or anywhere — to actually take on these challenges. And obviously, climate change is one of the most important.”

      However, Sharp continued, these challenges have, in some instances, spurred action. The war in Ukraine, he noted, has upset European energy markets, but it has also highlighted the importance of countries achieving a more energy-independent posture through renewables. “In America,” he added, “we’ve actually seen absolutely stunning … behavior by the United States Congress, of all places.”

      “What we’ve witnessed is, [Congress] put out incredible … sums of money under the previous administration, and then under this administration, to deal with the Covid crisis,” Sharp added later in his talk. “And then the United States government came together — red and blue — to support the Ukrainians against Russia. It saddens me to say, it seems to take a Russian invasion or the Chinese probing us economically to get us moving. But we are moving, and these things are happening.”

      Congressional action

      Sharp cautioned against getting “caught up” in the familiar viewpoint that Congress, in its current incarnation, is fundamentally incapable of passing meaningful legislation. He pointed, in particular, to the passage of five laws over the previous two years:

      The 2020 Energy Act, which has been characterized as a “down payment on fighting climate change.”
      The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (sometimes called the “bipartisan infrastructure bill”), which calls for investments in passenger rail, electric vehicle infrastructure, electric school buses, and other clean-energy measures;
      The CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion effort to revitalize the American semiconductor industry, which some analysts say could direct roughly one-quarter of its funding toward accelerating zero-carbon industries and conducting climate research;
      The Inflation Reduction Act (called by some “the largest climate legislation in U.S. history”), which includes tax credits, incentives, and other provisions to help private companies tackle climate change, increase investments in renewable energy, and enhance energy efficiency; and
      The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, ratified by the Senate to little fanfare in September, under which the United States agreed to reduce the consumption and production of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).
      “It is a big deal,” Sharp said of the dramatic increase in federal climate action. “It is very significant actions that are being taken — more than what we would expect, or I would expect, out of the Congress at any one time.”

      Along with the many billions of dollars of climate-related investments included in the legislation, Sharp said, these new laws will have a number of positive “spillover” effects.

      “This enables state governments, in their policies, to be more aggressive,” Sharp said. “Why? Because it makes it cheaper for some of the investments that they will try to force within their state.” Another “pretty obvious” spillover effect, Sharp said, is that the new laws will enhance U.S. credibility in international negotiations. Finally, he said, these public investments will make the U.S. economy more competitive in international markets for clean-energy technology — particularly as the United States seeks to compete against China in the space.

      “[Competition with China] has become a motivator in American politics, like it or not,” Sharp said. “There is no question that it is causing and bringing together [politicians] across blue [states] and red [states].”

      Holding onto progress

      Even in an uncertain political climate in which Democrats and Republicans seem unable to agree on basic facts, recent funding commitments are likely to survive, no matter which party controls Congress and the presidency, Sharp said. That’s because most of the legislation relies on broadly popular “carrots” that reward investments in decarbonization, rather than less popular “sticks” that create new restrictions or punishments for companies that fail to decarbonize.

      “Politically, the impact of this is very significant,” Sharp said. “It is so much easier in politics to give away tax [credits] than it is to penalize or put requirements onto people. The fact is that these tax credits are more likely to be politically sustained than other forms of government intervention. That, at least, has been the history.”

      Sharp stressed the importance of what he called “civil society” — institutions such as universities, nonprofits, churches, and other organizations that are apart from government and business — in promoting decarbonization efforts. “[Those groups] can act highly independently, and therefore, they can drive for things that others are not willing to do. Now this does not always work to good purposes. Partly, this diversity and this decentralization in civil society … led to deniers and others being able to stop some climate action. But now my view is, this is starting to all move in the right direction, in a very dynamic and a very important way. What we have seen over the last few years is a big uptick in philanthropy related to climate.”

      Looking ahead

      Sharp’s optimism even extended to the role of social media. He suggested that the “Wild West” era of social platforms may be ending, pointing to the celebrities who have recently lost valuable business partnerships for spreading hate speech and disinformation. “We’re now a lot more alert to the dangers,” he said.

