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Liftoff: The Climate Project at MIT takes flight

News Feed
Wednesday, September 18, 2024

The leaders of The Climate Project at MIT met with community members at a campus forum on Monday, helping to kick off the Institute’s major new effort to accelerate and scale up climate change solutions.“The Climate Project is a whole-of-MIT mobilization,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in her opening remarks. “It’s designed to focus the Institute’s talent and resources so that we can achieve much more, faster, in terms of real-world impact, from mitigation to adaptation.”The event, “Climate Project at MIT: Launching the Missions,” drew a capacity crowd to MIT’s Samberg Center.While the Climate Project has a number of facets, a central component of the effort consists of its six “missions,” broad areas where MIT researchers will seek to identify gaps in the global climate response that MIT can help fill, and then launch and execute research and innovation projects aimed at those areas. Each mission is led by campus faculty, and Monday’s event represented the first public conversation between the mission directors and the larger campus community.“Today’s event is an important milestone,” said Richard Lester, MIT’s interim vice president for climate and the Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, who led the Climate Project’s formation. He praised Kornbluth’s sustained focus on climate change as a leading priority for MIT.“The reason we’re all here is because of her leadership and vision for MIT,” Lester said. “We’re also here because the MIT community — our faculty, our staff, our students — has made it abundantly clear that it wants to do more, much more, to help solve this great problem.”The mission directors themselves emphasized the need for deep community involvement in the project — and that the Climate Project is designed to facilitate researcher-driven enterprise across campus.“There’s a tremendous amount of urgency,” said Elsa Olivetti PhD ’07, director of the Decarbonizing Energy and Industry mission, during an onstage discussion. “We all need to do everything we can, and roll up our sleeves and get it done.” Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, has been a professor of materials science and engineering at the Institute since 2014.“What’s exciting about this is the chance of MIT really meeting its potential,” said Jesse Kroll, co-director of the mission for Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans. Kroll is the Peter de Florez Professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a professor of chemical engineering, and the director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory.MIT, Kroll noted, features “so much amazing work going on in all these different aspects of the problem. Science, engineering, social science … we put it all together and there is huge potential, a huge opportunity for us to make a difference.”MIT has pledged an initial $75 million to the Climate Project, including $25 million from the MIT Sloan School of Management for a complementary effort, the MIT Climate Policy Center. However, the Institute is anticipating that it will also build new connections with outside partners, whose role in implementing and scaling Climate Project solutions will be critical.Monday’s event included a keynote talk from Brian Deese, currently the MIT Innovation and Climate Impact Fellow and the former director of the White House National Economic Council in the Biden administration.“The magnitude of the risks associated with climate change are extraordinary,” Deese said. However, he added, “these are solvable issues. In fact, the energy transition globally will be the greatest economic opportunity in human history. … It has the potential to actually lift people out of poverty, it has the potential to drive international cooperation, it has the potential to drive innovation and improve lives — if we get this right.”Deese’s remarks centered on a call for the U.S. to develop a current-day climate equivalent of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. initiative to provide aid to Western Europe after World War II. He also suggested three characteristics of successful climate projects, noting that many would be interdisciplinary in nature and would “engage with policy early in the design process” to become feasible.In addition to those features, Deese said, people need to “start and end with very high ambition” when working on climate solutions. He added: “The good thing about MIT and our community is that we, you, have done this before. We’ve got examples where MIT has taken something that seemed completely improbable and made it possible, and I believe that part of what is required of this collective effort is to keep that kind of audacious thinking at the top of our mind.” The MIT mission directors all participated in an onstage discussion moderated by Somini Sengupta, the international climate reporter on the climate team of The New York Times. Sengupta asked the group about a wide range of topics, from their roles and motivations to the political constraints on global climate progress, and more.Andrew Babbin, co-director of the mission for Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans, defined part of the task of the MIT missions as “identifying where those gaps of knowledge are and filling them rapidly,” something he believes is “largely not doable in the conventional way,” based on small-scale research projects. Instead, suggested Babbin, who is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, the collective input of research and innovation communities could help zero in on undervalued approaches to climate action.Some innovative concepts, the mission directors noted, can be tried out on the MIT campus, in an effort to demonstrate how a more sustainable infrastructure and systems can operate at scale.“That is absolutely crucial,” said Christoph Reinhart, director of the Building and Adapting Healthy, Resilient Cities mission, expressing the need to have the campus reach net-zero emissions. Reinhart is the Alan and Terri Spoon Professor of Architecture and Climate and director of MIT’s Building Technology Program in the School of Architecture and Planning.In response to queries from Sengupta, the mission directors affirmed that the Climate Project needs to develop solutions that can work in different societies around the world, while acknowledging that there are many political hurdles to worldwide climate action.“Any kind of quality engaged projects that we’ve done with communities, it’s taken years to build trust. … How you scale that without compromising is the challenge I’m faced with,” said Miho Mazereeuw, director of the Empowering Frontline Communities mission, an associate professor of architecture and urbanism, and director of MIT’s Urban Risk Lab.“I think we will impact different communities in different parts of the world in different ways,” said Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, adding that it would be important to “work with local communities [and] engage stakeholders, and at the same time, use local brains to solve the problem.” The mission he directs, Wild Cards, is centered on identifying unconventional solutions that are high risk and also high reward.Any climate program “has to be politically feasible, it has to be in separate nations’ self-interest,” said Christopher Knittel, mission director for Inventing New Policy Approaches. In an ever-shifting political world, he added, that means people must “think about not just the policy but the resiliency of the policy.” Knittel is the George P. Shultz Professor and professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Climate Policy Center, and associate dean for Climate and Sustainability.In all, MIT has more than 300 faculty and senior researchers who, along with their students and staff, are already working on climate issues.Kornbluth, for her part, referred to MIT’s first-year students while discussing the larger motivations for taking concerted action to address the challenges of climate change. It might be easy for younger people to despair over the world’s climate trajectory, she noted, but the best response to that includes seeking new avenues for climate progress.“I understand their anxiety and concern,” Kornbluth said. “But I have no doubt at all that together, we can make a difference. I believe that we have a special obligation to the new students and their entire generation to do everything we can to create a positive change. The most powerful antidote to defeat and despair is collection action.”

