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    3 Questions: Exploring the limits of carbon sequestration

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    As part of a multi-pronged approach toward curbing the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists seek to better understand the impact of rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on terrestrial ecosystems, particularly tropical forests. To that end, climate scientist César Terrer, the Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at MIT, and colleague Josh Fisher of Chapman University are bringing their scientific minds to bear on a unique setting — an active volcano in Costa Rica — as a way to study carbon dioxide emissions and their influence. Elevated CO2 levels can lead to a phenomenon known as the CO2 fertilization effect, where plants grow more and absorb greater amounts of carbon, providing a cooling effect. While this effect has the potential to be a natural climate change mitigator, the extent of how much carbon plants can continue to absorb remains uncertain. There are growing concerns from scientists that plants may eventually reach a saturation point, losing their ability to offset increasing atmospheric CO2. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for accurate climate predictions and developing strategies to manage carbon sequestration. Here, Terrer discusses his innovative approach, his motivations for joining the project, and the importance of advancing this research.Q: Why did you get involved in this line of research, and what makes it unique?A: Josh Fisher, a climate scientist and long-time collaborator, had the brilliant idea to take advantage of naturally high CO2 levels near active volcanoes to study the fertilization effect in real-world conditions. Conducting such research in dense tropical forests like the Amazon — where the largest uncertainties about CO2 fertilization exist — is challenging. It would require large-scale CO2 tanks and extensive infrastructure to evenly distribute the gas throughout the towering trees and intricate canopy layers — a task that is not only logistically complex, but also highly costly. Our approach allows us to circumvent those obstacles and gather critical data in a way that hasn’t been done before.Josh was looking for an expert in the field of carbon ecology to co-lead and advance this research with him. My expertise of understanding the dynamics that regulate carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems within the context of climate change made for a natural fit to co-lead and advance this research with him. This field has been central to my research, and was the focus of my PhD thesis.Our experiments inside the Rincon de la Vieja National Park are particularly exciting because CO2 concentrations in the areas near the volcano are four times higher than the global average. This gives us a rare opportunity to observe how elevated CO2 affects plant biomass in a natural setting — something that has never been attempted at this scale.Q: How are you measuring CO2 concentrations at the volcano?A: We have installed a network of 50 sensors in the forest canopy surrounding the volcano. These sensors continuously monitor CO2 levels, allowing us to compare areas with naturally high CO2 emissions from the volcano to control areas with typical atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The sensors are Bluetooth-enabled, requiring us to be in close proximity to retrieve the data. They will remain in place for a full year, capturing a continuous dataset on CO2 fluctuations. Our next data collection trip is scheduled for March, with another planned a year after the initial deployment.Q: What are the long-term goals of this research?A: Our primary objective is to determine whether the CO2 fertilization effect can be sustained, or if plants will eventually reach a saturation point, limiting their ability to absorb additional carbon. Understanding this threshold is crucial for improving climate models and carbon mitigation strategies.To expand the scope of our measurements, we are exploring the use of airborne technologies — such as drones or airplane-mounted sensors — to assess carbon storage across larger areas. This would provide a more comprehensive view of carbon sequestration potential in tropical ecosystems. Ultimately, this research could offer critical insights into the future role of forests in mitigating climate change, helping scientists and policymakers develop more accurate carbon budgets and climate projections. If successful, our approach could pave the way for similar studies in other ecosystems, deepening our understanding of how nature responds to rising CO2 levels. More

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      3 Questions: What the laws of physics tell us about CO2 removal