      Some in the audience questioned Sharp about specific paths toward decarbonization, but Sharp said that progress will require a number of disparate approaches — some of which will inevitably have a greater impact than others. “The current policy, and the policy embedded in this [new] legislation … is all about doing both,” he said. “It’s all about advancing [current] technologies into the marketplace, and at the same time driving for breakthroughs.”

      Above all, Sharp stressed the need for continued collective action around climate change. “The fact is, we’re all contributors to some degree,” he said. “But we also all can do something. In my view, this is clearly not a time for hand-wringing. This is a time for action. People have to roll up their sleeves, and go to work, and not roll them down anytime soon.” More

    • 38 Shares99 Views

      in Energy

      A healthy wind

      by

      Nearly 10 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from wind power. The renewable energy source benefits climate, air quality, and public health by displacing emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants that would otherwise be produced by fossil-fuel-based power plants.

      A new MIT study finds that the health benefits associated with wind power could more than quadruple if operators prioritized turning down output from the most polluting fossil-fuel-based power plants when energy from wind is available.

      In the study, published today in Science Advances, researchers analyzed the hourly activity of wind turbines, as well as the reported emissions from every fossil-fuel-based power plant in the country, between the years 2011 and 2017. They traced emissions across the country and mapped the pollutants to affected demographic populations. They then calculated the regional air quality and associated health costs to each community.

      The researchers found that in 2014, wind power that was associated with state-level policies improved air quality overall, resulting in $2 billion in health benefits across the country. However, only roughly 30 percent of these health benefits reached disadvantaged communities.

      The team further found that if the electricity industry were to reduce the output of the most polluting fossil-fuel-based power plants, rather than the most cost-saving plants, in times of wind-generated power, the overall health benefits could quadruple to $8.4 billion nationwide. However, the results would have a similar demographic breakdown.

      “We found that prioritizing health is a great way to maximize benefits in a widespread way across the U.S., which is a very positive thing. But it suggests it’s not going to address disparities,” says study co-author Noelle Selin, a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “In order to address air pollution disparities, you can’t just focus on the electricity sector or renewables and count on the overall air pollution benefits addressing these real and persistent racial and ethnic disparities. You’ll need to look at other air pollution sources, as well as the underlying systemic factors that determine where plants are sited and where people live.”

      Selin’s co-authors are lead author and former MIT graduate student Minghao Qiu PhD ’21, now at Stanford University, and Corwin Zigler at the University of Texas at Austin.

      Turn-down service

      In their new study, the team looked for patterns between periods of wind power generation and the activity of fossil-fuel-based power plants, to see how regional electricity markets adjusted the output of power plants in response to influxes of renewable energy.

      “One of the technical challenges, and the contribution of this work, is trying to identify which are the power plants that respond to this increasing wind power,” Qiu notes.

      To do so, the researchers compared two historical datasets from the period between 2011 and 2017: an hour-by-hour record of energy output of wind turbines across the country, and a detailed record of emissions measurements from every fossil-fuel-based power plant in the U.S. The datasets covered each of seven major regional electricity markets, each market providing energy to one or multiple states.

      “California and New York are each their own market, whereas the New England market covers around seven states, and the Midwest covers more,” Qiu explains. “We also cover about 95 percent of all the wind power in the U.S.”

      In general, they observed that, in times when wind power was available, markets adjusted by essentially scaling back the power output of natural gas and sub-bituminous coal-fired power plants. They noted that the plants that were turned down were likely chosen for cost-saving reasons, as certain plants were less costly to turn down than others.

      The team then used a sophisticated atmospheric chemistry model to simulate the wind patterns and chemical transport of emissions across the country, and determined where and at what concentrations the emissions generated fine particulates and ozone — two pollutants that are known to damage air quality and human health. Finally, the researchers mapped the general demographic populations across the country, based on U.S. census data, and applied a standard epidemiological approach to calculate a population’s health cost as a result of their pollution exposure.

      This analysis revealed that, in the year 2014, a general cost-saving approach to displacing fossil-fuel-based energy in times of wind energy resulted in $2 billion in health benefits, or savings, across the country. A smaller share of these benefits went to disadvantaged populations, such as communities of color and low-income communities, though this disparity varied by state.

