Interview

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares55 Views

    Q&A: The climate impact of generative AI

    by

    Vijay Gadepally, a senior staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, leads a number of projects at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) to make computing platforms, and the artificial intelligence systems that run on them, more efficient. Here, Gadepally discusses the increasing use of generative AI in everyday tools, its hidden environmental impact, and some of the ways that Lincoln Laboratory and the greater AI community can reduce emissions for a greener future.Q: What trends are you seeing in terms of how generative AI is being used in computing?A: Generative AI uses machine learning (ML) to create new content, like images and text, based on data that is inputted into the ML system. At the LLSC we design and build some of the largest academic computing platforms in the world, and over the past few years we’ve seen an explosion in the number of projects that need access to high-performance computing for generative AI. We’re also seeing how generative AI is changing all sorts of fields and domains — for example, ChatGPT is already influencing the classroom and the workplace faster than regulations can seem to keep up.We can imagine all sorts of uses for generative AI within the next decade or so, like powering highly capable virtual assistants, developing new drugs and materials, and even improving our understanding of basic science. We can’t predict everything that generative AI will be used for, but I can certainly say that with more and more complex algorithms, their compute, energy, and climate impact will continue to grow very quickly.Q: What strategies is the LLSC using to mitigate this climate impact?A: We’re always looking for ways to make computing more efficient, as doing so helps our data center make the most of its resources and allows our scientific colleagues to push their fields forward in as efficient a manner as possible.As one example, we’ve been reducing the amount of power our hardware consumes by making simple changes, similar to dimming or turning off lights when you leave a room. In one experiment, we reduced the energy consumption of a group of graphics processing units by 20 percent to 30 percent, with minimal impact on their performance, by enforcing a power cap. This technique also lowered the hardware operating temperatures, making the GPUs easier to cool and longer lasting.Another strategy is changing our behavior to be more climate-aware. At home, some of us might choose to use renewable energy sources or intelligent scheduling. We are using similar techniques at the LLSC — such as training AI models when temperatures are cooler, or when local grid energy demand is low.We also realized that a lot of the energy spent on computing is often wasted, like how a water leak increases your bill but without any benefits to your home. We developed some new techniques that allow us to monitor computing workloads as they are running and then terminate those that are unlikely to yield good results. Surprisingly, in a number of cases we found that the majority of computations could be terminated early without compromising the end result.Q: What’s an example of a project you’ve done that reduces the energy output of a generative AI program?A: We recently built a climate-aware computer vision tool. Computer vision is a domain that’s focused on applying AI to images; so, differentiating between cats and dogs in an image, correctly labeling objects within an image, or looking for components of interest within an image.In our tool, we included real-time carbon telemetry, which produces information about how much carbon is being emitted by our local grid as a model is running. Depending on this information, our system will automatically switch to a more energy-efficient version of the model, which typically has fewer parameters, in times of high carbon intensity, or a much higher-fidelity version of the model in times of low carbon intensity.By doing this, we saw a nearly 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions over a one- to two-day period. We recently extended this idea to other generative AI tasks such as text summarization and found the same results. Interestingly, the performance sometimes improved after using our technique!Q: What can we do as consumers of generative AI to help mitigate its climate impact?A: As consumers, we can ask our AI providers to offer greater transparency. For example, on Google Flights, I can see a variety of options that indicate a specific flight’s carbon footprint. We should be getting similar kinds of measurements from generative AI tools so that we can make a conscious decision on which product or platform to use based on our priorities.We can also make an effort to be more educated on generative AI emissions in general. Many of us are familiar with vehicle emissions, and it can help to talk about generative AI emissions in comparative terms. People may be surprised to know, for example, that one image-generation task is roughly equivalent to driving four miles in a gas car, or that it takes the same amount of energy to charge an electric car as it does to generate about 1,500 text summarizations.There are many cases where customers would be happy to make a trade-off if they knew the trade-off’s impact.Q: What do you see for the future?A: Mitigating the climate impact of generative AI is one of those problems that people all over the world are working on, and with a similar goal. We’re doing a lot of work here at Lincoln Laboratory, but its only scratching at the surface. In the long term, data centers, AI developers, and energy grids will need to work together to provide “energy audits” to uncover other unique ways that we can improve computing efficiencies. We need more partnerships and more collaboration in order to forge ahead.If you’re interested in learning more, or collaborating with Lincoln Laboratory on these efforts, please contact Vijay Gadepally.

    Play video

    Video: MIT Lincoln Laboratory More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares88 Views

