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    Atmospheric observations in China show rise in emissions of a potent greenhouse gas

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    To achieve the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change — limiting the increase in global average surface temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — will require its 196 signatories to dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Those greenhouse gases differ widely in their global warming potential (GWP), or ability to absorb radiative energy and thereby warm the Earth’s surface. For example, measured over a 100-year period, the GWP of methane is about 28 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the GWP of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is 24,300 times that of CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. 

    Used primarily in high-voltage electrical switchgear in electric power grids, SF6 is one of the most potent greenhouse gases on Earth. In the 21st century, atmospheric concentrations of SF6 have risen sharply along with global electric power demand, threatening the world’s efforts to stabilize the climate. This heightened demand for electric power is particularly pronounced in China, which has dominated the expansion of the global power industry in the past decade. Quantifying China’s contribution to global SF6 emissions — and pinpointing its sources in the country — could lead that nation to implement new measures to reduce them, and thereby reduce, if not eliminate, an impediment to the Paris Agreement’s aspirational goal. 

    To that end, a new study by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Fudan University, Peking University, University of Bristol, and Meteorological Observation Center of China Meteorological Administration determined total SF6 emissions in China over 2011-21 from atmospheric observations collected from nine stations within a Chinese network, including one station from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) network. For comparison, global total emissions were determined from five globally distributed, relatively unpolluted “background” AGAGE stations, involving additional researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and CSIRO, Australia’s National Science Agency.

    The researchers found that SF6 emissions in China almost doubled from 2.6 gigagrams (Gg) per year in 2011, when they accounted for 34 percent of global SF6 emissions, to 5.1 Gg per year in 2021, when they accounted for 57 percent of global total SF6 emissions. This increase from China over the 10-year period — some of it emerging from the country’s less-populated western regions — was larger than the global total SF6 emissions rise, highlighting the importance of lowering SF6 emissions from China in the future.

    The open-access study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications, explores prospects for future SF6 emissions reduction in China.

    “Adopting maintenance practices that minimize SF6 leakage rates or using SF6-free equipment or SF6 substitutes in the electric power grid will benefit greenhouse-gas mitigation in China,” says Minde An, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and the study’s lead author. “We see our findings as a first step in quantifying the problem and identifying how it can be addressed.”

    Emissions of SF6 are expected to last more than 1,000 years in the atmosphere, raising the stakes for policymakers in China and around the world.

    “Any increase in SF6 emissions this century will effectively alter our planet’s radiative budget — the balance between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy from the Earth — far beyond the multi-decadal time frame of current climate policies,” says MIT Joint Program and CGCS Director Ronald Prinn, a coauthor of the study. “So it’s imperative that China and all other nations take immediate action to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, their SF6 emissions.”

    The study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and Shanghai B&R Joint Laboratory Project, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other funding agencies.   More

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      in Environment

      A new way to quantify climate change impacts: “Outdoor days”

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      For most people, reading about the difference between a global average temperature rise of 1.5 C versus 2 C doesn’t conjure up a clear image of how their daily lives will actually be affected. So, researchers at MIT have come up with a different way of measuring and describing what global climate change patterns, in specific regions around the world, will mean for people’s daily activities and their quality of life.

      The new measure, called “outdoor days,” describes the number of days per year that outdoor temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for people to go about normal outdoor activities, whether work or leisure, in reasonable comfort. Describing the impact of rising temperatures in those terms reveals some significant global disparities, the researchers say.

      The findings are described in a research paper written by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Elfatih Eltahir and postdocs Yeon-Woo Choi and Muhammad Khalifa, and published in the Journal of Climate.

      Eltahir says he got the idea for this new system during his hourlong daily walks in the Boston area. “That’s how I interface with the temperature every day,” he says. He found that there have been more winter days recently when he could walk comfortably than in past years. Originally from Sudan, he says that when he returned there for visits, the opposite was the case: In winter, the weather tends to be relatively comfortable, but the number of these clement winter days has been declining. “There are fewer days that are really suitable for outdoor activity,” Eltahir says.

      Rather than predefine what constitutes an acceptable outdoor day, Eltahir and his co-authors created a website where users can set their own definition of the highest and lowest temperatures they consider comfortable for their outside activities, then click on a country within a world map, or a state within the U.S., and get a forecast of how the number of days meeting those criteria will change between now and the end of this century. The website is freely available for anyone to use.

      “This is actually a new feature that’s quite innovative,” he says. “We don’t tell people what an outdoor day should be; we let the user define an outdoor day. Hence, we invite them to participate in defining how future climate change will impact their quality of life, and hopefully, this will facilitate deeper understanding of how climate change will impact individuals directly.”

      After deciding that this was a way of looking at the issue of climate change that might be useful, Eltahir says, “we started looking at the data on this, and we made several discoveries that I think are pretty significant.”

      First of all, there will be winners and losers, and the losers tend to be concentrated in the global south. “In the North, in a place like Russia or Canada, you gain a significant number of outdoor days. And when you go south to places like Bangladesh or Sudan, it’s bad news. You get significantly fewer outdoor days. It is very striking.”

      To derive the data, the software developed by the team uses all of the available climate models, about 50 of them, and provides output showing all of those projections on a single graph to make clear the range of possibilities, as well as the average forecast.

      When we think of climate change, Eltahir says, we tend to look at maps that show that virtually everywhere, temperatures will rise. “But if you think in terms of outdoor days, you see that the world is not flat. The North is gaining; the South is losing.”

      While North-South disparity in exposure and vulnerability has been broadly recognized in the past, he says, this way of quantifying the effects on the hazard (change in weather patterns) helps to bring home how strong the uneven risks from climate change on quality of life will be. “When you look at places like Bangladesh, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Indonesia — they are all losing outdoor days.”