      “It’s a more complex story than we initially thought,” Qiu says. “Certain population groups are exposed to a higher level of air pollution, and those would be low-income people and racial minority groups. What we see is, developing wind power could reduce this gap in certain states but further increase it in other states, depending on which fossil-fuel plants are displaced.”

      Tweaking power

      The researchers then examined how the pattern of emissions and the associated health benefits would change if they prioritized turning down different fossil-fuel-based plants in times of wind-generated power. They tweaked the emissions data to reflect several alternative scenarios: one in which the most health-damaging, polluting power plants are turned down first; and two other scenarios in which plants producing the most sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide respectively, are first to reduce their output.

      They found that while each scenario increased health benefits overall, and the first scenario in particular could quadruple health benefits, the original disparity persisted: Communities of color and low-income communities still experienced smaller health benefits than more well-off communities.

      “We got to the end of the road and said, there’s no way we can address this disparity by being smarter in deciding which plants to displace,” Selin says.

      Nevertheless, the study can help identify ways to improve the health of the general population, says Julian Marshall, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Washington.

      “The detailed information provided by the scenarios in this paper can offer a roadmap to electricity-grid operators and to state air-quality regulators regarding which power plants are highly damaging to human health and also are likely to noticeably reduce emissions if wind-generated electricity increases,” says Marshall, who was not involved in the study.

      “One of the things that makes me optimistic about this area is, there’s a lot more attention to environmental justice and equity issues,” Selin concludes. “Our role is to figure out the strategies that are most impactful in addressing those challenges.”

      This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and by the National Institutes of Health. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Energy

      Mining for the clean energy transition

      by

      In a world powered increasingly by clean energy, drilling for oil and gas will gradually give way to digging for metals and minerals. Today, the “critical minerals” used to make electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, and grid-scale battery storage are facing soaring demand — and some acute bottlenecks as miners race to catch up.

      According to a report from the International Energy Agency, by 2040, the worldwide demand for copper is expected to roughly double; demand for nickel and cobalt will grow at least sixfold; and the world’s hunger for lithium could reach 40 times what we use today.

      “Society is looking to the clean energy transition as a way to solve the environmental and social harms of climate change,” says Scott Odell, a visiting scientist at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), where he helps run the ESI Mining, Environment, and Society Program, who is also a visiting assistant professor at George Washington University. “Yet mining the materials needed for that transition would also cause social and environmental impacts. So we need to look for ways to reduce our demand for minerals, while also improving current mining practices to minimize social and environmental impacts.”

      ESI recently hosted the inaugural MIT Conference on Mining, Environment, and Society to discuss how the clean energy transition may affect mining and the people and environments in mining areas. The conference convened representatives of mining companies, environmental and human rights groups, policymakers, and social and natural scientists to identify key concerns and possible collaborative solutions.

      “We can’t replace an abusive fossil fuel industry with an abusive mining industry that expands as we move through the energy transition,” said Jim Wormington, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, in a panel on the first day of the conference. “There’s a recognition from governments, civil society, and companies that this transition potentially has a really significant human rights and social cost, both in terms of emissions […] but also for communities and workers who are on the front lines of mining.”

      That focus on communities and workers was consistent throughout the three-day conference, as participants outlined the economic and social dimensions of standing up large numbers of new mines. Corporate mines can bring large influxes of government revenue and local investment, but the income is volatile and can leave policymakers and communities stranded when production declines or mineral prices fall. On the other hand, “artisanal” mining operations are an important source of critical minerals, but are hard to regulate and subject to abuses from brokers. And large reserves of minerals are found in conservation areas, regions with fragile ecosystems and experiencing water shortages that can be exacerbated by mining, in particular on Indigenous-controlled lands and other places where mine openings are deeply fraught.

      “One of the real triggers of conflict is a dissatisfaction with the current model of resource extraction,” said Jocelyn Fraser of the University of British Columbia in a panel discussion. “One that’s failed to support the long-term sustainable development of regions that host mining operations, and yet imposes significant local social and environmental impacts.”

      All these challenges point toward solutions in policy and in mining companies’ relationships with the communities where they work. Participants highlighted newer models of mining governance that can create better incentives for the ways mines operate — from full community ownership of mines to recognizing community rights to the benefits of mining to end-of-life planning for mines at the time they open.