      in Environment

      Q&A: Examining American attitudes on global climate policies

      by

      Does the United States have a “moral responsibility” for providing aid to poor nations — which have a significantly smaller carbon footprint and face catastrophic climate events at a much higher rate than wealthy countries?A study published Dec. 11 in Climatic Change explores U.S. public opinion on global climate policies considering our nation’s historic role as a leading contributor of carbon emissions. The randomized, experimental survey specifically investigates American attitudes toward such a moral responsibility. The work was led by MIT Professor Evan Lieberman, the Total Chair on Contemporary African Politics and director of the MIT Center for International Studies, and Volha Charnysh, the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science, and was co-authored with MIT political science PhD student Jared Kalow and University of Pennsylvania postdoc Erin Walk PhD ’24. Here, Lieberman describes the team’s research and insights, and offers recommendations that could result in more effective climate advocacy.Q: What are the key findings — and any surprises — of your recent work on climate attitudes among the U.S. population?A: A big question at the COP29 Climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan was: Who will pay the trillions of dollars needed to help lower-income countries adapt to climate change? During past meetings, global leaders have come to an increasing consensus that the wealthiest countries should pay, but there has been little follow-through on commitments. In countries like the United States, popular opinion about such policies can weigh heavily on politicians’ minds, as citizens focus on their own challenges at home.Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda is one of many who views such transfers as a matter of moral responsibility, explaining that many rich countries see climate finance as “a random act of charity … not recognizing that they have a moral obligation to provide funding, especially the historical emitters and even those who currently have large emissions.”In our study, we set out to measure American attitudes towards climate-related foreign aid, and explicitly to test the impact of this particular moral responsibility narrative. We did this on an experimental basis, so subjects were randomly assigned to receive different messages.One message emphasized what we call a “climate justice” frame, and it argued that Americans should contribute to helping poor countries because of the United States’ disproportionate role in the emissions of greenhouse gasses that have led to global warming. That message had a positive impact on the extent to which citizens supported the use of foreign aid for climate adaptation in poor countries. However, when we looked at who was actually moved by the message, we found that the effect was larger and statistically significant only among Democrats, but not among Republicans.We were surprised that a message emphasizing solidarity, the idea that “we are all in this together,” had no overall effect on citizen attitudes, Democrats or Republicans. Q: What are your recommendations toward addressing the attitudes on global climate policies within the U.S.?A: First, given limited budgets and attention for communications campaigns, our research certainly suggests that emphasizing a bit of blaming and shaming is more powerful than more diffuse messages of shared responsibility.But our research also emphasized how critically important it is to find new ways to communicate with Republicans about climate change and about foreign aid. Republicans were overwhelmingly less supportive of climate aid and yet even from that low baseline, a message that moved Democrats had a much more mixed reception among Republicans. Researchers and those working on the front lines of climate communications need to do more to better understand Republican perspectives. Younger Republicans, for example, might be more movable on key climate policies.Q: With an incoming Trump administration, what are some of the specific hurdles and/or opportunities we face in garnering U.S. public support for international climate negotiations?A: Not only did Trump demonstrate his disdain for international action on climate change by withdrawing from the Paris agreement during his first term in office, but he has indicated his intention to double down on such strategies in his second term. And the idea that he would support assistance for the world’s poorest countries harmed by climate change? This seems unlikely. Because we find Republican public opinion so firmly in line with these perspectives, frankly, it is hard to be optimistic.Those Americans concerned with the effects of climate change may need to look to state-level, non-government, corporate, and more global organizations to support climate justice efforts.Q: Are there any other takeaways you’d like to share?A: Those working in the climate change area may need to rethink how we talk and message about the challenges the world faces. Right now, almost anything that sounds like “climate change” is likely to be rejected by Republican leaders and large segments of American society. Our approach of experimenting with different types of messages is a relatively low-cost strategy for identifying more promising strategies, targeted at Americans and at citizens in other wealthy countries.But our study, in line with other work, also demonstrates that partisanship — identifying as a Republican or Democrat — is by far the strongest predictor of attitudes toward climate aid. While climate justice messaging can move attitudes slightly, the effects are still modest relative to the contributions of party identification itself. Just as Republican party elites were once persuaded to take leadership in the global fight against HIV and AIDS, a similar challenge lies ahead for climate aid. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Environment

      Q&A: Transforming research through global collaborations

      by

      The MIT Global Seed Funds (GSF) program fosters global research collaborations with MIT faculty and their peers abroad — creating partnerships that tackle complex global issues, from climate change to health-care challenges and beyond. Administered by the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), the GSF program has awarded more than $26 million to over 1,200 faculty research projects since its inception in 2008. Through its unique funding structure — comprising a general fund for unrestricted geographical use and several specific funds within individual countries, regions, and universities — GSF supports a wide range of projects. The current call for proposals from MIT faculty and researchers with principal investigator status is open until Dec. 10. CIS recently sat down with faculty recipients Josephine Carstensen and David McGee to discuss the value and impact GSF added to their research. Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, generates computational designs for large-scale structures with the intent of designing novel low-carbon solutions. McGee, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), reconstructs the patterns, pace, and magnitudes of past hydro-climate changes.Q: How did the Global Seed Funds program connect you with global partnerships related to your research?Carstensen: One of the projects my lab is working on is to unlock the potential of complex cast-glass structures. Through our GSF partnership with researchers at TUDelft (Netherlands), my group was able to leverage our expertise in generative design algorithms alongside the TUDelft team, who are experts in the physical casting and fabrication of glass structures. Our initial connection to TUDelft was actually through one of my graduate students who was at a conference and met TUDelft researchers. He was inspired by their work and felt there could be synergy between our labs. The question then became: How do we connect with TUDelft? And that was what led us to the Global Seed Funds program. McGee: Our research is based in fieldwork conducted in partnership with experts who have a rich understanding of local environments. These locations range from lake basins in Chile and Argentina to caves in northern Mexico, Vietnam, and Madagascar. GSF has been invaluable for helping foster partnerships with collaborators and universities in these different locations, enabling the pilot work and relationship-building necessary to establish longer-term, externally funded projects.Q: Tell us more about your GSF-funded work.Carstensen: In my research group at MIT, we live mainly in a computational regime, and we do very little proof-of-concept testing. To that point, we do not even have the facilities nor experience to physically build large-scale structures, or even specialized structures. GSF has enabled us to connect with the researchers at TUDelft who do much more experimental testing than we do. Being able to work with the experts at TUDelft within their physical realm provided valuable insights into their way of approaching problems. And, likewise, the researchers at TUDelft benefited from our expertise. It has been fruitful in ways we couldn’t have imagined within our lab at MIT.McGee: The collaborative work supported by the GSF has focused on reconstructing how past climate changes impacted rainfall patterns around the world, using natural archives like lake sediments and cave formations. One particularly successful project has been our work in caves in northeastern Mexico, which has been conducted in partnership with researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a local caving group. This project has involved several MIT undergraduate and graduate students, sponsored a research symposium in Mexico City, and helped us obtain funding from the National Science Foundation for a longer-term project.Q: You both mentioned the involvement of your graduate students. How exactly has the GSF augmented the research experience of your students?Carstensen: The collaboration has especially benefited the graduate students from both the MIT and TUDelft teams. The opportunity presented through this project to engage in research at an international peer institution has been extremely beneficial for their academic growth and maturity. It has facilitated training in new and complementary technical areas that they would not have had otherwise and allowed them to engage with leading world experts. An example of this aspect of the project’s success is that the collaboration has inspired one of my graduate students to actively pursue postdoc opportunities in Europe (including at TU Delft) after his graduation.McGee: MIT students have traveled to caves in northeastern Mexico and to lake basins in northern Chile to conduct fieldwork and build connections with local collaborators. Samples enabled by GSF-supported projects became the focus of two graduate students’ PhD theses, two EAPS undergraduate senior theses, and multiple UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program] projects.Q: Were there any unexpected benefits to the work funded by GSF?Carstensen: The success of this project would not have been possible without this specific international collaboration. Both the Delft and MIT teams bring highly different essential expertise that has been necessary for the successful project outcome. It allowed both the Delft and MIT teams to gain an in-depth understanding of the expertise areas and resources of the other collaborators. Both teams have been deeply inspired. This partnership has fueled conversations about potential future projects and provided multiple outcomes, including a plan to publish two journal papers on the project outcome. The first invited publication is being finalized now.McGee: GSF’s focus on reciprocal exchange has enabled external collaborators to spend time at MIT, sharing their work and exchanging ideas. Other funding is often focused on sending MIT researchers and students out, but GSF has helped us bring collaborators here, making the relationship more equal. A GSF-supported visit by Argentinian researchers last year made it possible for them to interact not just with my group, but with students and faculty across EAPS. More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Energy