      The same kind of disparity shows up in Europe, he says. The effects are already being felt, and are showing up in travel patterns: “There is a shift to people spending time in northern European states. They go to Sweden and places like that instead of the Mediterranean, which is showing a significant drop,” he says.

      Placing this kind of detailed and localized information at people’s fingertips, he says, “I think brings the issue of communication of climate change to a different level.” With this tool, instead of looking at global averages, “we are saying according to your own definition of what a pleasant day is, [this is] how climate change is going to impact you, your activities.”

      And, he adds, “hopefully that will help society make decisions about what to do with this global challenge.”

      The project received support from the MIT Climate Grand Challenges project “Jameel Observatory – Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network,” as well as from the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab. More

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      in Energy

      Optimizing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors

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      In 2010, when Ericmoore Jossou was attending college in northern Nigeria, the lights would flicker in and out all day, sometimes lasting only for a couple of hours at a time. The frustrating experience reaffirmed Jossou’s realization that the country’s sporadic energy supply was a problem. It was the beginning of his path toward nuclear engineering.

      Because of the energy crisis, “I told myself I was going to find myself in a career that allows me to develop energy technologies that can easily be scaled to meet the energy needs of the world, including my own country,” says Jossou, an assistant professor in a shared position between the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), where is the John Clark Hardwick (1986) Professor, and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

      Today, Jossou uses computer simulations for rational materials design, AI-aided purposeful development of cladding materials and fuels for next-generation nuclear reactors. As one of the shared faculty hires between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and departments across MIT, his appointment recognizes his commitment to computing for climate and the environment.

      A well-rounded education in Nigeria

      Growing up in Lagos, Jossou knew education was about more than just bookish knowledge, so he was eager to travel and experience other cultures. He would start in his own backyard by traveling across the Niger river and enrolling in Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria. Moving from the south was a cultural education with a different language and different foods. It was here that Jossou got to try and love tuwo shinkafa, a northern Nigerian rice-based specialty, for the first time.

      After his undergraduate studies, armed with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Jossou was among a small cohort selected for a specialty master’s training program funded by the World Bank Institute and African Development Bank. The program at the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria, is a pan-African venture dedicated to nurturing homegrown science talent on the continent. Visiting professors from around the world taught intensive three-week courses, an experience which felt like drinking from a fire hose. The program widened Jossou’s views and he set his sights on a doctoral program with an emphasis on clean energy systems.

      A pivot to nuclear science

      While in Nigeria, Jossou learned of Professor Jerzy Szpunar at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, who was looking for a student researcher to explore fuels and alloys for nuclear reactors. Before then, Jossou was lukewarm on nuclear energy, but the research sounded fascinating. The Fukushima, Japan, incident was recently in the rearview mirror and Jossou remembered his early determination to address his own country’s energy crisis. He was sold on the idea and graduated with a doctoral degree from the University of Saskatchewan on an international dean’s scholarship.

      Jossou’s postdoctoral work registered a brief stint at Brookhaven National Laboratory as staff scientist. He leaped at the opportunity to join MIT NSE as a way of realizing his research interest and teaching future engineers. “I would really like to conduct cutting-edge research in nuclear materials design and to pass on my knowledge to the next generation of scientists and engineers and there’s no better place to do that than at MIT,” Jossou says.

      Merging material science and computational modeling

      Jossou’s doctoral work on designing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors forms the basis of research his lab is pursuing at MIT NSE. Nuclear reactors that were built in the 1950s and ’60s are getting a makeover in terms of improved accident tolerance. Reactors are not confined to one kind, either: We have micro reactors and are now considering ones using metallic nuclear fuels, Jossou points out. The diversity of options is enough to keep researchers busy testing materials fit for cladding, the lining that prevents corrosion of the fuel and release of radioactive fission products into the surrounding reactor coolant.

      The team is also investigating fuels that improve burn-up efficiencies, so they can last longer in the reactor. An intriguing approach has been to immobilize the gas bubbles that arise from the fission process, so they don’t grow and degrade the fuel.

      Since joining MIT in July 2023, Jossou is setting up a lab that optimizes the composition of accident-tolerant nuclear fuels. He is leaning on his materials science background and looping computer simulations and artificial intelligence in the mix.

      Computer simulations allow the researchers to narrow down the potential field of candidates, optimized for specific parameters, so they can synthesize only the most promising candidates in the lab. And AI’s predictive capabilities guide researchers on which materials composition to consider next. “We no longer depend on serendipity to choose our materials, our lab is based on rational materials design,” Jossou says, “we can rapidly design advanced nuclear fuels.”

      Advancing energy causes in Africa

      Now that he is at MIT, Jossou admits the view from the outside is different. He now harbors a different perspective on what Africa needs to address some of its challenges. “The starting point to solve our problems is not money; it needs to start with ideas,” he says, “we need to find highly skilled people who can actually solve problems.” That job involves adding economic value to the rich arrays of raw materials that the continent is blessed with. It frustrates Jossou that Niger, a country rich in raw material for uranium, has no nuclear reactors of its own. It ships most of its ore to France. “The path forward is to find a way to refine these materials in Africa and to be able to power the industries on that continent as well,” Jossou says.

      Jossou is determined to do his part to eliminate these roadblocks.

      Anchored in mentorship, Jossou’s solution aims to train talent from Africa in his own lab. He has applied for a MIT Global Experiences MISTI grant to facilitate travel and research studies for Ghanaian scientists. “The goal is to conduct research in our facility and perhaps add value to indigenous materials,” Jossou says.

      Adding value has been a consistent theme of Jossou’s career. He remembers wanting to become a neurosurgeon after reading “Gifted Hands,” moved by the personal story of the author, Ben Carson. As Jossou grew older, however, he realized that becoming a doctor wasn’t necessarily what he wanted. Instead, he was looking to add value. “What I wanted was really to take on a career that allows me to solve a societal problem.” The societal problem of clean and safe energy for all is precisely what Jossou is working on today. More

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      in Energy

      Making the clean energy transition work for everyone

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      The clean energy transition is already underway, but how do we make sure it happens in a manner that is affordable, sustainable, and fair for everyone?