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      Human activities continue to pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, raising global temperatures and driving extreme weather events. As countries grapple with climate impacts and ways to significantly reduce carbon emissions, there have been various efforts to advance carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies that directly remove carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it for long periods of time.Unlike carbon capture and storage technologies, which are designed to remove carbon dioxide at point sources such as fossil-fuel plants, CDR aims to remove carbon dioxide molecules that are already circulating in the atmosphere.A new report by the American Physical Society and led by an MIT physicist provides an overview of the major experimental CDR approaches and determines their fundamental physical limits. The report focuses on methods that have the biggest potential for removing carbon dioxide, at the scale of gigatons per year, which is the magnitude that would be required to have a climate-stabilizing impact.The new report was commissioned by the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs, and appeared last week in the journal PRX. The report was chaired by MIT professor of physics Washington Taylor, who spoke with MIT News about CDR’s physical limitations and why it’s worth pursuing in tandem with global efforts to reduce carbon emissions.Q: What motivated you to look at carbon dioxide removal systems from a physical science perspective?A: The number one thing driving climate change is the fact that we’re taking carbon that has been stuck in the ground for 100 million years, and putting it in the atmosphere, and that’s causing warming. In the last few years there’s been a lot of interest both by the government and private entities in finding technologies to directly remove the CO2 from the air.How to manage atmospheric carbon is the critical question in dealing with our impact on Earth’s climate. So, it’s very important for us to understand whether we can affect the carbon levels not just by changing our emissions profile but also by directly taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Physics has a lot to say about this because the possibilities are very strongly constrained by thermodynamics, mass issues, and things like that.Q: What carbon dioxide removal methods did you evaluate?A: They’re all at an early stage. It’s kind of the Wild West out there in terms of the different ways in which companies are proposing to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In this report, we break down CDR processes into two classes: cyclic and once-through.Imagine we are in a boat that has a hole in the hull and is rapidly taking on water. Of course, we want to plug the hole as quickly as we can. But even once we have fixed the hole, we need to get the water out so we aren’t in danger of sinking or getting swamped. And this is particularly urgent if we haven’t completely fixed the hole so we still have a slow leak. Now, imagine we have a couple of options for how to get the water out so we don’t sink.The first is a sponge that we can use to absorb water, that we can then squeeze out and reuse. That’s a cyclic process in the sense that we have some material that we’re using over and over. There are cyclic CDR processes like chemical “direct air capture” (DAC), which acts basically like a sponge. You set up a big system with fans that blow air past some material that captures carbon dioxide. When the material is saturated, you close off the system and then use energy to essentially squeeze out the carbon and store it in a deep repository. Then you can reuse the material, in a cyclic process.The second class of approaches is what we call “once-through.” In the boat analogy, it would be as if you try to fix the leak using cartons of paper towels. You let them saturate and then throw them overboard, and you use each roll once.There are once-through CDR approaches, like enhanced rock weathering, that are designed to accelerate a natural process, by which certain rocks, when exposed to air, will absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Worldwide, this natural rock weathering is estimated to remove about 1 gigaton of carbon each year. “Enhanced rock weathering” is a CDR approach where you would dig up a lot of this rock, grind it up really small, to less than the width of a human hair, to get the process to happen much faster. The idea is, you dig up something, spread it out, and absorb CO2 in one go.The key difference between these two processes is that the cyclic process is subject to the second law of thermodynamics and there’s an energy constraint. You can set an actual limit from physics, saying any cyclic process is going to take a certain amount of energy, and that cannot be avoided. For example, we find that for cyclic direct-air-capture (DAC) plants, based on second law limits, the absolute minimum amount of energy you would need to capture a gigaton of carbon is comparable to the total yearly electric energy consumption of the state of Virginia. Systems currently under development use at least three to 10 times this much energy on a per ton basis (and capture tens of thousands, not billions, of tons). Such systems also need to move a lot of air; the air that would need to pass through a DAC system to capture a gigaton of CO2 is comparable to the amount of air that passes through all the air cooling systems on the planet.On the other hand, if you have a once-through process, you could in some respects avoid the energy constraint, but now you’ve got a materials constraint due to the central laws of chemistry. For once-through processes like enhanced rock weathering, that means that if you want to capture a gigaton of CO2, roughly speaking, you’re going to need a billion tons of rock.So, to capture gigatons of carbon through engineered methods requires tremendous amounts of physical material, air movement, and energy. On the other hand, everything we’re doing to put that CO2 in the atmosphere is extensive too, so large-scale emissions reductions face comparable challenges.Q: What does the report conclude, in terms of whether and how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?A: Our initial prejudice was, CDR is just going to take so much energy, and there’s no way around that because of the second law of thermodynamics, regardless of the method.But as we discussed, there is this nuance about cyclic versus once-through systems. And there are two points of view that we ended up threading a needle between. One is the view that CDR is a silver bullet, and we’ll just do CDR and not worry about emissions — we’ll just suck it all out of the atmosphere. And that’s not the case. It will be really expensive, and will take a lot of energy and materials to do large-scale CDR. But there’s another view, where people say, don’t even think about CDR. Even thinking about CDR will compromise our efforts toward emissions reductions. The report comes down somewhere in the middle, saying that CDR is not a magic bullet, but also not a no-go.If we are serious about managing climate change, we will likely want substantial CDR in addition to aggressive emissions reductions. The report concludes that research and development on CDR methods should be selectively and prudently pursued despite the expected cost and energy and material requirements.At a policy level, the main message is that we need an economic and policy framework that incentivizes emissions reductions and CDR in a common framework; this would naturally allow the market to optimize climate solutions. Since in many cases it is much easier and cheaper to cut emissions than it will likely ever be to remove atmospheric carbon, clearly understanding the challenges of CDR should help motivate rapid emissions reductions.For me, I’m optimistic in the sense that scientifically we understand what it will take to reduce emissions and to use CDR to bring CO2 levels down to a slightly lower level. Now, it’s really a societal and economic problem. I think humanity has the potential to solve these problems. I hope that we can find common ground so that we can take actions as a society that will benefit both humanity and the broader ecosystems on the planet, before we end up having bigger problems than we already have.  More

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      Q&A: The climate impact of generative AI

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      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.

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      Q&A: Examining American attitudes on global climate policies

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      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

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      Q&A: Transforming research through global collaborations

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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