      3 Questions: Bridging anthropology and engineering for clean energy in Mongolia

      by

      In 2021, Michael Short, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, approached professor of anthropology Manduhai Buyandelger with an unusual pitch: collaborating on a project to prototype a molten salt heat bank in Mongolia, Buyandelger’s country of origin and place of her scholarship. It was also an invitation to forge a novel partnership between two disciplines that rarely overlap. Developed in collaboration with the National University of Mongolia (NUM), the device was built to provide heat for people in colder climates, and in places where clean energy is a challenge. Buyandelger and Short teamed up to launch Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale, an initiative intended to advance the heat bank idea in Mongolia, and ultimately demonstrate its potential as a scalable clean heat source in comparably challenging sites around the world. This project received funding from the inaugural MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Seed Awards program. In order to fund various components of the project, especially student involvement and additional staff, the project also received support from the MIT Global Seed Fund, New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET), Experiential Learning Office, Vice Provost for International Activities, and d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education.As part of this initiative, the partners developed a special topic course in anthropology to teach MIT undergraduates about Mongolia’s unique energy and climate challenges, as well as the historical, social, and economic context in which the heat bank would ideally find a place. The class 21A.S01 (Anthro-Engineering: Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale) prepares MIT students for a January Independent Activities Period (IAP) trip to the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, where they embed with Mongolian families, conduct research, and collaborate with their peers. Mongolian students also engaged in the project. Anthropology research scientist and lecturer Lauren Bonilla, who has spent the past two decades working in Mongolia, joined to co-teach the class and lead the IAP trips to Mongolia. With the project now in its third year and yielding some promising solutions on the ground, Buyandelger and Bonilla reflect on the challenges for anthropologists of advancing a clean energy technology in a developing nation with a unique history, politics, and culture. Q: Your roles in the molten salt heat bank project mark departures from your typical academic routine. How did you first approach this venture?Buyandelger: As an anthropologist of contemporary religion, politics, and gender in Mongolia, I have had little contact with the hard sciences or building or prototyping technology. What I do best is listening to people and working with narratives. When I first learned about this device for off-the-grid heating, a host of issues came straight to mind right away that are based on socioeconomic and cultural context of the place. The salt brick, which is encased in steel, must be heated to 400 degrees Celsius in a central facility, then driven to people’s homes. Transportation is difficult in Ulaanbaatar, and I worried about road safety when driving the salt brick to gers [traditional Mongolian homes] where many residents live. The device seemed a bit utopian to me, but I realized that this was an amazing educational opportunity: We could use the heat bank as part of an ethnographic project, so students could learn about the everyday lives of people — crucially, in the dead of winter — and how they might respond to this new energy technology in the neighborhoods of Ulaanbaatar.Bonilla: When I first went to Mongolia in the early 2000s as an undergraduate student, the impacts of climate change were already being felt. There had been a massive migration to the capital after a series of terrible weather events that devastated the rural economy. Coal mining had emerged as a vital part of the economy, and I was interested in how people regarded this industry that both provided jobs and damaged the air they breathed. I am trained as a human geographer, which involves seeing how things happening in a local place correspond to things happening at a global scale. Thinking about climate or sustainability from this perspective means making linkages between social life and environmental life. In Mongolia, people associated coal with national progress. Based on historical experience, they had low expectations for interventions brought by outsiders to improve their lives. So my first take on the molten salt project was that this was no silver bullet solution. At the same time, I wanted to see how we could make this a great project-based learning experience for students, getting them to think about the kind of research necessary to see if some version of the molten salt would work.Q: After two years, what lessons have you and the students drawn from both the class and the Ulaanbaatar field trips?Buyandelger: We wanted to make sure MIT students would not go to Mongolia and act like consultants. We taught them anthropological methods so they could understand the experiences of real people and think about how to bring people and new technologies together. The students, from engineering and anthropological and social science backgrounds, became critical thinkers who could analyze how people live in ger districts. When they stay with families in Ulaanbaatar in January, they not only experience the cold and the pollution, but they observe what people do for work, how parents care for their children, how they cook, sleep, and get from one place to another. This enables them to better imagine and test out how these people might utilize the molten salt heat bank in their homes.Bonilla: In class, students learn that interventions like this often fail because the implementation process doesn’t work, or the technology doesn’t meet people’s real needs. This is where anthropology is so important, because it opens up the wider landscape in which you’re intervening. We had really difficult conversations about the professional socialization of engineers and social scientists. Engineers love to work within boxes, but don’t necessarily appreciate the context in which their invention will serve.As a group, we discussed the provocative notion that engineers construct and anthropologists deconstruct. This makes it seem as if engineers are creators, and anthropologists are brought in as add-ons to consult and critique engineers’ creations. Our group conversation concluded that a project such as ours benefits from an iterative back-and-forth between the techno-scientific and humanistic disciplines.Q: So where does the molten salt brick project stand?Bonilla: Our research in Mongolia helped us produce a prototype that can work: Our partners at NUM are developing a hybrid stove that incorporates the molten salt brick. Supervised by instructor Nathan Melenbrink of MIT’s NEET program, our engineering students have been involved in this prototyping as well.The concept is for a family to heat it up using a coal fire once a day and it warms their home overnight. Based on our anthropological research, we believe that this stove would work better than the device as originally conceived. It won’t eliminate coal use in residences, but it will reduce emissions enough to have a meaningful impact on ger districts in Ulaanbaatar. The challenge now is getting funding to NUM so they can test different salt combinations and stove models and employ local blacksmiths to work on the design.This integrated stove/heat bank will not be the ultimate solution to the heating and pollution crisis in Mongolia. But it will be something that can inspire even more ideas. We feel with this project we are planting all kinds of seeds that will germinate in ways we cannot anticipate. It has sparked new relationships between MIT and Mongolian students, and catalyzed engineers to integrate a more humanistic, anthropological perspective in their work.Buyandelger: Our work illustrates the importance of anthropology in responding to the unpredictable and diverse impacts of climate change. Without our ethnographic research — based on participant observation and interviews, led by Dr. Bonilla, — it would have been impossible to see how the prototyping and modifications could be done, and where the molten salt brick could work and what shape it needed to take. This project demonstrates how indispensable anthropology is in moving engineering out of labs and companies and directly into communities.Bonilla: This is where the real solutions for climate change are going to come from. Even though we need solutions quickly, it will also take time for new technologies like molten salt bricks to take root and grow. We don’t know where the outcomes of these experiments will take us. But there’s so much that’s emerging from this project that I feel very hopeful about. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Environment