The major effort to accelerate practical climate change solutions launches as its mission directors meet the Institute community.

The leaders of The Climate Project at MIT met with community members at a campus forum on Monday, helping to kick off the Institute’s major new effort to accelerate and scale up climate change solutions.

“The Climate Project is a whole-of-MIT mobilization,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in her opening remarks. “It’s designed to focus the Institute’s talent and resources so that we can achieve much more, faster, in terms of real-world impact, from mitigation to adaptation.”

The event, “Climate Project at MIT: Launching the Missions,” drew a capacity crowd to MIT’s Samberg Center.

While the Climate Project has a number of facets, a central component of the effort consists of its six “missions,” broad areas where MIT researchers will seek to identify gaps in the global climate response that MIT can help fill, and then launch and execute research and innovation projects aimed at those areas. Each mission is led by campus faculty, and Monday’s event represented the first public conversation between the mission directors and the larger campus community.

“Today’s event is an important milestone,” said Richard Lester, MIT’s interim vice president for climate and the Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, who led the Climate Project’s formation. He praised Kornbluth’s sustained focus on climate change as a leading priority for MIT.

“The reason we’re all here is because of her leadership and vision for MIT,” Lester said. “We’re also here because the MIT community — our faculty, our staff, our students — has made it abundantly clear that it wants to do more, much more, to help solve this great problem.”

The mission directors themselves emphasized the need for deep community involvement in the project — and that the Climate Project is designed to facilitate researcher-driven enterprise across campus.

“There’s a tremendous amount of urgency,” said Elsa Olivetti PhD ’07, director of the Decarbonizing Energy and Industry mission, during an onstage discussion. “We all need to do everything we can, and roll up our sleeves and get it done.” Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, has been a professor of materials science and engineering at the Institute since 2014.

