September 18, 2024

Liftoff: The Climate Project at MIT takes flight

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.”

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August 22, 2024

How Simple Monitors Can Prevent Air Pollution-Related Illness

Air pollution is the world’s second-largest cause of death globally, leading to 8.1 million premature deaths annually from lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema, among other diseases. Regular forest fires are a reminder for many in the U.S. that our air quality can be precarious, but in much of the world’s cities, foul air has been a fact of life for decades. In this article, a group of researchers including Benjamin Krebs, discuss the importance of air quality monitors and how tracking can be improved. Read the full story at Time Magazine.

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August 20, 2024

The Case for a Clean Energy Marshall Plan

For decades, global integration—of trade, of politics, of technology—was seen as a natural law. Today, integration has been replaced by fragmentation. Geopolitical frictions exist across global supply chains, for vehicles, minerals, computer chips, and more. Against this backdrop, the clean energy transition remains the most important planetary challenge. It also presents the greatest economic opportunity: it will be the largest capital formation event in human history. In an article on Foreign Affairs, MIT Institute Innovation Fellow Brian Deese discusses his thoughts on how the fight against climate change can renew American leadership.

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Clean Investment
Monitor

The Clean Investment Monitor (CIM) is a joint project of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) and the Rhodium Group. The CIM tracks public and private investments in climate technologies in the United States. Through this data and analysis, the CIM provides insights into investment trends, the effects of federal and state policies, and on-the-ground progress in the U.S. towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The CIM covers dozens of different technologies and their input components across all sectors of the economy, including for clean electricity and transportation, building electrification, low-emission industrial production, and carbon management.

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Climate Action
Through Education

The MIT Climate Action Through Education (CATE) program, directed by Professor Christopher R. Knittel, has developed an MIT-informed interdisciplinary, place-based climate change curriculum for U.S. high school teachers in the following core disciplines: History/Social Science, English/Language Arts, Math, and Science.

Curricular materials – labs, units, lessons, projects – will be aligned with Next Generation Science Standards, and MA education standards. The solutions-focused curriculum aims to inform students about the causes and consequences of anthropogenic climate change, while equipping them with the knowledge and sense of agency to contribute to climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience.

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Driving Towards
Seamless Public
EV Charging

Widespread electric vehicle (EV) adoption is critical to confronting climate change – but a lack of sufficient public charging infrastructure is holding many potential EV drivers back. A team of researchers from Harvard and the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research will work to accelerate progress on public EV charging as a gating requirement to achieving widespread EV adoption. The team will contribute by working directly with stakeholders and stakeholder groups to identify barriers to seamless public EV charging, build consensus for solutions, and advance those solutions.

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The Roosevelt
Project

Transitioning the United States economy toward deep decarbonization will have unequally distributed effects, positive and negative, across socio-economic groups, geographies and economic sectors. The concerns of workers and communities adversely affected by the transition must inform the discussion around decarbonization, associated policy changes and institutional development. The goal of the Roosevelt Project is to provide an analytical basis for charting a path to a low carbon economy in a way that promotes high quality job growth, minimizes worker and community dislocation, and harnesses the benefits of energy technologies for regional economic development.

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