      That was the overarching question at this year’s MIT Energy Conference, which took place March 11 and 12 in Boston and was titled “Short and Long: A Balanced Approach to the Energy Transition.”

      Each year, the student-run conference brings together leaders in the energy sector to discuss the progress and challenges they see in their work toward a greener future. Participants come from research, industry, government, academia, and the investment community to network and exchange ideas over two whirlwind days of keynote talks, fireside chats, and panel discussions.

      Several participants noted that clean energy technologies are already cost-competitive with fossil fuels, but changing the way the world works requires more than just technology.

      “None of this is easy, but I think developing innovative new technologies is really easy compared to the things we’re talking about here, which is how to blend social justice, soft engineering, and systems thinking that puts people first,” Daniel Kammen, a distinguished professor of energy at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a keynote talk. “While clean energy has a long way to go, it is more than ready to transition us from fossil fuels.”

      The event also featured a keynote discussion between MIT President Sally Kornbluth and MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Ceramics Yet-Ming Chiang, in which Kornbluth discussed her first year at MIT as well as a recently announced, campus-wide effort to solve critical climate problems known as the Climate Project at MIT.

      “The reason I wanted to come to MIT was I saw that MIT has the potential to solve the world’s biggest problems, and first among those for me was the climate crisis,” Kornbluth said. “I’m excited about where we are, I’m excited about the enthusiasm of the community, and I think we’ll be able to make really impactful discoveries through this project.”

      Fostering new technologies

      Several panels convened experts in new or emerging technology fields to discuss what it will take for their solutions to contribute to deep decarbonization.

      “The fun thing and challenging thing about first-of-a-kind technologies is they’re all kind of different,” said Jonah Wagner, principal assistant director for industrial innovation and clean energy in the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy. “You can map their growth against specific challenges you expect to see, but every single technology is going to face their own challenges, and every single one will have to defy an engineering barrier to get off the ground.”

      Among the emerging technologies discussed was next-generation geothermal energy, which uses new techniques to extract heat from the Earth’s crust in new places.

      A promising aspect of the technology is that it can leverage existing infrastructure and expertise from the oil and gas industry. Many newly developed techniques for geothermal production, for instance, use the same drills and rigs as those used for hydraulic fracturing.

      “The fact that we have a robust ecosystem of oil and gas labor and technology in the U.S. makes innovation in geothermal much more accessible compared to some of the challenges we’re seeing in nuclear or direct-air capture, where some of the supply chains are disaggregated around the world,” said Gabrial Malek, chief of staff at the geothermal company Fervo Energy.

      Another technology generating excitement — if not net energy quite yet — is fusion, the process of combining, or fusing, light atoms together to form heavier ones for a net energy gain, in the same process that powers the sun. MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has already validated many aspects of its approach for achieving fusion power, and the company’s unique partnership with MIT was discussed in a panel on the industry’s progress.

      “We’re standing on the shoulders of decades of research from the scientific community, and we want to maintain those ties even as we continue developing our technology,” CFS Chief Science Officer Brandon Sorbom PhD ’17 said, noting that CFS is one of the largest company sponsors of research at MIT and collaborates with institutions around the world. “Engaging with the community is a really valuable lever to get new ideas and to sanity check our own ideas.”

      Sorbom said that as CFS advances fusion energy, the company is thinking about how it can replicate its processes to lower costs and maximize the technology’s impact around the planet.

      “For fusion to work, it has to work for everyone,” Sorbom said. “I think the affordability piece is really important. We can’t just build this technological jewel that only one class of nations can afford. It has to be a technology that can be deployed throughout the entire world.”

      The event also gave students — many from MIT — a chance to learn more about careers in energy and featured a startup showcase, in which dozens of companies displayed their energy and sustainability solutions.

      “More than 700 people are here from every corner of the energy industry, so there are so many folks to connect with and help me push my vision into reality,” says GreenLIB CEO Fred Rostami, whose company recycles lithium-ion batteries. “The good thing about the energy transition is that a lot of these technologies and industries overlap, so I think we can enable this transition by working together at events like this.”

      A focused climate strategy

      Kornbluth noted that when she came to MIT, a large percentage of students and faculty were already working on climate-related technologies. With the Climate Project at MIT, she wanted to help ensure the whole of those efforts is greater than the sum of its parts.

      The project is organized around six distinct missions, including decarbonizing energy and industry, empowering frontline communities, and building healthy, resilient cities. Kornbluth says the mission areas will help MIT community members collaborate around multidisciplinary challenges. Her team, which includes a committee of faculty advisors, has begun to search for the leads of each mission area, and Kornbluth said she is planning to appoint a vice president for climate at the Institute.

      “I want someone who has the purview of the whole Institute and will report directly to me to help make sure this project stays on track,” Kornbluth explained.

      In his conversation about the initiative with Kornbluth, Yet-Ming Chiang said projects will be funded based on their potential to reduce emissions and make the planet more sustainable at scale.

      “Projects should be very high risk, with very high impact,” Chiang explained. “They should have a chance to prove themselves, and those efforts should not be limited by resources, only by time.”

      In discussing her vision of the climate project, Kornbluth alluded to the “short and long” theme of the conference.

      “It’s about balancing research and commercialization,” Kornbluth said. “The climate project has a very variable timeframe, and I think universities are the sector that can think about the things that might be 30 years out. We have to think about the incentives across the entire innovation pipeline and how we can keep an eye on the long term while making sure the short-term things get out rapidly.” More

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      in Energy

      Explained: Carbon credits

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      One of the most contentious issues faced at the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) on climate change last December was a proposal for a U.N.-sanctioned market for trading carbon credits. Such a mechanism would allow nations and industries making slow progress in reducing their own carbon emissions to pay others to take emissions-reducing measures, such as improving energy efficiency or protecting forests.