      Many of the conference speakers also shared technological innovations that may help reduce mining challenges. Some operations are investing in desalination as alternative water sources in water-scarce regions; low-carbon alternatives are emerging to many of the fossil fuel-powered heavy machines that are mainstays of the industry; and work is being done to reclaim valuable minerals from mine tailings, helping to minimize both waste and the need to open new extraction sites.

      Increasingly, the mining industry itself is recognizing that reforms will allow it to thrive in a rapid clean-energy transition. “Decarbonization is really a profitability imperative,” said Kareemah Mohammed, managing director for sustainability services at the technology consultancy Accenture, on the conference’s second day. “It’s about securing a low-cost and steady supply of either minerals or metals, but it’s also doing so in an optimal way.”

      The three-day conference attracted over 350 attendees, from large mining companies, industry groups, consultancies, multilateral institutions, universities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government, and more. It was held entirely virtually, a choice that helped make the conference not only truly international — participants joined from over 27 countries on six continents — but also accessible to members of nonprofits and professionals in the developing world.

      “Many people are concerned about the environmental and social challenges of supplying the clean energy revolution, and we’d heard repeatedly that there wasn’t a forum for government, industry, academia, NGOs, and communities to all sit at the same table and explore collaborative solutions,” says Christopher Noble, ESI’s director of corporate engagement. “Convening, and researching best practices, are roles that universities can play. The conversations at this conference have generated valuable ideas and consensus to pursue three parallel programs: best-in-class models for community engagement, improving ESG metrics and their use, and civil-society contributions to government/industry relations. We are developing these programs to keep the momentum going.”

      The MIT Conference on Mining, Environment, and Society was funded, in part, by Accenture, as part of the MIT/Accenture Convergence Initiative. Additional funding was provided by the Inter-American Development Bank. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Environment

      Using game engines and “twins” to co-create stories of climate futures

      by

      Imagine entering a 3D virtual story world that’s a digital twin of an existing physical space but also doubles as a vessel to dream up speculative climate stories and collective designs. Then, those imagined worlds are translated back into concrete plans for our physical spaces.

      Five multidisciplinary teams recently convened at MIT — virtually — for the inaugural WORLDING workshop. In a weeklong series of research and development gatherings, the teams met with MIT scientists, staff, fellows, students and graduates as well as other leading figures in the field. The theme of the gathering was “story, space, climate, and game engines.”

      “WORLDING illustrates the emergence of an entirely new field that fuses urban planning, climate science, real-time 3D engines, nonfiction storytelling, and speculative fiction,” says Katerina Cizek, lead designer of the workshop at Co-Creation Studio, MIT Open Documentary Lab. “And co-creation is at the core of this field that allows for collective, democratic, scientific and artistic processes.” The research workshop was organized by the studio in partnership with Unity Software.

      The WORLDING teams met with MIT scholars to discuss diverse domains, from the decolonization of board games, to urban planning as acts of democracy, to behind the scenes of a flagship MIT Climate Challenge project.

      “Climate is really a whole-world initiative,” said Noelle Selin, an MIT atmospheric chemistry professor, in a talk at WORLDING. Selin co-leads an MIT initiative that is digitally twinning the Earth to harness enormous volumes of data for improved climate projections and put these models into the hands of diverse communities and stakeholders.

      “Digital twinning” is a growth market for the game engine industry, in verticals such as manufacturing, architecture, finance, and medicine. “Digital twinning gives teams the power to ideate,” said Elizabeth Baron, a senior manager of enterprise solutions at Unity in her talk at WORLDING. “You can look at many things that maybe aren’t even possible to produce. But you’re the resource. Impact is very low, but the creativity aspect is very high.”

      That’s where the story and media experts come in. “Now, more than ever, we need to forge shared narratives about the world that we live in today and the world that we want to build for the future. Technology can help us visualize and communicate those worlds,” says Marina Psaros MCP ’06, head of sustainability at Unity, lead on WORLDING at Unity, and a graduate of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

      In his talk on the short history of WORLDING, media scholar William Uricchio, MIT professor of comparative media studies and founder of the Open Documentary Lab, suggested that story and space come together in these projects that create new ways of knowing. “Story is always a representation,” he says. “It’s got a fixity and coherence to it, and play is — and, I would argue, worlds are —  all about simulation. Simulation in the case of digital twinning is capable of generating countless stories. It’s play as a story-generator, but in the service of envisioning a pluralistic and malleable future.”