      3 Questions: The past, present, and future of sustainability science

      by

      It was 1978, over a decade before the word “sustainable” would infiltrate environmental nomenclature, and Ronald Prinn, MIT professor of atmospheric science, had just founded the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE). Today, AGAGE provides real-time measurements for well over 50 environmentally harmful trace gases, enabling us to determine emissions at the country level, a key element in verifying national adherence to the Montreal Protocol and the Paris Accord. This, Prinn says, started him thinking about doing science that informed decision making.Much like global interest in sustainability, Prinn’s interest and involvement continued to grow into what would become three decades worth of achievements in sustainability science. The Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and Joint Program on the Science and Policy Global Change, respectively founded and co-founded by Prinn, have recently joined forces to create the MIT School of Science’s new Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), lead by former CGCS postdoc turned MIT professor, Noelle Selin.As he prepares to pass the torch, Prinn reflects on how far sustainability has come, and where it all began.Q: Tell us about the motivation for the MIT centers you helped to found around sustainability.A: In 1990 after I founded the Center for Global Change Science, I also co-founded the Joint Program on the Science and Policy Global Change with a very important partner, [Henry] “Jake” Jacoby. He’s now retired, but at that point he was a professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Together, we determined that in order to answer questions related to what we now call sustainability of human activities, you need to combine the natural and social sciences involved in these processes. Based on this, we decided to make a joint program between the CGCS and a center that he directed, the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR).It was called the “joint program” and was joint for two reasons — not only were two centers joining, but two disciplines were joining. It was not about simply doing the same science. It was about bringing a team of people together that could tackle these coupled issues of environment, human development and economy. We were the first group in the world to fully integrate these elements together.Q: What has been your most impactful contribution and what effect did it have on the greater public’s overall understanding?A: Our biggest contribution is the development, and more importantly, the application of the Integrated Global System Model [IGSM] framework, looking at human development in both developing countries and developed countries that had a significant impact on the way people thought about climate issues. With IGSM, we were able to look at the interactions among human and natural components, studying the feedbacks and impacts that climate change had on human systems; like how it would alter agriculture and other land activities, how it would alter things we derive from the ocean, and so on.Policies were being developed largely by economists or climate scientists working independently, and we started showing how the real answers and analysis required a coupling of all of these components. We showed, and I think convincingly, that what people used to study independently, must be coupled together, because the impacts of climate change and air pollution affected so many things.To address the value of policy, despite the uncertainty in climate projections, we ran multiple runs of the IGSM with and without policy, with different choices for uncertain IGSM variables. For public communication, around 2005, we introduced our signature Greenhouse Gamble interactive visualization tools; these have been renewed over time as science and policies evolved.Q: What can MIT provide now at this critical juncture in understanding climate change and its impact?A: We need to further push the boundaries of integrated global system modeling to ensure full sustainability of human activity and all of its beneficial dimensions, which is the exciting focus that the CS3 is designed to address. We need to focus on sustainability as a central core element and use it to not just analyze existing policies but to propose new ones. Sustainability is not just climate or air pollution, it’s got to do with human impacts in general. Human health is central to sustainability, and equally important to equity. We need to expand the capability for credibly assessing what the impact policies have not just on developed countries, but on developing countries, taking into account that many places around the world are at artisanal levels of their economies. They cannot be blamed for anything that is changing climate and causing air pollution and other detrimental things that are currently going on. They need our help. That’s what sustainability is in its full dimensions.Our capabilities are evolving toward a modeling system so detailed that we can find out detrimental things about policies even at local levels before investing in changing infrastructure. This is going to require collaboration among even more disciplines and creating a seamless connection between research and decision making; not just for policies enacted in the public sector, but also for decisions that are made in the private sector.  More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Environment

      Q&A: “As long as you have a future, you can still change it”

