Sustainability

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in Energy

      Solve at MIT 2023: Collaboration and climate efforts are at the forefront of social impact

      by

      “The scale, complexity, the global nature of the problems we’re dealing with are so big that no single institution, industry, or country can deal with them alone,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth stated in her first remarks to the Solve community.

      Over 300 social impact leaders from around the world convened on MIT’s campus for Solve at MIT 2023 to celebrate the 2022 Solver class and to discuss some of the world’s greatest challenges and how we can tackle them with innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology.

      These challenges can be complicated and may even feel insurmountable, but Solve at MIT leaves us with the hope, tools, and connections needed to find solutions together.

      Hala Hanna, executive director of MIT Solve, shared what keeps her inspired and at the front line of social impact: “Optimism isn’t about looking away from the issues but looking right at them, believing we can create the solutions and putting in the work. So, anytime I need a dose of optimism, I look to the innovators we work with,” Hanna shared during the opening plenary, Unlocking our Collective Potential.

      Over the course of three days, more than 300 individuals from around the world convened to celebrate the 2022 Solver class, create partnerships that lead to progress, and address solutions to pressing world issues in real-time.

      Every technologist, philanthropist, investor, and innovator present at Solve at MIT left with their own takeaway, but three main themes seemed to underscore the overall discussions.

      Technology and innovation are as neutral as the makers

      Having bias is a natural part of what makes us human. However, being aware of our predispositions is necessary to transform our lived experiences into actionable solutions for others to benefit from. 

      We’ve largely learned that bias can be both unavoidable and applied almost instantly. Sangbae Kim, director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, proved this through robotics demonstrations where attendees almost unanimously were more impressed with a back-flipping MIT robot compared to one walking in circles. As it turns out, it took one individual three days to program a robot to do a flip and over two weeks for a full team to program one to walk. “We judge through the knowledge and bias we have based on our lived experiences,” Kim pointed out.

      Bias and lived experiences don’t have to be bad things. The solutions we create based on our own lives are what matter. 

      2022 Solver Atif Javed, co-founder and executive director of Tarjimly, began translating for his grandmother as a child and learned about the struggles that come with being a refugee. This led him to develop a humanitarian language-translation application, which connects volunteer translators with immigrants, refugees, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and more, on demand. 

      Vanessa Castañeda Gill, 2022 Solver and co-founder and CEO of Social Cipher, transformed her personal experience with ADHD and autism to develop Ava, a video game empowering neuro-divergent youth and facilitating social-emotional learning.

      For Kelsey Wirth, co-founder and chair of Mothers Out Front, the experience of motherhood and the shared concerns for the well-being of children are what unite her with other moms. 

      Whitney Wolf Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, shared that as a leader in technology and a person who witnessed toxic online spaces, she sees it as her responsibility to spearhead change. 

      During the plenary, “Bringing us Together or Tearing us Apart?” Wolf Herd asked, “What if we could use technology to be a force for positivity?” She shared her vision for equality and respect to be part of the next digital wave. She also called for technology leaders to join her to ensure “guardrails and ground rules” are in place to make sure this goal becomes a reality.

      Social innovation must be intersectional and intergenerational

      During Solve at MIT, industry leaders across sectors, cultures, ages, and expertise banded together to address pressing issues and to form relationships with innovators looking for support in real time.

      Adam Bly, founder and CEO of System Inc., discussed the interconnected nature of all things and why his organization is on a mission to show the links, “We’re seeing rising complexity in the systems that make up life on earth, and it impacts us individually and globally. The way we organize the information and data we need to make decisions about those systems [is highly] siloed and highly fragmented, and it impairs our ability to make decisions in the most systemic, holistic, rational way.”

      President and CEO of the National Resources Defense Council Manish Bapna shared his advocacy for cross-sector work: “Part of what I’ve seen really proliferate and expand in a good way over the past 10 to 15 years are collaborations involving startups in the private sector, governments, and NGOs. No single stakeholder or organization can solve the problem, but by coming together, they bring different perspectives and skills in ways that can create the innovation we need to see.”

      For a long time, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) were seen as the subjects that would resolve our complex issues, but as it turns out, art also holds a tremendous amount of power to transcend identity, borders, status, and concerns, to connect us all and aid us in global unity. Artists Beatie Wolfe, Norhan Bayomi, Aida Murad, and Nneka Jones showed us how to bring healing and awareness to topics like social and environmental injustice through their music, embroidery, and painting.

      The 2023 Solv[ED] Innovators, all age 24 or under, have solutions that are improving communication for individuals with hearing loss, transforming plastic waste into sustainable furniture, and protecting the Black birthing community, among other incredible feats.

      Kami Dar, co-founder and CEO of Uniti Networks, summarizes the value of interconnected problem-solving: “My favorite SDG [sustainable development goal] is SDG number 17— the power of partnership. Look for the adjacent problem-solvers and make sure we are not reinventing the wheel.”