      Fixed dominant narratives and game mechanics that underpin board games have been historically violent and unjust, says MIT Game Lab scholar Mikael Jakkobson, who shared findings for his upcoming book on the subject with the cohort. He argues that board games are built on underlying ideas of  “exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. And, as it happens, those are also good ways of thinking about the mechanics of Western colonialism.”

      To counter these hegemonic mechanics and come up with new systems, community is vital, and urban planning is a discipline that plays a huge role in the translation of space, story, and democracy. Ceasar MacDowell, an MIT professor of the practice of civic design, told the WORLDING cohort that urban planning needs to expand its notion of authorship. He is working on systems (from his current position at the Media Lab) that not only engage the community in conversations but also prompt “the people who have been in conversations to actually make sense of them, do the meaning-making themselves, not to have external people interpret them.” These become dynamic layers of both representation and simulation that are not, as Uricchio suggests, fixed. 

      USAID Chief Climate Officer Gillian Calwell visited the group with both sharp warnings and warm enthusiasm: “When it comes to climate, this world isn’t working so well for us; we better start envisioning the new ones, and fast … We don’t have time to convince people that this is happening anymore. Nor do we need to. I think most of the world is having the hands-on, up-close-and-personal experience with the fact that these impacts are coming faster and more furiously than even the scientists had predicted. But one thing we do need help with on a more hopeful note is visualizing how the world could be different.”

      The WORLDING workshop is designed and inspired by the ideas and practices charted in the Co-Creation Studio’s new MIT Press book, “Collective Wisdom: Co-Creation Media for Equity and Justice,” which insists that “No one person, organization, or discipline can determine all the answers alone.”

      The five multidisciplinary teams in this first WORLDING cohort were diverse in approach, technology, and geography. For example, one is an Indigenous-led, land-based, site-specific digital installation that seeks to envision a future in which, once again, the great herds of buffalo walk freely. Another team is creating 3D-modeled biome kits of the water systems in the drought-stricken American West, animated by interviews and data from the communities living there. Yet another team is digitally twinning and then re-imagining a sustainable future in the year 2180 for a multi-player virtual reality game in a Yawanawà Shukuvena Village in the rainforests of Brazil.

      “While our workshop design was focused on developing and researching these incredible, interdisciplinary projects, we also hope that WORLDING can set an example for similar initiatives across global sectors where distances and varied expertise are not limitations but opportunities to learn from one another,” says Srushti Kamat, WORLDING producer and MIT creative media studies/writing grad.

      Most of the talks and presentations from the WORLDING workshop are available as archived videos at cocreationstudio.mit.edu/worlding-videos. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Energy

      A breakthrough on “loss and damage,” but also disappointment, at UN climate conference

      by

      As the 2022 United Nations climate change conference, known as COP27, stretched into its final hours on Saturday, Nov. 19, it was uncertain what kind of agreement might emerge from two weeks of intensive international negotiations.

      In the end, COP27 produced mixed results: on the one hand, a historic agreement for wealthy countries to compensate low-income countries for “loss and damage,” but on the other, limited progress on new plans for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.

      “We need to drastically reduce emissions now — and this is an issue this COP did not address,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement at the conclusion of COP27. “A fund for loss and damage is essential — but it’s not an answer if the climate crisis washes a small island state off the map — or turns an entire African country to desert.”

      Throughout the two weeks of the conference, a delegation of MIT students, faculty, and staff was at the Sharm El-Sheikh International Convention Center to observe the negotiations, conduct and share research, participate in panel discussions, and forge new connections with researchers, policymakers, and advocates from around the world.

      Loss and damage

      A key issue coming in to COP27 (COP stands for “conference of the parties” to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, held for the 27th time) was loss and damage: a term used by the U.N. to refer to harms caused by climate change — either through acute catastrophes like extreme weather events or slower-moving impacts like sea level rise — to which communities and countries are unable to adapt. 