      Such trading systems have already grown to a multibillion-dollar market despite a lack of clear international regulations to define and monitor the claimed emissions reductions. During weeks of feverish negotiations, some nations, including the U.S., advocated for a somewhat looser approach to regulations in the interests of getting a system in place quickly. Others, including the European Union, advocated much tighter regulation, in light of a history of questionable or even counterproductive projects of this kind in the past. In the end, no agreement was reached on the subject, which will be revisited at a later meeting.

      The concept seems simple enough: Offset emissions in one place by preventing or capturing an equal amount of emissions elsewhere. But implementing that idea has turned out to be far more complex and fraught with problems than many expected.

      For example, projects that aim to preserve a section of forest — which can remove carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it in the soil — face numerous issues. Will the preservation of one parcel just lead to the clearcutting of an adjacent parcel? Would the preserved land have been left uncut anyway? And what if it ends up being destroyed by wildfire, drought, or insect infestation — all of which are expected to become more likely with climate change?

      Similarly, projects that aim to capture carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into the ground are sometimes used to justify increasing the production of petroleum or natural gas, negating the intended climate mitigation of the process.

      Several experts at MIT now say that the system could be effective, at least in certain circumstances, but it must be thoroughly evaluated and regulated.

      Carbon removal, natural or mechanical

      Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, co-led a study and workshop last year that included policymakers, industry representatives, and researchers. They focused on one kind of carbon offsets, those based on natural climate solutions — restoration or preservation of natural systems that not only sequester carbon but also provide other benefits, such as greater biodiversity. “We find a lot of confusion and misperceptions and misinformation, even about how you define the term carbon credit or offset,” he says.

      He points out that there has been a lot of criticism of the whole idea of carbon offsets, “and that criticism is well-placed. I think that’s a very healthy conversation, to clarify what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. What are the real actions versus what is greenwashing?”

      He says that government-mandated and managed carbon trading programs in some places, including British Columbia and parts of Europe, have been somewhat effective because they have clear standards in place, whereas unregulated carbon credit systems have often been abused.

      Charles Harvey, an MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering, should know, having been actively involved in both sides of the issue over the last two decades. He co-founded a company in 2008 that was the first private U.S. company to attempt to remove carbon dioxide from emissions on a commercial scale, a process called carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. Such projects have been a major recipient of federal subsidies aimed at combatting climate change, but Harvey now says these are largely a waste of money and in most cases do not achieve their stated objective.

      In fact, he says that according to industry sources, as of 2021 more than 90 percent of CCS projects in the U.S. have been used for the production of more fossil fuels — oil and natural gas. Here’s how it works: Natural gas wells often produce methane mixed with carbon dioxide, which must be removed to produce a marketable natural gas. This carbon dioxide is then injected into oil wells to stimulate more production. So, the net effect is the creation of more total greenhouse gas emissions rather than less, explains Harvey, who recently received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to explore CCS projects and whether they can be made to contribute to true emissions reductions.

      What went wrong with the ambitious startup CCS company Harvey co-founded? “What happened is that the prices of renewables and energy storage are now incredibly cheap,” he says. “It makes no sense to do this, ever, on power plants because honestly, fossil fuel power plants don’t even really make economic sense anymore.”

      Where does Harvey see potential for carbon credits to work? One possibility is the preservation or restoration of tropical peatlands, which he has received another grant to study. These are vast areas of permanently waterlogged land in which dead plant matter —and the carbon it contains — remains in place because the water prevents the normal decomposition processes that would otherwise release the stored carbon back into the air.

      While it is virtually impossible to quantify the amount of carbon stored in the soil of forest or farmland, in peatlands that’s easy to do because essentially all of the submerged material is carbon-based. Simply measuring changes in the elevation of such land, which can be done remotely by plane or satellite, gives a precise measure of how much carbon has been stored or released. When a patch of peat forest that has been clear-cut to build plantations or roads is reforested, the amount of carbon emissions that were prevented can be measured accurately.

      Because of that potential for accurate documentation, protecting or restoring peat bogs can also be a good way to achieve meaningful offsets for carbon emissions elsewhere, Harvey says. Rewetting a previously drained peat forest can immediately counteract the release of its stored carbon and can keep it there as long as it is not drained again — something that can be verified using satellite data.

      Paltsev adds that while such nature-based systems for countering carbon emissions can be a key component of addressing climate change, especially in very difficult-to-decarbonize industries such as aviation, carbon credits for such programs “shouldn’t be a replacement for our efforts at emissions reduction. It should be in addition.”

      Criteria for meaningful offsets

      John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has published a set of criteria for evaluating proposed carbon offset plans to make sure they would provide the benefits they claim. At present, “there’s no regulation, there’s no oversight” for carbon offsets, he says. “There have been many scandals over this.”

      For example, one company was providing what it claimed was certification for carbon offset projects but was found to have such lax standards that the claimed offsets were often not real. For example, there were multiple claims to protect the same piece of forest and claims to protect land that was already legally protected.

      Sterman’s proposed set of criteria goes by the acronym AVID+. “It stands for four principles that you have to meet in order for your offset to be legitimate: It has to be additional, verifiable, immediate, and durable,” he says. “And then I call it AVID+,” he adds, the “plus” being for plans that have additional benefits as well, such as improving health, creating jobs, or helping historically disadvantaged communities.

      Offsets can be useful, he says, for addressing especially hard-to-abate industries such as steel or cement manufacturing, or aviation. But it is essential to meet all four of the criteria, or else real emissions are not really being offset. For example, planting trees today, while often a good thing to do, would take decades to offset emissions going into the atmosphere now, where they may persist for centuries — so that fails to meet the “immediate” requirement.