      Relationships and the environment connect us all

      Solve is working to address global challenges on an ongoing basis connected to climate, economic prosperity, health, and learning. Many of these focus areas bleed into one another, but social justice and climate action served as a backdrop for many global issues addressed during Solve at MIT.

      “When we started addressing climate change, we saw it primarily as technical issues to bring down emissions … There’s inequality, there’s poverty, there are social tensions that are rising … We are not going to address climate change without addressing the social tensions that are embedded,” said Lewis Akenji, managing director of the Hot or Cool Institute. Akenji sees food, mobility, and housing as the most impactful areas to focus solutions on first.

      During the “Ensuring a Just Transition to Net Zero” plenary, Heather Clancy, vice president and editorial director at Greenbiz, asked panelists what lessons they have learned from their work. Janelle Knox Hayes, ​​professor of economic geography and planning at MIT, shared that listening to communities, especially front-line and Indigenous communities, is needed before deploying solutions to the energy crisis. “Climate work has this sense of urgency, like it rapidly has to be done … to do really engaged environmental justice work, we have to slow down and realize even before we begin, we need a long period of time to plan. But before we even do that, we have to rebuild relationships and trust and reciprocity … [This] will lead to better and longer-lasting solutions.”

      Hina Baloch, executive director and global head of climate change and sustainability strategy and communication at General Motors, asked Chéri Smith, founder of Indigenous Energy Initiative, to share her perspective on energy sovereignty as it relates to Indigenous communities. Smith shared, “Tribes can’t be sovereign if they’re relying on outside sources for their energy. We were founded to support the self-determination of tribes to revamp their energy systems and rebuild, construct, and maintain them themselves.”

      Smith shared an example of human and tribal-centered innovation in the making. Through the Biden administration’s national electronic vehicle (EV) initiative, Indigenous Energy Initiative and Native Sun Community Power Development will collaborate and create an inter-tribal EV charging network. “The last time we built out an electric grid, it deliberately skipped over tribal country. This time, we want to make sure that we not only have a seat at the table, but that we build out the tables and invite everyone to them,” said Smith.

      Solve at MIT led to meaningful discussions about climate change, intersectional and accessible innovation, and the power that human connection has to unite everyone. Entrepreneurship and social change are the paths forward. And although the challenges ahead of us can be daunting, with community, collaboration, and a healthy dose of bravery, global challenges will continue to be solved by agile impact entrepreneurs all around the world. 

      As Adrianne Haslet, a professional ballroom dancer and Boston Marathon bombing survivor, reminded attendees, “What will get you to the finish line is nothing compared to what got you to the start line.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Energy

      Finding “hot spots” where compounding environmental and economic risks converge

      by

      A computational tool developed by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change pinpoints specific counties within the United States that are particularly vulnerable to economic distress resulting from a transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources. By combining county-level data on employment in fossil fuel (oil, natural gas, and coal) industries with data on populations below the poverty level, the tool identifies locations with high risks for transition-driven economic hardship. It turns out that many of these high-risk counties are in the south-central U.S., with a heavy concentration in the lower portions of the Mississippi River.

      The computational tool, which the researchers call the System for the Triage of Risks from Environmental and Socio-economic Stressors (STRESS) platform, almost instantly displays these risk combinations on an easy-to-read visual map, revealing those counties that stand to gain the most from targeted green jobs retraining programs.  

      Drawing on data that characterize land, water, and energy systems; biodiversity; demographics; environmental equity; and transportation networks, the STRESS platform enables users to assess multiple, co-evolving, compounding hazards within a U.S. geographical region from the national to the county level. Because of its comprehensiveness and precision, this screening-level visualization tool can pinpoint risk “hot spots” that can be subsequently investigated in greater detail. Decision-makers can then plan targeted interventions to boost resilience to location-specific physical and economic risks.

      The platform and its applications are highlighted in a new study in the journal Frontiers in Climate.

      “As risks to natural and managed resources — and to the economies that depend upon them — become more complex, interdependent, and compounding amid rapid environmental and societal changes, they require more and more human and computational resources to understand and act upon,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, the lead author of the study. “The STRESS platform provides decision-makers with an efficient way to combine and analyze data on those risks that matter most to them, identify ‘hot spots’ of compounding risk, and design interventions to minimize that risk.”

      In one demonstration of the STRESS platform’s capabilities, the study shows that national and global actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could simultaneously reduce risks to land, water, and air quality in the upper Mississippi River basin while increasing economic risks in the lower basin, where poverty and unemployment are already disproportionate. In another demonstration, the platform finds concerning “hot spots” where flood risk, poverty, and nonwhite populations coincide.