      Ultimately, a deal on loss and damage proved to be COP27’s most prominent accomplishment. Negotiators reached an eleventh-hour agreement to “establish new funding arrangements for assisting developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.” 

      “Providing financial assistance to developing countries so they can better respond to climate-related loss and damage is not only a moral issue, but also a pragmatic one,” said Michael Mehling, deputy director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, who attended COP27 and participated in side events. “Future emissions growth will be squarely centered in the developing world, and offering support through different channels is key to building the trust needed for more robust global cooperation on mitigation.”

      Youssef Shaker, a graduate student in the MIT Technology and Policy Program and a research assistant with the MIT Energy Initiative, attended the second week of the conference, where he followed the negotiations over loss and damage closely. 

      “While the creation of a fund is certainly an achievement,” Shaker said, “significant questions remain to be answered, such as the size of the funding available as well as which countries receive access to it.” A loss-and-damage fund that is not adequately funded, Shaker noted, “would not be an impactful outcome.” 

      The agreement on loss and damage created a new committee, made up of 24 country representatives, to “operationalize” the new funding arrangements, including identifying funding sources. The committee is tasked with delivering a set of recommendations at COP28, which will take place next year in Dubai.

      Advising the U.N. on net zero

      Though the decisions reached at COP27 did not include major new commitments on reducing emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, the transition to a clean global energy system was nevertheless a key topic of conversation throughout the conference.

      The Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition (CEET), an independent, international body of engineers and energy systems experts formed to provide advice to the U.N. on achieving net-zero emissions globally by 2050, convened for the first time at COP27. Jessika Trancik, a professor in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and a member of CEET, spoke on a U.N.-sponsored panel on solutions for the transition to clean energy.

      Trancik noted that the energy transition will look different in different regions of the world. “As engineers, we need to understand those local contexts and design solutions around those local contexts — that’s absolutely essential to support a rapid and equitable energy transition.”

      At the same time, Trancik noted that there is now a set of “low-cost, ready-to-scale tools” available to every region — tools that resulted from a globally competitive process of innovation, stimulated by public policies in different countries, that dramatically drove down the costs of technologies like solar energy and lithium-ion batteries. The key, Trancik said, is for regional transition strategies to “tap into global processes of innovation.”

      Reinventing climate adaptation

      Elfatih Eltahir, the H. M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate, traveled to COP27 to present plans for the Jameel Observatory Climate Resilience Early Warning System (CREWSnet), one of the five projects selected in April 2022 as a flagship in MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative. CREWSnet focuses on climate adaptation, the term for adapting to climate impacts that are unavoidable.

      The aim of CREWSnet, Eltahir told the audience during a panel discussion, is “nothing short of reinventing the process of climate change adaptation,” so that it is proactive rather than reactive; community-led; data-driven and evidence-based; and so that it integrates different climate risks, from heat waves to sea level rise, rather than treating them individually.

      “However, it’s easy to talk about these changes,” said Eltahir. “The real challenge, which we are now just launching and engaging in, is to demonstrate that on the ground.” Eltahir said that early demonstrations will happen in a couple of key locations, including southwest Bangladesh, where multiple climate risks — rising sea levels, increasing soil salinity, and intensifying heat waves and cyclones — are combining to threaten the area’s agricultural production.

      Building on COP26

      Some members of MIT’s delegation attended COP27 to advance efforts that had been formally announced at last year’s U.N. climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland.

      At an official U.N. side event co-organized by MIT on Nov. 11, Greg Sixt, the director of the Food and Climate Systems Transformation (FACT) Alliance led by the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, provided an update on the alliance’s work since its launch at COP26.

      Food systems are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions — and are increasingly vulnerable to climate impacts. The FACT Alliance works to better connect researchers to farmers, food businesses, policymakers, and other food systems stakeholders to make food systems (which include food production, consumption, and waste) more sustainable and resilient. 

      Sixt told the audience that the FACT Alliance now counts over 20 research and stakeholder institutions around the world among its members, but also collaborates with other institutions in an “open network model” to advance work in key areas — such as a new research project exploring how climate scenarios could affect global food supply chains.