      And protecting existing forests, while also desirable, is very hard to prove as being additional, because “that requires a counterfactual that you can never observe,” he says. “That’s where a lot of squirrely accounting and a lot of fraud comes in, because how do you know that the forest would have been cut down but for the offset?” In one well-documented case, he points out, a company tried to sell carbon offsets for a section of forest that was already an established nature preserve.

      Are there offsets that can meet all the criteria and provide real benefits in helping to address climate change? Yes, Sterman and Harvey say, but they need to be evaluated carefully.

      “My favorite example,” Sterman says, “is doing deep energy retrofits and putting solar panels on low-income housing.” These measures can help address the so-called landlord-tenant problem: If tenants typically pay the utility bills, landlords have little incentive to pay for efficiency improvements, and the tenants don’t have the capital to make such improvements on their own. “Policies that would make this possible are pretty good candidates for legitimate offsets, because they are additional — low-income households can’t afford to do it without assistance, so it’s not going to happen without a program. It’s verifiable, because you’ve got the utility bills pre and post.” They are also quite immediate, typically taking only a year or so to implement, and “they’re pretty durable,” he says.

      Another example is a recent plan in Alaska that allows cruise ships to offset the emissions caused by their trips by paying into a fund that provides subsidies for Alaskan citizens to install heat pumps in their homes, thus preventing emissions from wood or fossil fuel heating systems. “I think this is a pretty good candidate to meet the criteria, certainly a lot better than much of what’s being done today,” Sterman says.

      But eventually, what is really needed, the researchers agree, are real, enforceable standards. After COP28, carbon offsets are still allowed, Sterman says, “but there is still no widely accepted mandatory regulation. We’re still in the wild West.”

      Paltsev nevertheless sees reasons for optimism about nature-based carbon offset systems. For example, he says the aviation industry has recently agreed to implement a set of standards for offsetting their emissions, known as CORSIA, for carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation. “It’s a point for optimism,” he says, “because they issued very tough guidelines as to what projects are eligible and what projects are not.”

      He adds, “There is a solution if you want to find a good solution. It is doable, when there is a will and there is the need.” More

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      in Energy

      3 Questions: The Climate Project at MIT

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      MIT is preparing a major campus-wide effort to develop technological, behavioral, and policy solutions to some of the toughest problems now impeding an effective global climate response. The Climate Project at MIT, as the new enterprise is known, includes new arrangements for promoting cross-Institute collaborations and new mechanisms for engaging with outside partners to speed the development and implementation of climate solutions.

      MIT News spoke with Richard K. Lester, MIT’s vice provost for international activities, who has helped oversee the development of the project.

      Q: What is the Climate Project at MIT?

      A: In her inaugural address last May, President Kornbluth called on the MIT community to join her in a “bold, tenacious response” to climate change. The Climate Project at MIT is a response to that call. It aims to mobilize every part of MIT to develop, deliver, and scale up practical climate solutions, as quickly as possible.

      Play video

      At MIT, well over 300 of our faculty are already working with their students and research staff members on different aspects of the climate problem. Almost all of our academic departments and more than a score of our interdepartmental labs and centers are involved in some way. What they are doing is remarkable, and this decentralized structure reflects the best traditions of MIT as a “bottom up,” entrepreneurial institution. But, as President Kornbluth said, we must do much more. We must be bolder in our research choices and more creative in how we organize ourselves to work with each other and with our partners. The purpose of the Climate Project is to support our community’s efforts to do bigger things faster in the climate domain. We will have succeeded if our work changes the trajectory of global climate outcomes for the better.

      I want to be clear that the clay is still wet here. The Climate Project will continue to take shape as more members of the MIT community bring their excellence, their energy, and their ambition to bear on the climate challenge. But I believe we have a vision and a framework for accelerating and amplifying MIT’s real-world climate impact, and I know that President Kornbluth is eager to share this progress report with the MIT community now to convey the breadth and ambition of what we’re planning.

      Q: How will the project be organized?

      A: The Climate Project will have three core components: the Climate Missions; their offshoots, the Climate Frontier Projects; and Climate HQ. A new vice president for climate will lead the enterprise.

      Initially there will be six missions, which you can read about in the plan. Each will address a different domain of climate impact where new solutions are required and where a critical mass of research excellence exists at MIT. One such mission, of course, is to decarbonize energy and industry, an area where we estimate that about 150 of our faculty are already working.

      The mission leaders will build multidisciplinary problem-solving communities reaching across the Institute and beyond. Each of these will be charged with roadmapping and assessing progress toward its mission, identifying critical gaps and bottlenecks, and launching applied research projects to accelerate progress where the MIT community and our partners are well-positioned to achieve impactful results. These projects — the climate frontier projects — will benefit from active, professional project management, with clear metrics and milestones. We are in a critical decade for responding to climate change, so it’s important that these research projects move quickly, with an eye on producing real-world results.

      The new Climate HQ will drive the overall vision for the Climate Project and support the work of the missions. We’ve talked about a core focus on impact-driven research, but much is still unknown about the Earth’s physical and biogeochemical systems, and there is also much to be learned about the behavior of the social and political systems that led us to the very difficult situation the world now faces. Climate HQ will support fundamental research in the scientific and humanistic disciplines related to climate, and will promote engagement between these disciplines and the missions. We must also advance climate-related education, led by departments and programs, as well as policy work, public outreach, and more, including an MIT-wide student-centric Climate Corps to elevate climate-related, community-focused service in MIT’s culture.

      Q: Why are partners a key part of this project?

      A: It is important to build strong partners right from the very start for our innovations, inventions, and discoveries to have any prospect of achieving scale. And in many cases, with climate change, it’s all about scale.

      One of the aims of this initiative is to strengthen MIT’s climate “scaffolding” — the people and processes connecting what we do on campus to the practical world of climate impact and response. We can build on MIT’s highly developed infrastructure for translation, innovation, and entrepreneurship, even as we promote other important pathways to scale involving communities, municipalities, and other not-for-profit organizations. Working with all these different organizations will help us build a broad infrastructure to help us get traction in the world. On a related note, the Sloan School of Management will be sharing details in the coming days of an exciting new effort to enhance MIT’s contributions in the climate policy arena.