“What’s exciting about this is the chance of MIT really meeting its potential,” said Jesse Kroll, co-director of the mission for Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans. Kroll is the Peter de Florez Professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a professor of chemical engineering, and the director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory.

MIT, Kroll noted, features “so much amazing work going on in all these different aspects of the problem. Science, engineering, social science … we put it all together and there is huge potential, a huge opportunity for us to make a difference.”

MIT has pledged an initial $75 million to the Climate Project, including $25 million from the MIT Sloan School of Management for a complementary effort, the MIT Climate Policy Center. However, the Institute is anticipating that it will also build new connections with outside partners, whose role in implementing and scaling Climate Project solutions will be critical.

Monday’s event included a keynote talk from Brian Deese, currently the MIT Innovation and Climate Impact Fellow and the former director of the White House National Economic Council in the Biden administration.

“The magnitude of the risks associated with climate change are extraordinary,” Deese said. However, he added, “these are solvable issues. In fact, the energy transition globally will be the greatest economic opportunity in human history. … It has the potential to actually lift people out of poverty, it has the potential to drive international cooperation, it has the potential to drive innovation and improve lives — if we get this right.”

Deese’s remarks centered on a call for the U.S. to develop a current-day climate equivalent of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. initiative to provide aid to Western Europe after World War II. He also suggested three characteristics of successful climate projects, noting that many would be interdisciplinary in nature and would “engage with policy early in the design process” to become feasible.

In addition to those features, Deese said, people need to “start and end with very high ambition” when working on climate solutions. He added: “The good thing about MIT and our community is that we, you, have done this before. We’ve got examples where MIT has taken something that seemed completely improbable and made it possible, and I believe that part of what is required of this collective effort is to keep that kind of audacious thinking at the top of our mind.” 

The MIT mission directors all participated in an onstage discussion moderated by Somini Sengupta, the international climate reporter on the climate team of The New York Times. Sengupta asked the group about a wide range of topics, from their roles and motivations to the political constraints on global climate progress, and more.

Andrew Babbin, co-director of the mission for Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans, defined part of the task of the MIT missions as “identifying where those gaps of knowledge are and filling them rapidly,” something he believes is “largely not doable in the conventional way,” based on small-scale research projects. Instead, suggested Babbin, who is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, the collective input of research and innovation communities could help zero in on undervalued approaches to climate action.

Some innovative concepts, the mission directors noted, can be tried out on the MIT campus, in an effort to demonstrate how a more sustainable infrastructure and systems can operate at scale.

“That is absolutely crucial,” said Christoph Reinhart, director of the Building and Adapting Healthy, Resilient Cities mission, expressing the need to have the campus reach net-zero emissions. Reinhart is the Alan and Terri Spoon Professor of Architecture and Climate and director of MIT’s Building Technology Program in the School of Architecture and Planning.

In response to queries from Sengupta, the mission directors affirmed that the Climate Project needs to develop solutions that can work in different societies around the world, while acknowledging that there are many political hurdles to worldwide climate action.

“Any kind of quality engaged projects that we’ve done with communities, it’s taken years to build trust. … How you scale that without compromising is the challenge I’m faced with,” said Miho Mazereeuw, director of the Empowering Frontline Communities mission, an associate professor of architecture and urbanism, and director of MIT’s Urban Risk Lab.

“I think we will impact different communities in different parts of the world in different ways,” said Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, adding that it would be important to “work with local communities [and] engage stakeholders, and at the same time, use local brains to solve the problem.” The mission he directs, Wild Cards, is centered on identifying unconventional solutions that are high risk and also high reward.

Any climate program “has to be politically feasible, it has to be in separate nations’ self-interest,” said Christopher Knittel, mission director for Inventing New Policy Approaches. In an ever-shifting political world, he added, that means people must “think about not just the policy but the resiliency of the policy.” Knittel is the George P. Shultz Professor and professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Climate Policy Center, and associate dean for Climate and Sustainability.

In all, MIT has more than 300 faculty and senior researchers who, along with their students and staff, are already working on climate issues.