      Marcela Angel, research program director for the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), helped convene a meeting at COP27 of the Afro-InterAmerican Forum on Climate Change, which also launched at COP26. The forum works with Afro-descendant leaders across the Americas to address significant environmental issues, including climate risks and biodiversity loss. 

      At the event — convened with the Colombian government and the nonprofit Conservation International — ESI brought together leaders from six countries in the Americas and presented recent work that estimates that there are over 178 million individuals who identify as Afro-descendant living in the Americas, in lands of global environmental importance. 

      “There is a significant overlap between biodiversity hot spots, protected areas, and areas of high Afro-descendant presence,” said Angel. “But the role and climate contributions of these communities is understudied, and often made invisible.”    

      Limiting methane emissions

      Methane is a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas: When released into the atmosphere, it immediately traps about 120 times more heat than carbon dioxide does. More than 150 countries have now signed the Global Methane Pledge, launched at COP26, which aims to reduce methane emissions by at least 30 percent by 2030 compared to 2020 levels.

      Sergey Paltsev, the deputy director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative, gave the keynote address at a Nov. 17 event on methane, where he noted the importance of methane reductions from the oil and gas sector to meeting the 2030 goal.

      “The oil and gas sector is where methane emissions reductions could be achieved the fastest,” said Paltsev. “We also need to employ an integrated approach to address methane emissions in all sectors and all regions of the world because methane emissions reductions provide a near-term pathway to avoiding dangerous tipping points in the global climate system.”

      “Keep fighting relentlessly”

      Arina Khotimsky, a senior majoring in materials science and engineering and a co-president of the MIT Energy and Climate Club, attended the first week of COP27. She reflected on the experience in a social media post after returning home. 

      “COP will always have its haters. Is there greenwashing? Of course! Is everyone who should have a say in this process in the room? Not even close,” wrote Khotimsky. “So what does it take for COP to matter? It takes everyone who attended to not only put ‘climate’ on front-page news for two weeks, but to return home and keep fighting relentlessly against climate change. I know that I will.” More

    • 50 Shares149 Views

      in Environment

      Machinery of the state

      by

      In Mai Hassan’s studies of Kenya, she documented the emergence of a sprawling administrative network officially billed as encouraging economic development, overseeing the population, and bolstering democracy. But Hassan’s field interviews and archival research revealed a more sinister purpose for the hundreds of administrative and security offices dotting the nation: “They were there to do the presidents’ bidding, which often involved coercing their own countrymen.”

      This research served as a catalyst for Hassan, who joined MIT as an associate professor of political science in July, to investigate what she calls the “politicized management of bureaucracy and the state.” She set out to “understand the motivations, capacities, and roles of people administering state programs and social functions,” she says. “I realized the state is not a faceless being, but instead comprised of bureaucrats carrying out functions on behalf of the state and the regime that runs it.”

      Today, Hassan’s portfolio encompasses not just the bureaucratic state but democratization efforts in Kenya and elsewhere in the East Africa region, including her native Sudan. Her research highlights the difficulties of democratization. “I’m finding that the conditions under which people come together for overthrowing an autocratic regime really matter, because those conditions may actually impede a nation from achieving democracy,” she says.

      A coordinated bureaucracy

      Hassan’s academic engagement with the state’s administrative machinery began during graduate school at Harvard University, where she earned her master’s and doctorate in government. While working with a community trash and sanitation program in some Kenyan Maasai communities, Hassan recalls “shepherding myself from office to office, meeting different bureaucrats to obtain the same approvals but for different jurisdictions.” The Kenyan state had recently set up hundreds of new local administrative units, motivated by what it claimed was the need for greater efficiency. But to Hassan’s eyes, “the administrative network was not well organized, seemed costly to maintain, and seemed to hinder — not bolster — development,” she says. What then, she wondered, was “the political logic behind such state restructuring?”

      Hassan began researching this bureaucratic transformation of Kenya, speaking with administrators in communities large and small who were charged with handling the business of the state. These studies yielded a wealth of findings for her dissertation, and for multiple journals.

