News and Outreach: John Reilly

Includes commentary by John Reilly and climate change calculator based on methodology co-developed by Adam Schlosser

Vicki Ekstrom | Laur Fisher | MIT Climate CoLab

Solar panel system wins $10,000 prize for technology that makes energy and water more accessible in the developing world

An MIT initiative is using the global crowd to help solve climate change. And with the United Nations’ climate agreement anticipated to fall short of the 2 degree Celsius carbon emissions target, it’s never been a more critical time to take this approach.

MIT’s Climate CoLab initiative is a growing community of 50,000 people from around the world who work together online through a series of interrelated contests focused on different aspects of the climate change problem. Yesterday, MIT hosted the Crowds and Climate conference, where the Climate CoLab awarded its 2015 contest winners.

Eden Full from the non-profit SunSaluter won the $10,000 Grand Prize for its technology that makes energy and water more accessible in the developing world. Their product uses gravity and water to rotate a solar panel throughout the day, generating 30 percent more electricity than a standard panel and four liters of clean drinking water each 24-hour period. The rotator is cheaper than motorized solar trackers and has already achieved success: there are already 130 SunSaluters in 16 countries.

"This prize is especially important now," said Full, founder of the project. "We just decided that SunSaluter will become fully volunteer-led, supported by our non-profit and corporate partners. This funding will go toward making that possible."

In addition, two proposals received honorable mention awards:

• A national campaign on energy conservation and renewable energy in Indian schools that is working towards building a network of energy ambassadors. The campaign already has support from the Indian government, and is well on its way to fostering a more environmentally-aware generation of Indians.
• A mechanism for internalizing marine emissions that combines charging a levy on emissions from international maritime shipping, with a fuel levy on fuel consumption by domestic shipping

These proposals were selected by Robert Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative; Jason Jay, director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative; John Reilly, co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

The grand prize and honorable mention awards were selected from the 34 winners of the 24 contests run on the Climate CoLab in 2015. The winners are a diverse group of non-profits, entrepreneurs, scholars and climate experts, students, business people, and concerned citizens looking to confront the climate challenge, who hail from 11 countries.

The Climate CoLab also announced the winner of its United States Climate Action Plan contest, which sought regional solutions to climate change. Unlike the other contests, which target specific sub-problems that contribute to climate change, this contest asked participants to take different actions and combine them to form a regional strategy.

The winner for the United States Climate Action Plan contest suggested a pathway to engineer cities so that they are built for livability, sustainability, resiliency, energy-efficiency and affordability.

An important addition to this round of contests is a tool — and a team of climate modelers — to help people to evaluate the impact their ideas will have on global emissions. The public can also combine regional plans to form global strategies. The Global Climate Action Plan contest is still open and accepting submissions until Oct. 17th.

All the winners were recognized at the Crowds and Climate conference, held this week alongside MIT’s Solve conference. Crowds and Climate brought together leaders from businesses, non-profit organizations, governments, and communities around the world to advance an online global problem-solving effort to more effectively tackle climate change. This bottom-up approach enables large communities of people to work together to shift business practices, influence policy makers, and reshape public attitudes and behavior on climate change.

“Our goal is to open up the elite conference rooms and meeting halls where climate strategies are developed today and bring that discussion into an online forum where anyone with a good idea can contribute,” says Professor Thomas Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the MIT Sloan School of Management and principal investigator for the Climate CoLab project.

“We are very proud of this year’s winners, and we see this as just the beginning of new ways to use our global collective intelligence to tackle important societal problems like climate change.”

The Joint Program is a cosponsor of the Crowds & Climate conference.

Photo: Grand prize and honorable mention award winners, with Professor Thomas Malone (center) and Laur Fisher (second from right) of the MIT Climate CoLab (Photo by Justin Saglio)

Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions could have big benefits in the U.S., according to a report released today by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including thousands of avoided deaths from extreme heat, billions of dollars in saved infrastructure expenses, and prevented destruction of natural resources and ecosystems.