      The risk triage platform is based on an emerging discipline called multi-sector dynamics (MSD), which seeks to understand and model compounding risks and potential tipping points across interconnected natural and human systems. Tipping points occur when these systems can no longer sustain multiple, co-evolving stresses, such as extreme events, population growth, land degradation, drinkable water shortages, air pollution, aging infrastructure, and increased human demands. MSD researchers use observations and computer models to identify key precursory indicators of such tipping points, providing decision-makers with critical information that can be applied to mitigate risks and boost resilience in natural and managed resources. With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the MIT Joint Program has since 2018 been developing MSD expertise and modeling tools and using them to explore compounding risks and potential tipping points in selected regions of the United States.

      Current STRESS platform data includes more than 100 risk metrics at the county-level scale, but data collection is ongoing. MIT Joint Program researchers are continuing to develop the STRESS platform as an “open-science tool” that welcomes input from academics, researchers, industry and the general public. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Energy

      The answer may be blowing in the wind

      by

      Capturing energy from the winds gusting off the coasts of the United States could more than double the nation’s electricity generation. It’s no wonder the Biden administration views this immense, clean-energy resource as central to its ambitious climate goals of 100 percent carbon-emissions-free electricity by 2035 and a net-zero emissions economy by 2050. The White House is aiming for 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 — enough to power 10 million homes.

      At the MIT Energy Initiative’s Spring Symposium, academic experts, energy analysts, wind developers, government officials, and utility representatives explored the immense opportunities and formidable challenges of tapping this titanic resource, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

      “There’s a lot of work to do to figure out how to use this resource economically — and sooner rather than later,” said Robert C. Armstrong, MITEI director and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering, in his introduction to the event. 

      In sessions devoted to technology, deployment and integration, policy, and regulation, participants framed the issues critical to the development of offshore wind, described threats to its rapid rollout, and offered potential paths for breaking through gridlock.

      R&D advances

      Moderating a panel on MIT research that is moving the industry forward, Robert Stoner, MITEI’s deputy director for science and technology, provided context for the audience about the industry.

      “We have a high degree of geographic coincidence between where that wind capacity is and where most of us are, and it’s complementary to solar,” he said. Turbines sited in deeper, offshore waters gain the advantage of higher-velocity winds. “You can make these machines huge, creating substantial economies of scale,” said Stoner. An onshore turbine generates approximately 3 megawatts; offshore structures can each produce 15 to 17 megawatts, with blades the length of a football field and heights greater than the Washington Monument.

      To harness the power of wind farms spread over hundreds of nautical miles in deep water, Stoner said, researchers must first address some serious issues, including building and maintaining these massive rigs in harsh environments, laying out wind farms to optimize generation, and creating reliable and socially acceptable connections to the onshore grid. MIT scientists described how they are tackling a number of these problems.

      “When you design a floating structure, you have to prepare for the worst possible conditions,” said Paul Sclavounos, a professor of mechanical engineering and naval architecture who is developing turbines that can withstand severe storms that batter turbine blades and towers with thousands of tons of wind force. Sclavounos described systems used in the oil industry for tethering giant, buoyant rigs to the ocean floor that could be adapted for wind platforms. Relatively inexpensive components such as polyester mooring lines and composite materials “can mitigate the impact of high waves and big, big wind loads.”

      To extract the maximum power from individual turbines, developers must take into account the aerodynamics among turbines in a single wind farm and between adjacent wind farms, according to Michael Howland, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Howland’s work modeling turbulence in the atmosphere and wind speeds has demonstrated that angling turbines by just a small amount relative to each other can increase power production significantly for offshore installations, dramatically improving their efficiencies. Howland hopes his research will promote “changing the design of wind farms from the beginning of the process.”

      There’s a staggering complexity to integrating electricity from offshore wind into regional grids such as the one operated by ISO New England, whether converting voltages or monitoring utility load. Steven B. Leeb, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of mechanical engineering, is developing sensors that can indicate electronic failures in a micro grid connected to a wind farm. And Marija Ilić, a joint adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, is developing software that would enable real-time scheduling of controllable equipment to compensate for the variable power generated by wind and other variable renewable resources. She is also working on adaptive distributed automation of this equipment to ensure a stable electric power grid.

      “How do we get from here to there?”

      Symposium speakers provided snapshots of the emerging offshore industry, sharing their sense of urgency as well as some frustrations.

      Climate poses “an existential crisis” that calls for “a massive war-footing undertaking,” said Melissa Hoffer, who occupies the newly created cabinet position of climate chief for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She views wind power “as the backbone of electric sector decarbonization.” With the Vineyard Wind project, the state will be one of the first in the nation to add offshore wind to the grid. “We are actually going to see the first 400 megawatts … likely interconnected and coming online by the end of this year, which is a fantastic milestone for us,” said Hoffer.