      But upon finishing this tranche of research, Hassan realized that it was insufficient simply to study the structure of the state. “Understanding the role of new administrative structures for politics, development, and governance fundamentally requires that we understand who the government has put in charge of them,” she says. Among her insights:

      “The president’s office knows a lot of these administrators, and thinks about their strengths, limitations, and fit within a community,” says Hassan. Some administrators served the purposes of the central government by setting up water irrigation projects or building a new school. But in other villages, the state chose administrators who could act “much more coercively, ignoring development needs, throwing youth who supported the opposition into jail, and spending resources exclusively on policing.”

      Hassan’s work showed that in communities characterized by strong political opposition, “the local administration was always more coercive, regardless of an elected or autocratic president,” she says. Notably, the tenures of such officials proved shorter than those of their peers. “Once administrators get to know a community — going to church and the market with residents — it’s hard to coerce them,” explains Hassan.

      These short tenures come with costs, she notes: “Spending significant time in a station is useful for development, because you know exactly whom to hire if you want to build a school or get something done efficiently.” Politicizing these assignments undermines efforts at delivery of services and, more broadly, economic improvement nationwide. “Regimes that are more invested in retaining power must devote resources to establishing and maintaining control, resources that could otherwise be used for development and the welfare of citizens,” she says.

      Hassan wove together her research covering three presidents over a 50-year period, in the book, “Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya” (2020, Cambridge University Press), named a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2020.

      Sudanese roots

      The role of the state in fulfilling the needs of its citizens has long fascinated Hassan. Her grandfather, who had served as Sudan’s ambassador to the USSR, talked to her about the advantages of a centralized government “that allocated resources to reduce inequality,” she says.

      Politics often dominated the conversation in gatherings of Hassan’s family and friends. Her parents immigrated to northern Virginia when she was very young, and many relatives joined them, part of a steady flow of Sudanese fleeing political turmoil and oppression.

      “A lot of people had expected more from the Sudanese state after independence and didn’t get it,” she says. “People had hopes for what the government could and should do.”

      Hassan’s Sudanese roots and ongoing connection to the Sudanese community have shaped her academic interests and goals. At the University of Virginia, she gravitated toward history and economics classes. But it was her time at the Ralph Bunche Summer institute that perhaps proved most pivotal in her journey. This five-week intensive program is offered by the American Political Science Association to introduce underrepresented undergraduate students to doctoral studies. “It was really compelling in this program to think rigorously about all the political ideas I’d heard as I was growing up, and find ways to challenge some assertions empirically,” she says.

      Regime change and civil society

      At Harvard, Hassan first set out to focus on Sudan for her doctoral program. “There wasn’t much scholarship on the country, and what there was lacked rigor,” she says. “That was something that needed to change.” But she decided to postpone this goal after realizing that she might be vulnerable as a student conducting field research there. She landed instead in Kenya, where she honed her interviewing and data collection skills.

      Today, empowered by her prior work, she has returned to Sudan. “I felt that the popular uprising in Sudan and ousting of the Islamist regime in 2019 should be documented and analyzed,” she says. “It was incredible that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, acted collectively to uproot a dictator, in the face of brutal violence from the state.”But “democracy is still uncertain there,” says Hassan. The broad coalition behind regime change “doesn’t know how to govern because different people and different sectors of society have different ideas about what democratic Sudan should look like,” she says. “Overthrowing an autocratic regime and having civil society come together to figure out what’s going to replace it require different things, and it’s unclear if a movement that accomplishes the first is well-suited to do the second.”

      Hassan believes that in order to create lasting democratization, “you need the hard work of building organizations, developing ways in which members learn to compromise among themselves, and make decisions and rules for how to move forward.”

      Hassan is enjoying the fall semester and teaching courses on autocracy and authoritarian regimes. She is excited as well about developing her work on African efforts at democratic mobilization in a political science department she describes as “policy-forward.”

      Over time, she hopes to connect with Institute scholars in the hard sciences to think about other challenges these nations are facing, such as climate change. “It’s really hot in Sudan, and it may be one of the first countries to become completely uninhabitable,” she says. “I’d like to explore strategies for growing crops differently or managing the exceedingly scarce resource of water, and figure out what kind of political discussions will be necessary to implement any changes. It is really critical to think about these problems in an interdisciplinary way.” More