Climate change

MIT Energy Initiative Interim Director Robert Stoner speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Jared Bowen and Andrea Cabral about the MIT Energy Initiative and low – or even no – carbon solutions that could mitigate climate change.

Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Boston Globe reporter Aruni Soni about her new study that finds reducing the cost of solar energy will be accelerated by improvements in soft tech. “We found that the soft technology involved in solar energy really has not changed and hasn’t improved nearly as quickly as the hardware,” says Trancik. “These soft costs, in many systems, can be 50 percent or even more of the total cost of solar electricity.”

Writing for The Hill, Andre Zollinger, senior policy manager at J-PAL Global, makes the case that “current attention to air pollution can be transformational for how we tackle climate change. Policy leaders in the U.S. and abroad should seize this moment of reckoning over our common struggle for clean air as an opportunity to focus on policies that are known to curb air pollution and simultaneously combat climate change.”

This past spring, Prof. J. Phillip Thompson and MIT lecturer Elisabeth Reynolds taught a class at MIT that sent students to work with local officials across the country to help identify available federal funds for climate change mitigation, reports Farah Stockman for The New York Times. “We have to figure out how to use it. Because if we don’t, wealthy communities will go green, and low-income communities will stay brown,” says Thompson. “Unless we do something intentionally to make sure that it is fair, it will bypass poor communities.”

Studies by researchers at MIT have found “that shifting to electric vehicles delivers a 30% to 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over combustion vehicles,” reports Tom Krisher for Associated Press. According to Prof. Jessika Trancik, “electric vehicles are cleaner over their lifetimes, even after taking into account the pollution caused by the mining of metals for batteries,” writes Krisher.

An analysis by the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative and Climate Interactive has found that planting a trillion trees would only prevent 0.27 degrees of warming by 2100, reports Maxine Joselow for The Washington Post. “Trees are great. I personally love to be out in the forests as much as I possibly can,” says Prof. John Sterman. “But the reality is very simple: You can plant a trillion trees, and even if they all survived, which wouldn’t happen, it just wouldn’t make that much difference to the climate.”

Merritt Jenkins MBA '21 co-founded Kodama Systems, a startup developing a semiautonomous timber harvesting machine to remove tree and debris from forests and bury them in an effort to help combat global warming, reports Christopher Helman for Forbes. “Scientists say burying trees can reduce global warming as well—particularly if those trees would otherwise end up burning or decaying, spewing their stored carbon into the air,” writes Helman.

Researchers at MIT have discovered that the ocean’s color has changed considerably in the last 20 years and is “another warning sign of human-driven climate change,” reports Maria Luisa Paul for The Washington Post. “These ecosystems have taken millions of years to evolve together and be in balance,” says Senior Research Scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz. “Changes in such a short amount of time are not good because they put the whole ecosystem out of balance.”

In this video for Wired, Prof. Anne White explains the nature of nuclear fusion in five levels of increasing difficulty to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. “Fusion is so exciting because it is extraordinarily beautiful physics, which underpins some of the most basic processes in our universe," says White. “Nuclear processes have a tremendously valuable application for humankind, a virtually limitless, clean, safe, carbon-free form of energy.”

Researchers from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are using high-temperature superconducting tape as a key part of the design for their tokamak reactor, reports Tom Clynes for IEEE Spectrum. The researchers believe that “this novel approach will allow it to build a high-performance tokamak that is much smaller and less expensive than would be possible with previous approaches,” Clynes notes.

A study by MIT researchers has found that over 65% of the world’s oceans have changed color over the past 20 years and “human-caused climate change is likely to blame,” reports Rebecca Falconer for Axios. The researchers found that: “Tropical ocean regions near the equator have been particularly affected by this steady change from blue to green,” Falconer notes. 

MIT researchers have found that over the past two decades, the color of the world’s oceans has changed significantly, reports Talib Visram for Fast Company. The change “is likely due to human-induced climate change,” explains Visram. “The color shifts matter in that they signal changes in ecosystem balance, which have the power to disrupt fragile marine food webs.”

CNN reporter Jack Guy spotlights a new study co-authored by researchers at MIT, which shows that the ocean’s color has changed considerably over the last 20 years and human-caused climate change is likely responsible. “All changes are causing an imbalance in the natural organization of ecosystems,” says senior research scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz. “Such imbalance will only get worse over time if our oceans keep heating.”

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered that the ocean’s hue has changed significantly over the last 20 years, reports Laura Baisas for Popular Science. “A shift in ocean color is an indication that ecosystems within the surface may also be changing,” writes Baisas. “While the team can’t point to exactly how marine ecosystems are changing to reflect the shift, they are quite sure that human-induced climate change is likely behind it.”

A new study led by a team including researchers at MIT has found that more than half of the world’s ocean has changed color in the last 20 years, reports Coco Liu for Bloomberg. “The color shift could be caused by changes in plankton communities that are critical to the marine food chain,” writes Liu. “And biodiversity isn’t the only thing at stake: The shift could also affect how much carbon dioxide the ocean takes up, since different types of plankton have different abilities to absorb it."