      by

      Tristan Brown is the S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Professor at MIT. He specializes in law, science, environment and religion of late imperial China, a period running from the 16th through early 20th centuries.In this Q&A, Brown discusses how his areas of historical research can be useful for examining today’s pressing environmental challenges. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.Q: Why does this era of Chinese history resonate so much for you? How is it relevant to contemporary times and challenges?A: China has always been interesting to historians because it has a long-recorded history, with data showing how people have coped with environmental and climate changes over the centuries. We have tons of records of various kinds of ecological issues, environmental crises, and the associated outbreaks of calamities, famine, epidemics, and warfare. Historians of China have a lot to offer ongoing conversations about climate.More specifically, I research conflicts over land and resources that erupted when China was undergoing huge environmental, economic, demographic, and political pressures, and the role that feng shui played as local communities and the state tried to mediate those conflicts. [Feng shui is an ancient Chinese practice combining cosmology, spatial aesthetics, and measurement to divine the right balance between the natural and built environment.] Ultimately, the Qing (1644-1912) state was unable to manage these conflicts, and feng shui–based attempts to make decisions about conserving or exploiting certain areas blew up by the end of the 19th century in the face of pressures to industrialize. This is the subject of my first book, “Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China.”Q: Can you give a sense of how feng shui was used to determine outcomes in environmental cases?A: We tend to think of feng shui as a popular design mechanism today. While this isn’t completely inaccurate, there was much more to it than that in Chinese history, when it evolved over many centuries. Specifically, there are lots of insights in feng shui that reflect the ways in which people recorded the natural world, explained how components in the environment related to one another, and understood why and how bad things happened. There is an interesting concept in feng shui that your environment affects your health,and specifically your children’s (i.e., descendants and progeny) health. That concept is found across premodern feng shui literature and is one of fundamental principles of the whole knowledge system.During the period I research, the Qing, the primary fuel energy sources in China came from timber and coal. There were legal cases where communities argued against efforts to mine a local mountain, saying that it could injure the feng shui (i.e., undermine the cosmological balance of natural forces and spatial integrity) of a mountain and hurt the fortunes of an entire region. People were suspicious of coal mining in their communities. They had seen or heard about mines collapsing and flooded mine shafts, they had watched runoff ruin good farmland, causing crops to fail, and even perhaps children to fall ill. Coal mining disturbed the human-earth connection, and thus the relationship between people and nature. People invoked feng shui to express an idea that the extraction of rocks and minerals from the land can have detrimental effects on living communities. Whether out of a sincere community-based concern or out of a more self-interested NIMBYism, feng shui was the primary discourse invoked in these cases.Not all efforts to conserve areas from mining succeeded, especially as foreign imperialism encroached on China, threatening government and local control over the economy. It became gradually clear to China’s elites that the country had to industrialize to survive, and this involved the difficult and even violent process of taking people from farm work and bringing them to cities, building railways, cutting millions of trees, and mining coal to power it all.Q: This makes it seem as if the Chinese swept away feng shui whenever it presented a hurdle, putting the country on the path to coal dependence, pollution, and a carbon-emitting future.A: Feng shui has not disappeared in China, but there’s no doubt about it that development in the form of industrialization took precedence in the 20th century, when it became officially labelled a “superstition” on the national stage. When I first went to China in 2007, city air was so polluted I couldn’t see the horizon. I was 18 years old and the air in some northern cities like Shijiazhuang honestly felt scary. I’ve returned many times since then, of course, and there has been great improvement in air quality, because the government made it a priority.Feng shui is a future-oriented knowledge, concerned with identifying events that have happened in the past that are related to things happening today, and using that information to influence future events. As Richard Smith of Rice University argues, Chinese have used history to order the past, ritual to order the present, and divination to order the future. Consider, for instance, Xiong’an, a new development area outside of Beijing that is physically marking the era of Xi Jinping’s tenure as paramount leader. As soon as the site was selected, people in China started talking about its feng shui, both out of potential environmental concerns and as a subtle form of political commentary. MIT’s own Sol Andrew Stokols in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) has a fantastic new dissertation examining that new area.In short, the feng shui masters of old said there will be floods and droughts and bad stuff happening in the future if a course correction isn’t made. But at the same time, in feng shui there’s never a situation that is hopeless; there is no lost cause. So, there is optimism in the knowledge and rhetoric of feng shui that I think might be applicable as time goes on with climate change. As long as you have a future, you can still change it. Q: In 2023, you were awarded one of the first grants of MIT’s Climate Nucleus, the faculty committee charged with seeing through the Institute’s climate action plan over the decade. What have you been up to courtesy of this fund?A: Well, it all started years ago, when I started thinking about great number of mountains in China associated with Buddhism or Daoism that have become national parks in recent decades. Some of these mountains host trees and plant species that are not found in any other part of China. For my grant, I wanted to find out how these mountains have managed to incubate such rare species for the last 2,000 years. And it’s not as simple as just saying, well, Buddhism, right? Because there are plenty of Buddhist mountains that have not fared as well ecologically. The religious landscape is part of the answer, but there’s also all the messiness of material history that surrounds such a mountain.With this grant, I am bringing together a group of scholars of religion, historians, as well as engineers working in conservation ecology, and we’re trying to figure out what makes some of these places religiously and environmentally distinctive. People come to the project with different approaches. My MIT colleague Serguei Saavedra in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering uses new models in system ecology to measure the resilience of environments under various stresses. My colleague in religious studies, Or Porath at Tel Aviv University, is asking when and how Asian religions have centered — or ignored — animals and animal welfare. Another collaboration with MIT’s Siqi Zheng in DUSP and Wen-Chi Liao at the National University of Singapore is looking at how we can use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and classical feng shui manuals to teach computers how to analyze the value of a property’s feng shui in Sinophone communities around the world. There’s a lot going on!Q: How do you bring China’s unique environmental history and law into your classroom, and make it immediate and relevant to the world students face today?A: History is always part of the answer. I mean, whether it’s for an economist, a political scientist, or an architect, history matters. Likewise, when you’re confronting climate change and all these struggles regarding the environment and various crises involving ecosystems, it’s always a good idea to look at how human beings in the past dealt with similar crises. It doesn’t give you a prediction on what would happen in the future, but it gives you some range of possibilities, many of which may at first appear counterintuitive or surprising.That’s exactly what the humanities do. My job is to make MIT undergraduates care about a people who are no longer alive, who walked the earth a thousand years ago, who confronted terrible times of conflict and hunger. Sometimes these people left behind a written record about their world, and sometimes they didn’t. But we try to hear them out regardless. I want students to develop empathy for these strangers and wonder what it would be like to walk in their shoes. Every one of those people is someone’s ancestor, and they very well could have been your ancestor.In my class 21H.186 (Nature and Environment in China), we look at the historical precedents that might be useful for today’s environmental challenges, ranging from urban pollution or domestic recycling systems. The fact we’re still here to ask historical questions is itself significant. When we feel despair about climate change, we can ask, “How did individuals endure the changed course of the Yellow River or the Little Ice Age?” Even when it is recording tragedies, history can be understood as an enduring form of hope.  More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Environment