      The journey to completing Vineyard Wind involved a plethora of painstaking environmental reviews, lawsuits over lease siting, negotiations over the price of the electricity it will produce, buy-in from towns where its underground cable comes ashore, and travels to an Eversource substation. It’s a familiar story to Alla Weinstein, founder and CEO of Trident Winds, Inc. On the West Coast, where deep waters (greater than 60 meters) begin closer to shore, Weinstein is trying to launch floating offshore wind projects. “I’ve been in marine renewables for 20 years, and when people ask why I do what I do, I tell them it’s because it matters,” she said. “Because if we don’t do it, we may not have a planet that’s suitable for humans.”

      Weinstein’s “picture of reality” describes a multiyear process during which Trident Winds must address the concerns of such stakeholders as tribal communities and the fishing industry and ensure compliance with, among other regulations, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Species Act. Construction of these massive floating platforms, when it finally happens, will require as-yet unbuilt specialized port infrastructure and boats, and a large skilled labor force for assembly and transmission. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a new industry,” she said, but “how do we get from here to there?”

      Danielle Jensen, technical manager for Shell’s Offshore Wind Americas, is working on a project off of Rhode Island. The blueprint calls for high-voltage, direct-current cable snaking to landfall in Massachusetts, where direct-current lines switch to alternating current to connect to the grid. “None of this exists, so we have to find a space, the lands, and the right types of cables, tie into the interconnection point, and work with interconnection operators to do that safely and reliably,” she said.

      Utilities are partnering with developers to begin clearing some of these obstacles. Julia Bovey, director of offshore wind for Eversource, described her firm’s redevelopment or improvement of five ports, and new transport vessels for offshore assembly of wind farm components in Atlantic waters. The utility is also digging under roads to lay cables for new power lines. Bovey notes that snags in supply chains and inflation have been driving up costs. This makes determining future electricity rates more complex, especially since utility contracts and markets work differently in each state.

      Just seven up

      Other nations hold a commanding lead in offshore wind: To date, the United States claims just seven operating turbines, while Denmark boasts 6,200 and the U.K. 2,600. Europe’s combined offshore power capacity stands at 30 gigawatts — which, as MITEI Research Scientist Tim Schittekatte notes, is the U.S. goal for 2030.

      The European Union wants 400 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2050, a target made all the more urgent by threats to Europe’s energy security from the war in Ukraine. “The idea is to connect all those windmills, creating a mesh offshore grid,” Schittekatte said, aided by E.U. regulations that establish “a harmonized process to build cross-border infrastructure.”

      Morten Pindstrup, the international chief engineer at Energinet, Denmark’s state-owned energy enterprise, described one component of this pan-European plan: a hybrid Danish-German offshore wind network. Energinet is also constructing energy islands in the North Sea and the Baltic to pool power from offshore wind farms and feed power to different countries.

      The European wind industry benefits from centralized planning, regulation, and markets, said Johannes P. Pfeifenberger, a principal of The Brattle Group. “The grid planning process in the U.S. is not suitable today to find cost-effective solutions to get us to a clean energy grid in time,” he said. Pfeifenberger recommended that the United States immediately pursue a series of moves including a multistate agreement for cooperating on offshore wind and establishment by grid operators of compatible transmission technologies.

      Symposium speakers expressed sharp concerns that complicated and prolonged approvals, as well as partisan politics, could hobble the nation’s nascent offshore industry. “You can develop whatever you want and agree on what you’re doing, and then the people in charge change, and everything falls apart,” said Weinstein. “We can’t slow down, and we actually need to accelerate.”

      Larry Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, had ideas for breaking through permitting and political gridlock. A negotiations expert, he suggested convening confidential meetings for stakeholders with competing interests for collaborative problem-solving sessions. He announced the creation of a Renewable Energy Facility Siting Clinic at MIT. “We get people to agree that there is a problem, and to accept that without a solution, the system won’t work in the future, and we have to start fixing it now.”

      Other symposium participants were more sanguine about the success of offshore wind. “Trust me, floating wind is not a pie-in-the-sky, exotic technology that is difficult to implement,” said Sclavounos. “There will be companies investing in this technology because it produces huge amounts of energy, and even though the process may not be streamlined, the economics will work itself out.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Environment

      US and UAE governments highlight early warning system for climate resilience

      by

      The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Community Jameel.

      An international project to build community resilience to the effects of climate change, launched by Community Jameel and a research team at MIT, has been recognized as an innovation sprint at the 2023 summit of the United States’ and United Arab Emirates’ Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM4C).

      The Jameel Observatory Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network (Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet), one of MIT’s five Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects, aims to empower communities worldwide, specifically within the agriculture sector, to adapt to climate shocks by launching cross-sector collaborations and by combining state-of-the-art climate and socioeconomic forecasting techniques with technological solutions to support communities’ resilience.