      MIT is committing $75 million, including $25 million from Sloan, at the outset of the project. But we anticipate developing new partnerships, including philanthropic partnerships, to increase that scope dramatically. More

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      in Energy

      Reflecting on COP28 — and humanity’s progress toward meeting global climate goals

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      With 85,000 delegates, the 2023 United Nations climate change conference, known as COP28, was the largest U.N. climate conference in history. It was held at the end of the hottest year in recorded history. And after 12 days of negotiations, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, it produced a decision that included, for the first time, language calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” though it stopped short of calling for their complete phase-out.

      U.N. Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said the outcome in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, COP28’s host city, signaled “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. 

      COP stands for “conference of the parties” to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, held this year for the 28th time. Through the negotiations — and the immense conference and expo that takes place alongside them — a delegation of faculty, students, and staff from MIT was in Dubai to observe the negotiations, present new climate technologies, speak on panels, network, and conduct research.

      On Jan. 17, the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) hosted a panel discussion with MIT delegates who shared their reflections on the experience. Asking what’s going on at COP is “like saying, ‘What’s going on in the city of Boston today?’” quipped Evan Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa, director of CIS, and faculty director of MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI). “The value added that all of us can provide for the MIT community is [to share] what we saw firsthand and how we experienced it.” 

      Phase-out, phase down, transition away?

      In the first week of COP28, over 100 countries issued a joint statement that included a call for “the global phase out of unabated fossil fuels.” The question of whether the COP28 decision — dubbed the “UAE Consensus” — would include this phase-out language animated much of the discussion in the days and weeks leading up to COP28. 

      Ultimately, the decision called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” It also called for “accelerating efforts towards the phase down of unabated coal power,” referring to the combustion of coal without efforts to capture and store its emissions.

      In Dubai to observe the negotiations, graduate student Alessandra Fabbri said she was “confronted” by the degree to which semantic differences could impose significant ramifications — for example, when negotiators referred to a “just transition,” or to “developed vs. developing nations” — particularly where evolution in recent scholarship has produced more nuanced understandings of the terms.

      COP28 also marked the conclusion of the first global stocktake, a core component of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The effort every five years to assess the world’s progress in responding to climate change is intended as a basis for encouraging countries to strengthen their climate goals over time, a process often referred to as the Paris Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism.” 

      The technical report of the first global stocktake, published in September 2023, found that while the world has taken actions that have reduced forecasts of future warming, they are not sufficient to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global average temperature increase to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

      “Despite minor, punctual advancements in climate action, parties are far from being on track to meet the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Fabbri, a graduate student in the School of Architecture and Planning and a fellow in MIT’s Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Citing a number of persistent challenges, including some parties’ fears that rapid economic transition may create or exacerbate vulnerabilities, she added, “There is a noted lack of accountability among certain countries in adhering to their commitments and responsibilities under international climate agreements.” 

      Climate and trade

      COP28 was the first climate summit to formally acknowledge the importance of international trade by featuring an official “Trade Day” on Dec. 4. Internationally traded goods account for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, raising complex questions of accountability and concerns about offshoring of industrial manufacturing, a phenomenon known as “emissions leakage.” Addressing the nexus of climate and trade is therefore considered essential for successful decarbonization, and a growing number of countries are leveraging trade policies — such as carbon fees applied to imported goods — to secure climate benefits. 

      Members of the MIT delegation participated in several related activities, sharing research and informing decision-makers. Catherine Wolfram, professor of applied economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Michael Mehling, deputy director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), presented options for international cooperation on such trade policies at side events, including ones hosted by the World Trade Organization and European Parliament. 

      “While COPs are often criticized for highlighting statements that don’t have any bite, they are also tremendous opportunities to get people from around the world who care about climate and think deeply about these issues in one place,” said Wolfram.

      Climate and health

      For the first time in the conference’s nearly 30-year history, COP28 included a thematic “Health Day” that featured talks on the relationship between climate and health. Researchers from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) have been testing policy solutions in this area for years through research funds such as the King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI). 

      “An important but often-neglected area where climate action can lead to improved health is combating air pollution,” said Andre Zollinger, K-CAI’s senior policy manager. “COP28’s announcement on reducing methane leaks is an important step because action in this area could translate to relatively quick, cost-effective ways to curb climate change while improving air quality, especially for people living near these industrial sites.” K-CAI has an ongoing project in Colorado investigating the use of machine learning to predict leaks and improve the framework for regulating industrial methane emissions, Zollinger noted.

      This was J-PAL’s third time at COP, which Zollinger said typically presented an opportunity for researchers to share new findings and analysis with government partners, nongovernmental organizations, and companies. This year, he said, “We have [also] been working with negotiators in the [Middle East and North Africa] region in the months preceding COP to plug them into the latest evidence on water conservation, on energy access, on different challenging areas of adaptation that could be useful for them during the conference.”

      Sharing knowledge, learning from others

      MIT student Runako Gentles described COP28 as a “springboard” to greater impact. A senior from Jamaica studying civil and environmental engineering, Gentles said it was exciting to introduce himself as an MIT undergraduate to U.N. employees and Jamaican delegates in Dubai. “There’s a lot of talk on mitigation and cutting carbon emissions, but there needs to be much more going into climate adaptation, especially for small-island developing states like those in the Caribbean,” he said. “One of the things I can do, while I still try to finish my degree, is communicate — get the story out there to raise awareness.”

      At an official side event at COP28 hosted by MIT, Pennsylvania State University, and the American Geophysical Union, Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research, stressed the importance of opportunities to share knowledge and learn from people around the world.