      Q&A: What past environmental success can teach us about solving the climate crisis

      by

      Susan Solomon, MIT professor of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences (EAPS) and of chemistry, played a critical role in understanding how a class of chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons were creating a hole in the ozone layer. Her research was foundational to the creation of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement established in the 1980s that phased out products releasing chlorofluorocarbons. Since then, scientists have documented signs that the ozone hole is recovering thanks to these measures.Having witnessed this historical process first-hand, Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies, is aware of how people can come together to make successful environmental policy happen. Using her story, as well as other examples of success — including combating smog, getting rid of DDT, and more — Solomon draws parallels from then to now as the climate crisis comes into focus in her new book, “Solvable: How we Healed the Earth and How we can do it Again.”Solomon took a moment to talk about why she picked the stories in her book, the students who inspired her, and why we need hope and optimism now more than ever.Q: You have first-hand experience seeing how we’ve altered the Earth, as well as the process of creating international environmental policy. What prompted you to write a book about your experiences?A: Lots of things, but one of the main ones is the things that I see in teaching. I have taught a class called Science, Politics and Environmental Policy for many years here at MIT. Because my emphasis is always on how we’ve actually fixed problems, students come away from that class feeling hopeful, like they really want to stay engaged with the problem.It strikes me that students today have grown up in a very contentious and difficult era in which they feel like nothing ever gets done. But stuff does get done, even now. Looking at how we did things so far really helps you to see how we can do things in the future.Q: In the book, you use five different stories as examples of successful environmental policy, and then end talking about how we can apply these lessons to climate change. Why did you pick these five stories?A: I picked some of them because I’m closer to those problems in my own professional experience, like ozone depletion and smog. I did other issues partly because I wanted to show that even in the 21st century, we’ve actually got some stuff done — that’s the story of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which is a binding international agreement on some greenhouse gases.Another chapter is on DDT. One of the reasons I included that is because it had an enormous effect on the birth of the environmental movement in the United States. Plus, that story allows you to see how important the environmental groups can be.Lead in gasoline and paint is the other one. I find it a very moving story because the idea that we were poisoning millions of children and not even realizing it is so very, very sad. But it’s so uplifting that we did figure out the problem, and it happened partly because of the civil rights movement, that made us aware that the problem was striking minority communities much more than non-minority communities.Q: What surprised you the most during your research for the book?A: One of the things that that I didn’t realize and should have, was the outsized role played by one single senator, Ed Muskie of Maine. He made pollution control his big issue and devoted incredible energy to it. He clearly had the passion and wanted to do it for many years, but until other factors helped him, he couldn’t. That’s where I began to understand the role of public opinion and the way in which policy is only possible when public opinion demands change.Another thing about Muskie was the way in which his engagement with these issues demanded that science be strong. When I read what he put into congressional testimony I realized how highly he valued the science. Science alone is never enough, but it’s always necessary. Over the years, science got a lot stronger, and we developed ways of evaluating what the scientific wisdom across many different studies and many different views actually is. That’s what scientific assessment is all about, and it’s crucial to environmental progress.Q: Throughout the book you argue that for environmental action to succeed, three things must be met which you call the three Ps: a threat much be personal, perceptible, and practical. Where did this idea come from?A: My observations. You have to perceive the threat: In the case of the ozone hole, you could perceive it because those false-color images of the ozone loss were so easy to understand, and it was personal because few things are scarier than cancer, and a reduced ozone layer leads to too much sun, increasing skin cancers. Science plays a role in communicating what can be readily understood by the public, and that’s important to them perceiving it as a serious problem.Nowadays, we certainly perceive the reality of climate change. We also see that it’s personal. People are dying because of heat waves in much larger numbers than they used to; there are horrible problems in the Boston area, for example, with flooding and sea level rise. People perceive the reality of the problem and they feel personally threatened.The third P is practical: People have to believe that there are practical solutions. It’s interesting to watch how the battle for hearts and minds has shifted. There was a time when the skeptics would just attack the whole idea that the climate was changing. Eventually, they decided ‘we better accept that because people perceive it, so let’s tell them that it’s not caused by human activity.’ But it’s clear enough now that human activity does play a role. So they’ve moved on to attacking that third P, that somehow it’s not practical to have any kind of solutions. This is progress! So what about that third P?What I tried to do in the book is to point out some of the ways in which the problem has also become eminently practical to deal with in the last 10 years, and will continue to move in that direction. We’re right on the cusp of success, and we just have to keep going. People should not give in to eco despair; that’s the worst thing you could do, because then nothing will happen. If we continue to move at the rate we have, we will certainly get to where we need to be.Q: That ties in very nicely with my next question. The book is very optimistic; what gives you hope?A: I’m optimistic because I’ve seen so many examples of where we have succeeded, and because I see so many signs of movement right now that are going to push us in the same direction.If we had kept conducting business as usual as we had been in the year 2000, we’d be looking at 4 degrees of future warming. Right now, I think we’re looking at 3 degrees. I think we can get to 2 degrees. We have to really work on it, and we have to get going seriously in the next decade, but globally right now over 30 percent of our energy is from renewables. That’s fantastic! Let’s just keep going.Q: Throughout the book, you show that environmental problems won’t be solved by individual actions alone, but requires policy and technology driving. What individual actions can people take to help push for those bigger changes?A: A big one is choose to eat more sustainably; choose alternative transportation methods like public transportation or reducing the amount of trips that you make. Older people usually have retirement investments, you can shift them over to a social choice funds and away from index funds that end up funding companies that you might not be interested in. You can use your money to put pressure: Amazon has been under a huge amount of pressure to cut down on their plastic packaging, mainly coming from consumers. They’ve just announced they’re not going to use those plastic pillows anymore. I think you can see lots of ways in which people really do matter, and we can matter more.Q: What do you hope people take away from the book?A: Hope for their future and resolve to do the best they can getting engaged with it. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Environment