      AIM4C is a joint initiative of the U.S. and U.A.E. that seeks to enhance climate action by accelerating agriculture and food systems innovation and investment. Innovation sprints are selected by AIM4C to accelerate their impact following a competitive process that considers scientific excellence and financial support.

      “As we launch Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet, the AIM4C summit offers a great opportunity to share our plans and initial work with all those who are interested in enhancing the capacity of agricultural communities in vulnerable countries to deal with challenges of climate change,” says Elfatih Eltahir, HM King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate at MIT and project leader of the Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet.

      Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet seeks to bridge the gap between the knowledge about climate change created at research institutions such as MIT and the local farming communities that are adapting to the impacts of climate change. By effectively informing and engaging local communities, the project seeks to enable farmers to sustainably increase their agricultural productivity and income.     

      The Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet will initially pilot in Bangladesh and Sudan, working with local partners BRAC, a leading international nonprofit headquartered in Bangladesh, and the Agricultural Research Corporation-Sudan, the principal agricultural research arm of the Sudanese government, and with MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. Beginning in southwestern Bangladesh, the Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet will integrate next-generation climate forecasting, predictive analytics, new technologies, and financial instruments. In East Africa, with a focus on Sudan, the initiative will emphasize adopting modern technology to use a better variety of heat-resistant seeds, increasing the use of targeted fertilizers, strengthening soils through soil fertility mapping combined with data modeling, and emphasizing vertical expansion of agriculture over traditional horizontal expansion. The work in Sudan is extensible to other regions in Africa. Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet’s activities and timeline will be reevaluated as the team monitors the ongoing situation in Sudan.

      Using local climate insights, communities will be empowered to adapt proactively to climate change by optimally planning their agricultural activities, targeting emergent economic opportunities, and proactively managing risks from climate change.

      George Richards, director of Community Jameel, says: “Community Jameel is proud to be collaborating with MIT, BRAC, and the Agricultural Research Corporation-Sudan to empower agricultural communities to adapt to the ever-growing challenges arising from climate change — challenges which, as we are seeing acutely in Sudan, are compounded by other crises. We welcome the support of the U.S. and U.A.E. governments in selecting the Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet as an AIM4C innovation sprint.”

      Md Liakath Ali, director of climate change, urban development, and disaster risk management at BRAC, says: “Over our five decades working alongside climate-vulnerable communities in Bangladesh, BRAC has seen firsthand how locally led climate adaptation helps protect lives and livelihoods. BRAC is proud to work with Community Jameel and MIT to empower vulnerable communities to proactively adapt to the impacts of climate change.”

      The Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet was launched at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh as part of the Jameel Observatory, an international collaboration launched in 2021 that focuses on convening researchers and practitioners who use data and technology to help communities adapt to the impacts of climate change and short-term climate shocks.

      The Jameel Observatory focuses on using data and evidence to prepare for and act on environmental shocks as well as those impacts of climate change and variability which threaten human and environmental well-being. With a special focus on low- and middle-income countries, the Jameel Observatory works at the interface of climate, natural disasters, agricultural and food systems, and health. It emphasizes the need to incorporate local as well as scientific knowledge to prepare and act in anticipation of environmental shocks.

      Launched in 2020, MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative is designed to mobilize the Institute’s research community around tackling the most difficult unsolved climate problems in emissions reduction, climate adaptation and resilience, risk forecasting, carbon removal, and understanding the human impacts of climate change. MIT selected 27 teams as finalists from a field of nearly 100 initial proposals. In 2022, five teams with the most promising concepts were announced as multi-year flagship projects. More

    • 50 Shares109 Views

      in Environment

      Governing for our descendants

      by

      Social scientists worry that too often we think only of ourselves. 

      “There’s been an increasing recognition that over the last few decades the economy and society have become incredibly focused on the individual, to the detriment of our social fabric,” says Lily L. Tsai, the Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT.

      Tsai, who is also the director and founder of the MIT Governance LAB (MIT GOV/LAB) and is the current chair of the MIT faculty, is interested in distributive justice — allocating resources fairly across different groups of people. Typically, that might mean splitting resources between different socioeconomic groups, or between different nations. 

      But in an essay in the journal Dædalus, Tsai discusses policies and institutions that consider the needs of people in the future when determining who deserves what resources. That is, they broaden our concept of a collective society to include people who haven’t been born yet and will bear the brunt of climate change in the future.

      Some groups of people do actually consider the needs of future people when making decisions. For example, Wales has a Future Generations Commissioner who monitors whether the government’s actions compromise the needs of future generations. Norway’s Petroleum Fund invests parts of its oil profits for future generations. And MIT’s endowment “is explicitly charged” with ensuring that future students are just as well-off as current students, Tsai says.

      But in other ways, societies place a lower value on the needs of their descendants. For example, to determine the total return on an investment, governments use something called a discount rate that places more value in the present return on the investment than the future return on the investment. And humans are currently using up the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate, which in turn is raising global temperatures and making earth less habitable for our children and our children’s children.