The report, “Climate Change in the United States: Benefits of Global Action,” relies on research developed at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change to estimate the effects of climate change on 22 sectors in six areas: health, infrastructure, electricity, water resources, agriculture and forestry, and ecosystems. The report compares two possible futures: one with significant global action on climate change, and one in which greenhouse gases continue to rise.

“Understanding the risks posted by future climate change informs policy decisions designed to address those risks,” says John Reilly, co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “This report quantifies the risks we might face by taking no action.”

The MIT researchers developed two suites of future climate scenarios, socioeconomic scenarios, and technological assumptions that serve as the foundation of the EPA report’s findings. In the first scenario, no new constraints were placed on greenhouse gas emissions. In the second, global warming was limited to 2 degrees Celsius through global climate action.

Research groups across the country then built on the scenarios developed at MIT to study how different sectors in the U.S. would fare under each future scenarios. The groups studied a diverse range of impacts of climate change according to their own areas of expertise, ranging from lost wages due to extreme temperatures, to damage to bridges from heavy river flows, to destruction of Hawaii’s coral reefs, among others.

The MIT team also contributed heavily to the section of the report focusing on water resources. The report concludes that mitigating greenhouse gas emissions can reduce the risk of both damaging floods and droughts, and prevent future water management issues.

“Water is fundamentally linked to climate.” Reilly says. “Water needs to be in the right place at the right time. So as temperatures rise and precipitation patterns shift, you run the risk of having a mismatch between demand for water and the available supply in an area.”

The report is part of the ongoing Climate Impacts and Risk Analysis (CIRA) program, an EPA-led collaborative modeling effort among teams in the federal government, MIT, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and several consulting firms.

The scenarios developed at MIT serve as a common tie between the results produced by the many teams participating in the project. Each team used the MIT scenarios as inputs to their own modeling tools, uniting all of the estimates in the report with a set of shared assumptions about emissions growth and possible changes in future climate.

The report summarizes more than 35 studies that were individually peer reviewed in scientific journals. The full report and related materials are available at epa.gov/cira.

John M. Reilly | Co-director, MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

Worldwide, people are learning to live with less gas, but that's a habit hard to keep.

The price of oil has fallen nearly 60% since peaking in June, and lately there's been a lot of ink and pixels devoted to the question of whether oil prices will plunge even further or whether they will shoot right back up. An even bigger issue is whether prices will stay at these very low levels.

While I doubt oil prices will fall much more — how much further could they reasonably tumble? Perhaps another $20 or so? — history suggests we can expect prices to remain low for the foreseeable future. What's playing out right now in the oil market is likely the same supply-demand dynamic we've seen over and over: several years of extremely high oil prices followed by decades of low prices. The twin oil shocks of the 1970s, for instance, resulted in 20 to 25 years of low prices.

Of course, things are different today — but not that much different. Over the past six or seven years, oil has been relatively expensive, often trading at over $100 a barrel. During that time, both the supply and demand sides of the equation have responded.

On the supply side, high prices have spurred investment in oil and gas exploration. Even as OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) has maintained steady production, the U.S. is experiencing a drilling revival and the shale industry is booming. Oil production is up in other countries, too. Canada has boosted its crude oil production, as have Russia and Libya. With more oil on the market, prices predictably have fallen.

On the demand side, many developed countries — including the U.S. — are using less oil.Policies such as CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) have helped improve the fuel economy of cars and light trucks. Consumers, meanwhile, have recently demanded higher-mileage cars.

There are sociological forces driving oil prices down, as well. For instance, people are more likely to live in cities (rather than car-critical suburbs) and choosing to walk or bike more.

The upshot is that unless the world changes dramatically, we should expect oil prices to remain low for at least the next 10 years. On the supply side, investments in production will continue to bear fruit; and history suggests the forces on the demand side will play out for another decade or two — or at least until people forget about high prices.

Read the full article here.