      Q&A: The power of tiny gardens and their role in addressing climate change

      by

      To address the climate crisis, one must understand environmental history. MIT Professor Kate Brown’s research has typically focused on environmental catastrophes. More recently, Brown has been exploring a more hopeful topic: tiny gardens.Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In this Q&A, Brown discusses her research, and how she believes her current project could help put power into the hands of everyday people.This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.Q: You have created an unusual niche for yourself as an historian of environmental catastrophes. What drew you to such a dismal beat?A: Historians often study New York, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, but if you go to these little towns that nobody’s ever heard of, that’s where you see the destruction in the wake of progress. This is likely because I grew up in a manufacturing town in the Midwestern Rust Belt, watching stores go bankrupt and houses sit empty. I became very interested in the people who were the last to turn off the lights.Q: Did this interest in places devastated by technological and economic change eventually lead to your investigation of Chernobyl?A: I first studied the health and environmental consequences of radioactive waste on communities near nuclear weapons facilities in the U.S. and Russia, and then decided to focus on the health and environmental impacts of fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear energy plant disaster. After gaining access to the KGB records in Kiev, I realized that there was a Klondike of records describing what Soviet officials at the time called a “public health disaster.” People on the ground recognized the saturation of radioactivity into environments and food supplies not with any with sensitive devices, but by noticing the changes in ecologies and on human bodies. I documented how Moscow leaders historically and decades later engaged in a coverup, and that even international bodies charged with examining nuclear issues were reluctant to acknowledge this ongoing public health disaster due to liabilities in their own countries from the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.Q: Why did you turn from detailed studies of what you call “modernist wastelands” to the subject of climate change?A: Journalists and scholars have worked hard in the last two decades to get people to understand the scope and the scale and the verisimilitude of climate change. And that’s great, but some of these catastrophic stories we tell don’t make people feel very safe or secure. They have a paralyzing effect on us. Climate change is one of many problems that are too big for any one person to tackle, or any one entity, whether it’s a huge nation like the United States or an international body like the U.N.So I thought I would start to work on something that is very small scale that puts action in the hands of just regular people to try to tell a more hopeful story. I am finishing a new book about working-class people who got pushed off their farms in the 19th century, and ended up in mega cities like London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington D.C., find land on the periphery of the cities. They start digging, growing their own food, cooperating together. They basically recreated forms of the commons in cities. And in so doing, they generate the most productive agriculture in recorded history.Q: What are some highlights of this extraordinary city-based food generation?A: In Paris circa 1900, 5,000 urban farmers grew fruits and vegetables and fresh produce for 2 million Parisians with a surplus left over to sell to London. They would plant three to six crops a year on one tract of land using horse manure to heat up soils from below to push the season and grow spring crops in winter and summer crops in spring.An agricultural economist looked at the inputs and the outputs from these Parisian farms. He found there was no comparison to the Green Revolution fields of the 1970s. These urban gardeners were producing far more per acre, with no petroleum-based fertilizers.Q: What is the connection between little gardens like these and the global climate crisis, where individuals can feel at loss facing the scale of the problems?A: You can think of a tiny city garden like a coral reef, where one little worm comes and builds its cave. And then another one attaches itself to the first, and so on. Pretty soon you have a great coral reef with a platform to support hundreds of different species — a rich biodiversity. Tiny gardens work that way in cities, which is one reason cities are now surprising hotspots of biodiversity.Transforming urban green space into tiny gardens doesn’t take an act of God, the U.N., or the U.S. Congress to make a change. You could just go to your municipality and say, “Listen, right now we have a zoning code that says every time there’s a new condo, you have to have one or two parking spaces, but we’d rather see one or two garden spaces.”And if you don’t want a garden, you’ll have a neighbor who does. So people are outside and they have their hands in the soil and then they start to exchange produce with one another. As they share carrots and zucchini, they exchange soil and human microbes as well. We know that when people share microbiomes, they get along better, have more in common. It comes as no surprise that humans have organized societies around shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, producing food together and sharing meals. That’s what I think we’ve lost in our remote worlds.Q: So can we address or mitigate the impacts of climate change on a community-by-community basis?A: I believe that’s probably the best way to do it. When we think of energy we often imagine deposits of oil or gas, but, as our grad student Turner Adornetto points out, every environment has energy running through it. Every environment has its own best solution. If it’s a community that lives along a river, tap into hydropower; or if it’s a community that has tons of organic waste, maybe you want to use microbial power; and if it’s a community that has lots of sun then use different kinds of solar power. The legacy of midcentury modernism is that engineers came up with one-size-fits-all solutions to plug in anywhere in the world, regardless of local culture, traditions, or environment. That is one of the problems that has gotten us into this fix in the first place.Politically, it’s a good idea to avoid making people feel they’re being pushed around by one set of codes, one set of laws in terms of coming up with solutions that work. There are ways of deriving energy and nutrients that enrich the environment, ways that don’t drain and deplete. You see that so clearly with a plant, which just does nothing but grow and contribute and give, whether it’s in life or in death. It’s just constantly improving its environment.Q: How do you unleash creativity and propagate widespread local responses to climate change?A: One of the important things we are trying to accomplish in the humanities is communicating in the most down-to-earth ways possible to our students and the public so that anybody — from a fourth grader to a retired person — can get engaged.There’s “TECHNOLOGY” in uppercase letters, the kind that is invented and patented in places like MIT. And then there’s technology in lowercase letters, where people are working with things readily at hand. That is the kind of creativity we don’t often pay enough attention to.Keep in mind that at the end of the 19th century, scientists were sure that the earth was cooling and the earth would all under ice by 2020. In the 1950s, many people feared nuclear warfare. In the 1960s the threat was the “population bomb.” Every generation seems to have its apocalyptic sense of doom. It is helpful to take climate change and the Anthropocene and put them in perspective. These are problems we can solve. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Environment