      The purpose of Tsai’s essay is not to suggest how, say, governments might set discount rates that more fairly consider future people. “I’m interested in the things that make people care about setting the discount rate lower and therefore valuing the future more,” she says. “What are the moral commitments and the kinds of cultural practices or social institutions that make people care more?”

      Tsai thinks the volatility of the modern world and anxiety about the future — say, the future habitability of the planet — make it harder for people to consider the needs of their descendants. In Tsai’s 2021 book “When People Want Punishment,” she argues that this volatility and anxiety make people seek out more stability and order. “The more uncertain the future is, the less you can be sure that saving for the future is going to be valuable to anybody,” she says. So, part of the solution could be making people feel less unsettled and more stable, which Tsai says can be done with institutions we already have, like social welfare systems.

      She also thinks the rate at which things change in the modern world has hurt our ability to consider the long view. “We no longer think in terms of decades and centuries the way in which we used to,” she says.

      MIT GOV/LAB is working with partners to figure out how to experiment in a lab setting with developing democratic practices or institutions that might better distribute resources between current people and future people. That would allow researchers to assess if structuring interactions or decision-making in a particular way encourages people to save more for future people. 

      Tsai thinks getting people to care about their descendants is a problem researchers can work on, and that humans have a natural inclination to consider the future. People have a desire to be entrusted with things of importance, to leave a legacy, and for conservation. “I think many humans actually naturally conserve things that are valuable and scarce, and there’s a strange way in which society has eroded that human instinct in favor of a culture of consumption,” she says. We need to “re-imagine the kinds of practices that encourage conservation rather than consumption,” she adds. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Environment

      Envisioning education in a climate-changed world

      by

      What must colleges and universities do differently to help students develop the skills, capacities, and perspectives they’ll need to live, lead, and thrive in a world being remade by the accelerating climate crisis?

      That question was at the heart of a recent convening on MIT’s campus that brought together faculty and staff from more than 30 institutions of higher education. Over two days, attendees delved into the need for higher education to align structurally and philosophically with the changing demands of the coming decades.

      “We all know that there is more to do to educate and to empower today’s students, the young people who rightly feel the threat of climate change most acutely,” said MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles. “They are our future leaders, the generation that will inherit the full weight of the problem and the responsibility for trying to solve it.”

      The MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education, held on April 6 and 7, was hosted by MIT’s Climate Education Working Group, one of three working groups established under the Institute’s ambitious Fast Forward climate action plan. The Climate Education Working Group is tasked with finding ways to strengthen climate- and sustainability-related education at the Institute, from curricular offerings to experiential learning opportunities and beyond.

      “We began working as a group about a year ago, and we quickly realized it would be important to expand the conversation across MIT and to colleagues at other institutions who … are thinking broadly,” says Professor David McGee, co-chair of the Climate Education Working Group.

      Co-chair Professor David Hsu encouraged attendees to build lasting relationships, adding, “There is a true wealth of knowledge spread throughout the room. Every university has pieces of the puzzle, but I don’t think we can point to a single one that right now exemplifies all of what we want to achieve.”

      The symposium featured keynotes by Nobles; Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society; and Reverend Mariama White-Hammond, founder of the New Roots AME Church in Dorchester, who is also chief of environment, energy, and open space for the City of Boston.

      On the first morning of the event, participants engaged in roundtable discussions, exchanging ideas, successes, and pain points. They also identified and read out close to a dozen unsolved challenges, among them: “How do we meet the fear and anger that students are feeling, and the desire to ‘do’ that students are expressing?” “How do we support people who challenge the status quo?” “As we create these new educational experiences, how do we ensure that a diversity of students can participate in them?” “How do we align tenure and power structures to center communities in the development of this work?” and “How radical a change is MIT willing to make?”

      Kate Trimble, senior associate dean and director of the Office of Experiential Learning, remarked on the thorniness of those questions in closing, wryly adding, “We’ll answer every last one of them before we leave here tomorrow.”

      But in sharing best practices and lessons learned, the tone was overwhelmingly hopeful. Trimble, for example, led a series of discussions highlighting 10 climate education programs already developed at MIT, the University of California at Davis, the University of Michigan, Swarthmore College, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and McGill University, among others. Each offered new models by which to weave climate justice, community partnerships, and cross-disciplinary teaching into classroom-based and experiential learning.

      Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research, opened the symposium on the second day. Invoking the words of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres upon publication of the IPCC’s sixth synthesis report last month, she said, “the global response needs to be ‘everything, everywhere, all at once.’”

      She pointed to a number of MIT research initiatives that are structured to address complex problems, among them the Climate Grand Challenges projects — the proposals for which came from researchers across 90 percent of MIT departments — as well as the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium and the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center.