Kornbluth, for her part, referred to MIT’s first-year students while discussing the larger motivations for taking concerted action to address the challenges of climate change. It might be easy for younger people to despair over the world’s climate trajectory, she noted, but the best response to that includes seeking new avenues for climate progress.

“I understand their anxiety and concern,” Kornbluth said. “But I have no doubt at all that together, we can make a difference. I believe that we have a special obligation to the new students and their entire generation to do everything we can to create a positive change. The most powerful antidote to defeat and despair is collection action.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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For plants, urban heat islands don’t mimic global warming

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It’s tricky to predict precisely what the impacts of climate change will be, given the many variables involved. To predict the impacts of a warmer world on plant life, some researchers look at urban “heat islands,” where, because of the effects of urban structures, temperatures consistently run a few degrees higher than those of the surrounding rural areas. This enables side-by-side comparisons of plant responses.But a new study by researchers at MIT and Harvard University has found that, at least for forests, urban heat islands are a poor proxy for global warming, and this may have led researchers to underestimate the impacts of warming in some cases. 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Five activists were handed multi-year sentences for their role in the M25 actions in 2022. Those were reduced on appeal earlier this month but are still the longest jail terms for non-violent civil disobedience ever issued.Senior JSO members deny the crackdown had anything to do with the group's decision to "hang up the hi-vis" – as its statement this week announcing the end of campaign put it.JSO's public position is that it has won its battle. "Just Stop Oil's initial demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history," the group claimed.The government has said it does not plan to issue any new licences for oil and gas production but strongly denies its policies have a link to JSO. Furthermore, the Prime Minister's official spokesperson told journalists: "We have been very clear when it comes to oil and gas that it has a future for decades to come in our energy mix."And the group's wider goal – to end the production of oil and gas – has manifestly not been achieved. The members of the group I spoke to for this article all agree the climate crisis has deepened.AFPA protest at the Aston Martin showroom in central LondonIn the face of stiffer sentences, some climate campaigners have said they will turn to more clandestine activities. One new group says it plans a campaign of sabotage against key infrastructure. In a manifesto published online it says it plans to "kickstart a new phase of the climate activist movement, aiming to shut down key actors of the fossil fuel economy."That's not a direction the JSO members I spoke to said they wanted to go. Sarah Lunnon said a key principle of JSO and the civil disobedience movement generally was that activists would take responsibility for their actions. One of the first questions new joiners were asked is whether they would be willing to be locked up."As corporations and billionaires corrupt political systems across the world, we need a different approach. "We are creating a new strategy, to face this reality and to carry our responsibilities at this time," the group says, suggesting they may be planning to form a new movement.JSO's most high-profile figure, Roger Hallam, is one of the five activists convicted for their role in the M25 protests. In a message from his prison cell he acknowledged that JSO has only had a "marginal impact". That is "not due to lack of trying," he said. The failure lay with the UK's "elites and our leaders" who had walked away from their responsibility to tackle the climate crisis, Hallam claimed. A hint perhaps that the group's new focus might be on the political system itself.JSO has said its last protest – to be held at the end of April – will mark "the end of soup on Van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets". But don't believe it. When pressed, the JSO members I spoke to said they may well turn back to disruptive tactics but under a new name and with a new and as yet unspecified objective.

Climate
Activism
Crisis

Amid Trump Cuts, Climate Researchers Wait for the Ax to Fall

Climate experts whose research is funded by federal grants hide, whisper and wait for their jobs to disappear