      Q&A: Exploring ethnic dynamics and climate change in Africa

      by

      Evan Lieberman is the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa at MIT, and is also director of the Center for International Studies. During a semester-long sabbatical, he’s currently based at the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town.In this Q&A, Lieberman discusses several climate-related research projects he’s pursuing in South Africa and surrounding countries. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.Q: South Africa is a nation whose political and economic development you have long studied and written about. Do you see this visit as an extension of the kind of research you have been pursuing, or a departure from it?A: Much of my previous work has been animated by the question of understanding the causes and consequences of group-based disparities, whether due to AIDS or Covid. These are problems that know no geographic boundaries, and where ethnic and racial minorities are often hardest hit. Climate change is an analogous problem, with these minority populations living in places where they are most vulnerable, in heat islands in cities, and in coastal areas where they are not protected. The reality is they might get hit much harder by longer-term trends and immediate shocks.In one line of research, I seek to understand how people in different African countries, in different ethnic groups, perceive the problems of climate change and their governments’ response to it. There are ethnic divisions of labor in terms of what people do — whether they are farmers or pastoralists, or live in cities. So some ethnic groups are simply more affected by drought or extreme weather than others, and this can be a basis for conflict, especially when competing for often limited government resources.In this area, just like in my previous research, learning what shapes ordinary citizen perspectives is really important, because these views affect people’s everyday practices, and the extent to which they support certain kinds of policies and investments their government makes in response to climate-related challenges. But I will also try to learn more about the perspectives of policymakers and various development partners who seek to balance climate-related challenges against a host of other problems and priorities.Q: You recently published “Until We Have Won Our Liberty,” which examines the difficult transition of South Africa from apartheid to a democratic government, scrutinizing in particular whether the quality of life for citizens has improved in terms of housing, employment, discrimination, and ethnic conflicts. How do climate change-linked issues fit into your scholarship?A: I never saw myself as a climate researcher, but a number of years ago, heavily influenced by what I was learning at MIT, I began to recognize more and more how important the issue of climate change is. And I realized there were lots of ways in which the climate problem resonated with other kinds of problems I had tackled in earlier parts of my work.There was once a time when climate and the environment was the purview primarily of white progressives: the “tree huggers.” And that’s really changed in recent decades as it has become evident that the people who’ve been most affected by the climate emergency are ethnic and racial minorities. We saw with Hurricane Katrina and other places [that] if you are Black, you’re more likely to live in a vulnerable area and to just generally experience more environmental harms, from pollution and emissions, leaving these communities much less resilient than white communities. Government has largely not addressed this inequity. When you look at American survey data in terms of who’s concerned about climate change, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans are more unified in their worries than are white Americans.There are analogous problems in Africa, my career research focus. Governments there have long responded in different ways to different ethnic groups. The research I am starting looks at the extent to which there are disparities in how governments try to solve climate-related challenges.Q: It’s difficult enough in the United States taking the measure of different groups’ perceptions of the impact of climate change and government’s effectiveness in contending with it. How do you go about this in Africa?A: Surprisingly, there’s only been a little bit of work done so far on how ordinary African citizens, who are ostensibly being hit the hardest in the world by the climate emergency, are thinking about this problem. Climate change has not been politicized there in a very big way. In fact, only 50 percent of Africans in one poll had heard of the term.In one of my new projects, with political science faculty colleague Devin Caughey and political science doctoral student Preston Johnston, we are analyzing social and climate survey data [generated by the Afrobarometer research network] from over 30 African countries to understand within and across countries the ways in which ethnic identities structure people’s perception of the climate crisis, and their beliefs in what government ought to be doing. In largely agricultural African societies, people routinely experience drought, extreme rain, and heat. They also lack the infrastructure that can shield them from the intense variability of weather patterns. But we’re adding a lens, which is looking at sources of inequality, especially ethnic differences.I will also be investigating specific sectors. Africa is a continent where in most places people cannot take for granted universal, piped access to clean water. In Cape Town, several years ago, the combination of failure to replace infrastructure and lack of rain caused such extreme conditions that one of the world’s most important cities almost ran out of water.While these studies are in progress, it is clear that in many countries, there are substantively large differences in perceptions of the severity of climate change, and attitudes about who should be doing what, and who’s capable of doing what. In several countries, both perceptions and policy preferences are differentiated along ethnic lines, more so than with respect to generational or class differences within societies.This is interesting as a phenomenon, but substantively, I think it’s important in that it may provide the basis for how politicians and government actors decide to move on allocating resources and implementing climate-protection policies. We see this kind of political calculation in the U.S. and we shouldn’t be surprised that it happens in Africa as well.That’s ultimately one of the challenges from the perch of MIT, where we’re really interested in understanding climate change, and creating technological tools and policies for mitigating the problem or adapting to it. The reality is frustrating. The political world — those who make decisions about whether to acknowledge the problem and whether to implement resources in the best technical way — are playing a whole other game. That game is about rewarding key supporters and being reelected.Q: So how do you go from measuring perceptions and beliefs among citizens about climate change and government responsiveness to those problems, to policies and actions that might actually reduce disparities in the way climate-vulnerable African groups receive support?A: Some of the work I have been doing involves understanding what local and national governments across Africa are actually doing to address these problems. We will have to drill down into government budgets to determine the actual resources devoted to addressing a challenge, what sorts of practices the government follows, and the political ramifications for governments that act aggressively versus those that don’t. With the Cape Town water crisis, for example, the government dramatically changed residents’ water usage through naming and shaming, and transformed institutional practices of water collection. They made it through a major drought by using much less water, and doing it with greater energy efficiency. Through the government’s strong policy and implementation, and citizens’ active responses, an entire city, with all its disparate groups, gained resilience. Maybe we can highlight creative solutions to major climate-related problems and use them as prods to push more effective policies and solutions in other places.In the MIT Global Diversity Lab, along with political science faculty colleague Volha Charnysh, political science doctoral student Jared Kalow, and Institute for Data, Systems and Society doctoral student Erin Walk, we are exploring American perspectives on climate-related foreign aid, asking survey respondents whether the U.S. should be giving more to people in the global South who didn’t cause the problems of climate change but have to suffer the externalities. We are particularly interested in whether people’s desire to help vulnerable communities rests on the racial or national identity of those communities.From my new seat as director of the Center for International Studies (CIS), I hope to do more and more to connect social science findings to relevant policymakers, whether in the U.S. or in other places. CIS is making climate one of our thematic priority areas, directing hundreds of thousands of dollars for MIT faculty to spark climate collaborations with researchers worldwide through the Global Seed Fund program. COP 28 (the U.N. Climate Change Conference), which I attended in December in Dubai, really drove home the importance of people coming together from around the world to exchange ideas and form networks. It was unbelievably large, with 85,000 people. But so many of us shared the belief that we are not doing enough. We need enforceable global solutions and innovation. We need ways of financing. We need to provide opportunities for journalists to broadcast the importance of this problem. And we need to understand the incentives that different actors have and what sorts of messages and strategies will resonate with them, and inspire those who have resources to be more generous. More