      “These initiatives recognize that no sector, let alone any single institution, can be effective on its own — and so they seek to engage from the outset with other research institutions and with government, industry, and civil society,” Zuber said.

      Cobb, of Brown University, also spoke about the value of sustained action partnerships built on transdisciplinary research and collaborations with community leaders. She highlighted Brown’s participation in the Breathe Providence project and Georgia Tech’s involvement in the Smart Sea Level Sensors project in Savannah.

      Several speakers noted the importance of hands-on learning opportunities for students as a training ground for tackling complex challenges at scale. Students should learn how to build a respectfully collaborative team and how to connect with communities to understand the true nature and constraints of the problem, they said.

      Engineering professor Anne White, who is co-chair of the MIT Climate Nucleus, the faculty committee charged with implementing the Fast Forward plan, and MIT’s associate provost and associate vice president for research administration, moderated a career panel spanning nonprofit and corporate roles.

      The panelists’ experiences emphasized that in a world where no sector will be untouched by the impacts of climate change, every graduate in every field must be informed and ready to engage.

      “Education is training; it’s skills. We want the students to be smart. But what I’m hearing is that it’s not just that,” White reflected. “It’s these other qualities, right? It’s can they be brave … and can they be kind?”

      “Every job is a climate job in this era,” declared MIT graduate student Dyanna Jaye, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement.

      John Fernández, director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative at MIT, moderated a panel on structural change in higher education, speaking with Jim Stock, vice provost for climate and sustainability at Harvard University; Toddi Steelman, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University; and Stephen Porder, assistant provost for sustainability at Brown.

      Steelman (who is also a qualified wildland firefighter — a useful skill for a dean, she noted) described a popular course at Duke called “Let’s Talk About Climate Change” that is jointly taught by a biogeochemist and a theologian. The course enrolled around 150 students in the fall who met for contemplative breakout discussions. “Unless we talk about our hearts and our minds,” she said, “we’re not going to make progress.”

      White-Hammond highlighted one trait she believes today’s students already have in abundance.

      “They’re willing to say that the status quo is unacceptable, and that is an important part of being courageous in the face of this climate crisis,” she said. She urged institutions to take that cue.

      “If we have to remake the world, rebuild it on something radically different. Why would we bake in racial injustice again? Why would we say, let’s have an equally unequal economic system that just doesn’t burn as many fossil fuels? I think we have an opportunity to go big.”

      “That,” she added, “is the work I believe higher education should be taking on, and not from an ivory tower, but rooted in real communities.”

      The MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education was part of Earth Month at MIT, a series of climate and sustainability events on campus in April. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Energy

      Asegun Henry wins National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award

      by

      The National Science Foundation (NSF) today named Asegun Henry, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, as a 2023 recipient of its Alan T. Waterman Award. This award is the NSF’s highest honor for early-career researchers and provides funding for research in any science or engineering field. 

      This is the second year NSF has chosen to honor three researchers with the award. Henry is the sixth faculty member from MIT to receive this honor in its 47-year history, and is only the second mechanical engineer to ever win the award. In addition to a medal, Henry and his fellow awardees, Natalie S. King of Georgia State University and William Anderegg from the University of Utah, will each receive $1 million over five years for research in their chosen field of science.

      “I am thrilled to congratulate this year’s Waterman awardees, three outstanding scientists who are courageously tackling some of the most challenging societal problems through their ingenuity and innovative mindset,” says NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “Their pioneering accomplishments are precisely what the Waterman Award was created to recognize, and I look forward to their tremendous contributions in the future.”

      NSF recognizes Henry as an international thermal science and engineering leader. Henry has made breakthrough advances in nanoscale heat transfer and high-temperature energy systems. He directs the Atomistic Simulation and Energy (ASE) Research Group at MIT, focusing on heat transfer at the atomic level. He also works on developing technologies that can help mitigate climate change, addressing many problems from the atomic to the gigawatt scale.

      Henry and colleagues have led the development of several technological breakthroughs, setting a world record for the highest-temperature pump, using an all-ceramic mechanical pump to move liquid metal above 1,400 degrees Celsius, as well as the world record for thermophotovoltaic efficiency.

      “It has been challenging to push the field towards acceptance of new ideas, and it has been a path fraught with resistance and questioning of the validity of our results,” says Henry. “Receiving this award is vindicating and will impact my career greatly as it helps validate that the advances we’ve pioneered really do register as major contributions, and I pride myself on the impact of my work.”

      The Waterman Award will be presented to Henry at a ceremony held in Washington on May 9 during the National Science Board meeting.  More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Environment

      Exploring the bow shock and beyond

      by

      For most people, the night sky conjures a sense of stillness, an occasional shooting star the only visible movement. A conversation with Rishabh Datta, however, unveils the supersonic drama crashing above planet Earth. The PhD candidate has focused his recent study on the plasma speeding through space, flung from sources like the sun’s corona and headed toward Earth, halted abruptly by colliding with the planet’s magnetosphere. The resulting shock wave is similar to the “bow shock” that forms around the nose cone of a supersonic jet, which manifests as the familiar sonic boom.