      “The reason this two-way learning is so important for us is simple: The ideas we come up with in a university setting, whether they’re technological or policy or any other kind of innovations — they only matter in the practical world if they can be put to good use and scaled up,” said Zuber. “And the only way we can know that our work has practical relevance for addressing climate is by working hand-in-hand with communities, industries, governments, and others.”

      Marcela Angel, research program director at the Environmental Solutions Initiative, and Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, also spoke at the event, which was moderated by Bethany Patten, director of policy and engagement for sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  More

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      in Energy

      Meeting the clean energy needs of tomorrow

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      Yuri Sebregts, chief technology officer at Shell, succinctly laid out the energy dilemma facing the world over the rest of this century. On one hand, demand for energy is quickly growing as countries in the developing world modernize and the global population grows, with 100 gigajoules of energy per person needed annually to enable quality-of-life benefits and industrialization around the globe. On the other, traditional energy sources are quickly warming the planet, with the world already seeing the devastating effects of increasingly frequent extreme weather events. 

      While the goals of energy security and energy sustainability are seemingly at odds with one another, the two must be pursued in tandem, Sebregts said during his address at the MIT Energy Initiative Fall Colloquium.

      “An environmentally sustainable energy system that isn’t also a secure energy system is not sustainable,” Sebregts said. “And conversely, a secure energy system that is not environmentally sustainable will do little to ensure long-term energy access and affordability. Therefore, security and sustainability must go hand-in-hand. You can’t trade off one for the other.”

      Sebregts noted that there are several potential pathways to help strike this balance, including investments in renewable energy sources, the use of carbon offsets, and the creation of more efficient tools, products, and processes. However, he acknowledged that meeting growing energy demands while minimizing environmental impacts is a global challenge requiring an unprecedented level of cooperation among countries and corporations across the world. 

      “At Shell, we recognize that this will require a lot of collaboration between governments, businesses, and civil society,” Sebregts said. “That’s not always easy.”

      Global conflict and global warming

      In 2021, Sebregts noted, world leaders gathered in Glasgow, Scotland and collectively promised to deliver on the “stretch goal” of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — a level that scientists believe will help avoid the worst potential impacts of climate change. But, just a few months later, Russia invaded Ukraine, resulting in chaos in global energy markets and illustrating the massive impact that geopolitical friction can have on efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

      “Even though global volatility has been a near constant of this century, the situation in Ukraine is proving to be a turning point,” Sebregts said. “The stress it placed on the global supply of energy, food, and other critical materials was enormous.”

      In Europe, Sebregts noted, countries affected by the loss of Russia’s natural gas supply began importing from the Middle East and the United States. This, in turn, drove up prices. While this did result in some efforts to limit energy use, such as Europeans lowering their thermostats in the winter, it also caused some energy buyers to turn to coal. For instance, the German government approved additional coal mining to boost its energy security — temporarily reversing a decades-long transition away from the fuel. To put this into wider perspective, in a single quarter, China increased its coal generation capacity by as much as Germany had reduced its own over the previous 20 years.

      The promise of electrification

      Sebregts noted the strides being made toward electrification, which is expected to have a significant impact on global carbon emissions. To meet net-zero emissions (the point at which humans are adding no more carbon to the atmosphere than they are removing) by 2050, the share of electricity as a portion of total worldwide energy consumption must reach 37 percent by 2030, up from 20 percent in 2020, Sebregts said.

      He pointed out that Shell has become one of the world’s largest electric vehicle charging companies, with more than 30,000 public charge points. By 2025, that number will increase to 70,000, and it is expected to soar to 200,000 by 2030. While demand and infrastructure for electric vehicles are growing, Sebregts said that the “real needle-mover” will be industrial electrification, especially in so-called “hard-to-abate” sectors.

      This progress will depend heavily on global cooperation — Sebregts pointed out that China dominates the international market for many rare elements that are key components of electrification infrastructure. “It shouldn’t be a surprise that the political instability, shifting geopolitical tensions, and environmental and social governance issues are significant risks for the energy transition,” he said. “It is imperative that we reduce, control, and mitigate these risks as much as possible.”

      Two possible paths

      For decades, Sebregts said, Shell has created scenarios to help senior managers think through the long-term challenges facing the company. While Sebregts stressed that these scenarios are not predictions, they do take into account real-world conditions, and they are meant to give leaders the opportunity to grapple with plausible situations.

      With this in mind, Sebregts outlined Shell’s most recent Energy Security Scenarios, describing the potential future consequences of attempts to balance growing energy demand with sustainability — scenarios that envision vastly different levels of global cooperation, with huge differences in projected results. 

      The first scenario, dubbed “Archipelagos,” imagines countries pursuing energy security through self-interest — a fragmented, competitive process that would result in a global temperature increase of 2.2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. The second scenario, “Sky 2050,” envisions countries around the world collaborating to change the energy system for their mutual benefit. This more optimistic scenario would see a much lower global temperature increase of 1.2 C by 2100.

      “The good news is that in both scenarios, the world is heading for net-zero emissions at some point,” Sebregts said. “The difference is a question of when it gets there. In Sky 2050, it is the middle of the century. In Archipelagos, it is early in the next century.”

      On the other hand, Sebregts added, the average global temperature will increase by more than 1.5 C for some period of time in either scenario. But, in the Archipelagos scenario, this overshoot will be much larger, and will take much longer to come down. “So, two very different futures,” Sebregts said. “Two very different worlds.”

      The work ahead

      Questioned about the costs of transitioning to a net-zero energy ecosystem, Sebregts said that it is “very hard” to provide an accurate answer. “If you impose an additional constraint … you’re going to have to add some level of cost,” he said. “But then, of course, there’s 30 years of technology development pathway that might counteract some of that.”