Climate Researchers Wait for the Ax to FallClimate experts whose research is funded by federal grants hide, whisper and wait for their jobs to disappearBy Ariel Wittenberg, Chelsea Harvey & E&E News The Trump administration has slashed jobs and funding at the National Institutes of Health. Mark Wilson/Newsmakers/Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | The National Institutes of Health has canceled grants for research on diversity, Covid-19 and vaccines. Climate scientists are hoping their work won’t be next — but fear it could be.“We are holding our breaths because we know we are on their list of targets,” said Marsha Wills-Karp, chair of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. “It feels like it’s been slash and burn. We are hopeful they won’t get to climate, but we know it’s not likely.”Researchers in her department have received NIH grants to study the effects of wildfire air pollution on preterm birth rates and how hotter weather is affecting the health of babies at birth, measured by their weight and potential complications. They’re also studying how climate change is affecting nutrition.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.At the University of Washington, Kristie Ebi is fearful that NIH could cut grants that fund studies about which populations are more vulnerable to extreme heat — a project that the team is planning to expand to include the dangers of wildfire smoke.“We’re working to provide information that departments of health, communities and individuals can use,” Ebi said. “The more you know, the more of those lives you can save.”None of those programs haven’t been cut yet. But there’s reason to think they could be, and soon.Earlier this week, ProPublica reported on an internal NIH memo that outlined how the agency will no longer fund research on the health effects of climate change. It followed a story in Mother Jones showing that NIH had ended three climate-related programs, including the Climate Change and Health Initiative. The program was created in 2022 and has had annual congressional appropriations of $40 million, according to a December NIH report that was taken offline by the agency earlier this year.“HHS is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities,” said Emily Hilliard, a department spokesperson.“As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans,” she added. “We will leave no stone unturned in identifying the root cause of the chronic disease epidemic as part of our mission to Make America Healthy Again.”She did not respond to questions about whether HHS believes that research into the health effects of heat and other types of extreme weather are aligned with agency priorities or whether HHS believes that heat waves affect the health of Americans. NIH did not respond to a request for comment.Heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency within HHS. Heat caused or contributed to at least 2,300 deaths in 2023, CDC records show.In addition to turbocharging temperatures, climate change can affect people's health by increasing the prevalence of vector-borne diseases and the number of wildfires, whose smoke has been shown to increase asthma and cause cardiovascular problems.Those connections have long been studied with funding from the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences. Then in 2022, NIH broadened the scope of federal funding for climate health research, directing each of the agency’s 26 centers and institutes to study the dangers of climate change. At the time, the agency said “a mounting number of assessments and reports provide undeniable evidence that climate change is resulting in … direct and indirect consequences for human health and well-being.”Most of the climate researchers contacted by POLITICO's E&E News declined to talk publicly about their funding, citing concerns about their grants being rescinded if they spoke to the media.One researcher who was awarded federal funding said some experts in the climate and health field are pausing work related to their grants, like hiring.Others have turned down speaking requests because they're concerned about attracting attention from the Trump administration. Their work often focuses on how extreme weather has disproportional effects on the health of communities of color, according to several researchers who were granted anonymity for fear of retribution. One said that they declined a speaking invitation to avoid “accidentally us[ing] language we are not supposed to and then be told our language is not compliant with various executive orders” on diversity and equality.“We’ve been told we need to comply with those executive orders as federal grantees, but it’s hard to do if you are funded for something that the name is something you are not allowed to say,” the researcher said. “No one wants to do a social media post or a webinar or an event that might get them in trouble.”An annual conference hosted by NIH, Boston University and the Harvard School of Public Health was postponed earlier this month.Linda Birnbaum, who led the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences until 2017, said that during the first Trump administration, researchers were able to circumvent directives by wording grant applications as “climate and health” rather than “climate change.”“It worked then. I don’t think that will work anymore,” she said.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

Climate
Energy
Pollution

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THE WATER WILL TAKE US

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Rise and Fall

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Inside The Grand Canyon

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Water
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Sounding the Alarm ~ America's Climate Crisis

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Climate
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Government

We Trees

Ever wonder what trees think of us now that we have created a climate disaster? This 2-minute film answers that question. As Bill McKibben recently tweeted about the film, “Who speaks for trees? In this short and elegant video, the trees themselves.” It has been screened at Green Fest (Serbia), The Colorado Environmental Film Festival, The Wildlife Conservation Film Festival and Winner of Merit at the Nature Without Borders Film Festival.

Forests
Chemicals
Climate

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