      The bow shock phenomenon has been well studied. “It’s probably one of the things that’s keeping life alive,” says Datta, “protecting us from the solar wind.” While he feels the magnetosphere provides “a very interesting space laboratory,” Datta’s main focus is, “Can we create this high-energy plasma that is moving supersonically in a laboratory, and can we study it? And can we learn things that are hard to diagnose in an astrophysical plasma?”

      Datta’s research journey to the bow shock and beyond began when he joined a research program for high school students at the National University Singapore. Tasked with culturing bacteria and measuring the amount of methane they produced in a biogas tank, Datta found his first research experience “quite nasty.”

      “I was working with chicken manure, and every day I would come home smelling completely awful,” he says.

      As an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, Datta’s interests turned toward solar power, compelled by a new technology he felt could generate sustainable energy. By the time he joined MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, though, his interests had morphed into researching the heat and mass transfer from airborne droplets. After a year of study, he felt the need to go in a yet another direction.

      The subject of astrophysical plasmas had recently piqued his interest, and he followed his curiosity to Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering Professor Nuno Loureiro’s introductory plasma class. There he encountered Professor Jack Hare, who was sitting in on the class and looking for students to work with him.

      “And that’s how I ended up doing plasma physics and studying bow shocks,” he says, “a long and circuitous route that started with culturing bacteria.”

      Gathering measurements from MAGPIE

      Datta is interested in what he can learn about plasma from gathering measurements of a laboratory-created bow shock, seeking to verify theoretical models. He uses data already collected from experiments on a pulsed-power generator known as MAGPIE (the Mega-Ampere Generator of Plasma Implosion Experiments), located at Imperial College, London. By observing how long it takes a plasma to reach an obstacle, in this case a probe that measures magnetic fields, Datta was able to determine its velocity.   

      With the velocity established, an interferometry system was able to provide images of the probe and the plasma around it, allowing Datta to characterize the structure of the bow shock.

      “The shape depends on how fast sound waves can travel in a plasma,” says Datta. “And this ‘sound speed’ depends on the temperature.”

      The interdependency of these characteristics means that by imaging a shock it’s possible to determine temperature, sound speed, and other measurements more easily and cheaply than with other methods.

      “And knowing more about your plasma allows you to make predictions about, for example, electrical resistivity, which can be important for understanding other physics that might interest you,” says Datta, “like magnetic reconnection.”

      This phenomenon, which controls the evolution of such violent events as solar flares, coronal mass ejections, magnetic storms that drive auroras, and even disruptions in fusion tokamaks, has become the focus of his recent research. It happens when opposing magnetic fields in a plasma break and then reconnect, generating vast quantities of heat and accelerating the plasma to high velocities.

      Onward to Z

      Datta travels to Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to work on the largest pulsed power facility in the world, informally known as “the Z machine,” to research how the properties of magnetic reconnection change when a plasma emits strong radiation and cools rapidly.

      In future years, Datta will only have to travel across Albany Street on the MIT campus to work on yet another machine, PUFFIN, currently being built at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Like MAGPIE and Z, PUFFIN is a pulsed power facility, but with the ability to drive the current 10 times longer than other machines, opening up new opportunities in high-energy-density laboratory astrophysics.

      Hare, who leads the PUFFIN team, is pleased with Datta’s increasing experience.

      “Working with Rishabh is a real pleasure,” he says, “He has quickly learned the ins and outs of experimental plasma physics, often analyzing data from machines he hasn’t even yet had the chance to see! While we build PUFFIN it’s really useful for us to carry out experiments at other pulsed-power facilities worldwide, and Rishabh has already written papers on results from MAGPIE, COBRA at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, and the Z Machine.”

      Pursuing climate action at MIT

      Hand-in-hand with Datta’s quest to understand plasma is his pursuit of sustainability, including carbon-free energy solutions. A member of the Graduate Student Council’s Sustainability Committee since he arrived in 2019, he was heartened when MIT, revising their climate action plan, provided him and other students the chance to be involved in decision-making. He led focus groups to provide graduate student input on the plan, raising issues surrounding campus decarbonization, the need to expand hiring of early-career researchers working on climate and sustainability, and waste reduction and management for MIT laboratories.

      When not focused on bringing astrophysics to the laboratory, Datta sometimes experiments in a lab closer to home — the kitchen — where he often challenges himself to duplicate a recipe he has recently tried at a favorite restaurant. His stated ambition could apply to his sustainability work as well as to his pursuit of understanding plasma.

      “The goal is to try and make it better,” he says. “I try my best to get there.”

      Datta’s work has been funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Department of Energy. More