      In some cases, such as air travel, Sebregts said, it will likely remain impractical to either rely on electrification or sequester carbon at the source of emission. Direct air capture (DAC) methods, which mechanically pull carbon directly from the atmosphere, will have a role to play in offsetting these emissions, he said. Sebregts predicted that the price of DAC could come down significantly by the middle of this century. “I would venture that a price of $200 to $250 a ton of CO2 by 2050 is something that the world would be willing to spend, at least in developed economies, to offset those very hard-to-abate instances.”

      Sebregts noted that Shell is working on demonstrating DAC technologies in Houston, Texas, constructing what will become Europe’s largest hydrogen plant in the Netherlands, and taking other steps to profitably transition to a net-zero emissions energy company by 2050. “We need to understand what can help our customers transition quicker and how we can continue to satisfy their needs,” he said. “We must ensure that energy is affordable, accessible, and sustainable, as soon as possible.” More

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      in Environment

      K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center will prioritize innovations for resource-constrained communities

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      Billions of people worldwide face threats to their livelihood, health, and well-being due to poverty. These problems persist because solutions offered in developed countries often do not meet the requirements — related to factors like price, performance, usability, robustness, and culture — of poor or developing countries. Academic labs frequently try to tackle these challenges, but often to no avail because they lack real-world, on-the-ground knowledge from key stakeholders, and because they do not have an efficient, reliable means of converting breakthroughs to real-world impact.

      The new K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center at MIT, founded with a $28 million gift from philanthropist and investor Lisa Yang, aims to rethink how products and technologies for resource-constrained communities are conceived, designed, and commercialized. A collaboration between MIT’s School of Engineering and School of Science, the Yang GEAR Center will bring together a multidisciplinary team of MIT researchers to assess today’s most pressing global challenges in three critical areas: global health, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the water-energy-food nexus.

      “As she has shown over and over through her philanthropy, Lisa Yang shares MIT’s passion for connecting fundamental research and real-world data to create positive impact,” says MIT president Sally Kornbluth. “I’m grateful for her powerful vision and incredible generosity in founding the K. Lisa Yang GEAR Center. I can’t imagine a better use of MIT’s talents than working to improve the lives and health of people around the world.”

      Yang’s gift expands her exceptional philanthropic support of human health and basic science research at MIT over the past six years. Yang GEAR Center will join MIT’s Yang Tan Collective, an assemblage of six major research centers focused on accelerating collaboration in basic science, research, and engineering to realize translational strategies that improve human health and well-being at a global scale.

      “Billions of people face daily life-or-death challenges that could be improved with elegant technologies,” says Yang. “And yet I’ve learned how many products and tools created by top engineers don’t make it out of the lab. They may look like clever ideas during the prototype phase, but they are entirely ill-suited to the communities they were designed for. I am very excited about the potential of a deliberate and thoughtful engineering effort that will prioritize the design of technologies for use in impoverished communities.”

      Cost, material availability, cultural suitability, and other market mismatches hinder many major innovations in global health, food, and water from being translated to use in resource-constrained communities. Yang GEAR Center will support a major research and design program with its mission to strategically identify compelling challenges and associated scientific knowledge gaps in resource-constrained communities then address them through academic innovation to create and translate transformative technologies.

      The center will be led by Amos Winter, associate professor of mechanical engineering, whose lab focuses on creating technologies that marry innovative, low-cost design with an in-depth understanding of the unique socioeconomic constraints of emerging markets.

      “Academia has a key role to play in solving the historically unsolvable challenges in resource-constrained communities,” says Winter. “However, academic research is often disconnected from the real-world requirements that must be satisfied to make meaningful change. Yang GEAR Center will be a catalyst for innovation to impact by helping colleagues identify compelling problems and focus their talents on realizing real-world solutions, and by providing mechanisms for commercial dissemination. I am extremely grateful to find in Lisa a partner who shares a vision for how academic research can play a more efficient and targeted role in addressing the needs of the world’s most disadvantaged populations.”

      The backbone of the Yang GEAR Center will be a team of seasoned research scientists and engineers. These individuals will scout real-world problems and distill the relevant research questions then help assemble collaborative teams. As projects develop, center staff will mentor students, build and conduct field pilots, and foster relationships with stakeholders around the world. They will be strategically positioned to translate technology at the end of projects through licensing and startups. Center staff and collaborators will focus on creating products and services for climate-driven migrants, such as solar-powered energy and water networks; technologies for reducing atmospheric carbon and promoting the hydrogen economy; brackish water desalination and irrigation solutions; and high-performance, global health diagnostics and devices.

      For instance, a Yang GEAR Center team focused on creating water-saving and solar-powered irrigation solutions for farmers in the Middle East and North Africa will continue its work in the region. They will conduct exploratory research; build a team of stakeholders, including farmers, agricultural outreach organizations, irrigation hardware manufacturers, retailers, water and agriculture scientists, and local government officials; design, rigorously test, and iterate prototypes both in the lab and in the field; and conduct large-scale field trials to garner user feedback and pave the way to product commercialization.

      “Grounded in foundational scientific research and blended with excellence in the humanities, MIT provides a framework that integrates people, economics, research, and innovation. By incorporating multiple perspectives — and being attentive to the needs and cultures of the people who will ultimately rely on research outcomes — MIT can have the greatest impact in areas of health, climate science, and resource security,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics.

      An overarching aim for the center will be to educate graduates who are global engineers, designers, and researchers positioned for a career of addressing compelling, high-impact challenges. The center includes four endowed Hock E. Tan GEAR Center Fellowships that will support graduate students and/or postdoctoral fellows eager to enter the field of global engineering. The fellowships are named for MIT alumnus and Broadcom CEO Hock E. Tan ’75 SM ’75.

      “I am thrilled that the Yang GEAR Center is taking a leading role in training problem-solvers who will rethink how products and inventions can help communities facing the most pressing challenges of our time,” adds Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “These talented young students,  postdocs, and staff have the potential to reach across disciplines — and across the globe — to truly transform the impact engineering can have in the future.” More