CS3 In the News

For millennia, Egypt has relied on the Nile River for its agriculture. So Egyptians were understandably upset in 2011 when their upstream neighbor, Ethiopia, announced plans to build a hydroelectric dam that threatened to reduce the flow out of the spigot: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), sited along a major tributary that contributes most of the water flowing into the Nile. Two years ago, then prime minister Mohammed Morsi even threatened to go to war.

In an effort to break the stalemate, Kenneth Strzepek ’75, SM ’77, PhD ’80 led a nonpartisan panel of 17 experts convened last November through MIT’s new Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) to investigate the issue and forge a common solution. MIT Spectrum spoke this spring with the alumnus—who is currently a research scientist with the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the MIT Center for Global Change Science—about the “great moral dilemma” at the heart of the conflict, and the value of objective advice.

What is your background on water issues in the Nile Basin?

I did my PhD at MIT on water issues in Egypt. For the last 10 years, I’ve been working with the World Bank on the Nile Basin Initiative to come up with a comprehensive framework agreement between all the sovereign states in the region on how to manage the Nile.

What is it that draws you to work on water issues?

Water is such a metaphor for life. At one point, I thought I might go into the ministry. When I went to Africa as an MIT sophomore, I saw the great impact of water on people’s lives, and I realized water resources development was a way I could integrate my faith with my profession by providing physical water as well as spiritual water to people.

What are the roots of the conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia?

Rather than one principle on allocating water across boundaries, the UN has two principles—that all people should have equal access to water within their boundaries, and also that there should be no harm to anybody who is currently developed downstream. Egypt has been using all of this water for thousands of years; if anyone upstream uses some of it, that violates the “do no harm” principle. On the other hand, if 75% of their water comes from Ethiopia, how is it equitable that [Ethiopia] can’t take a drop? So we have this great moral dilemma.

What were the major questions you discussed?

When this dam is completed and filled, it is going to lead to some additional evaporation, and less water going to Egypt, though some suggest that joint operation of the GERD and the Egyptian Aswan High Dam (AHD) could reduce total losses. Could the impact of water loss on Egypt’s economy be offset by Ethiopia selling some of the GERD’s low-cost, clean electricity to Egypt so there would be benefits to both countries? We also knew that since the capacity of the dam is greater than the annual flow of the river, the issue of filling the dam was critical—if Ethiopia started filling the dam and there was a drought, could they stand to wait for years before resuming?

What kind of debates did you have among the members on your panel?

Most of the conclusions were quite universal. When you are not party to a debate, it’s not as impassioned for you. None of us have that history of distrust that the governments have. When Egypt says “We’ve been using that water for 10,000 years,” Ethiopians will say, “Yeah, our water!” Most of us saw that if this was all one country, there would still be upstream-downstream debates, but you could work out a win-win solution.

What are some of the recommendations you made?

The first conclusion is the need to manage the dam cooperatively with the AHD in Egypt. No river with two reservoirs of such size without a plan to operate them in concert will benefit both parties. Not to manage them cooperatively would be a recipe for disaster. Secondly, the dam is going to produce a lot of electricity, but right now there is no sales agreement or connection to export it out of Ethiopia. There needs to be a power plan in place to bring electricity to users or Ethiopia will have no incentive to let water out of the dam through its turbines so it can reach Egypt.

How have the countries responded to the report?

Both Egypt and Ethiopia have commented on the report, and although they expressed some reservations, a week after we presented it, the countries signed a declaration of principles, which is basically an agreement to agree. We can’t know how much impact our report had on that decision, but it was in their hands when they signed the agreement. They are still far away from agreeing to the specific plan to operate the GERD, but the report and follow-up discussions in Cairo and Addis Ababa have outlined a process to facilitate the technical steps towards developing such a plan.

What do you think your report achieved?

A nonpartisan, world-class, international group convened by MIT and including a number of MIT experts has outlined the technical issues facing Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt, and has helped put a boundary to negotiations among the countries. We wanted to make this public so there would be some sound technical information out there as they continue their negotiations. We have offered an objective assessment of the current situation and built connections among key water decision makers involved in the basin. I am very proud of what MIT and J-WAFS did; I pray this activity has and will continue to reduce conflict in the region.

Read more about the Grand Ethopian Renaissance Dam report at MIT News.

By Daniel A. Gross

Most economists agree that if we want to efficiently reduce CO₂ emissions, we’ll need to put a price on carbon. But a nagging question remains. How are we supposed to figure out a price for an invisible, amorphous gas that underpins the economy and transforms the climate?

It’s relatively easy to put a price on a t-shirt or a pound of apples. Calculate the cost of all the inputs, from raw materials to labor to shipping. Then add a margin for profit, and the product is ready to be sold.

Why do the costs of carbon vary from country to country?

The costs of carbon, by contrast, are diffuse and diverse—which helps explain why the estimated prices of CO₂ vary wildly across countries and companies. The US government uses an estimate of $33 per ton of CO₂, while Sweden uses the strikingly high figure of $168. In internal calculations, Google Inc. uses $14 per ton, while (perhaps surprisingly) oil companies like BP and Exxon-Mobil use fairly high prices of $40 and $60, respectively.

So where do these carbon price tags come from? Whenever you see dollar amounts tacked on to tons of carbon, economists likely used one of two methods to calculate them.

Calculation methods vary too

The first method is like a very long addition problem. The strategy, according to World Bank senior economist Stephane Hallegate, “is to look at the damages on the environment and societies and people that one ton of carbon would create.” In other words, economists use computer models to tally up all the negative impacts of carbon, and set a carbon price high enough to offset those costs. “If the damages are going to be high, that justifies quite a high carbon price,” explains Niven Winchester, an MIT environmental economist.

In practice, however, adding up the costs of carbon can be extremely tedious. “You’re solving a puzzle,” he says—but the puzzle has a huge number of finicky pieces. A dizzying array of factors can affect the estimated cost of carbon. For example: How much will solar energy cost in 30 years? How much meat will humans consume, one century from now? How much CO₂ would cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt? Because there are so many factors to estimate, MIT outsources its calculations to a massive computing center 100 miles west of Boston, the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). Unlike simplified models of the economy, “integrated models” may generate datasets of many terabytes — a reflection of the many environmental and economic processes that researchers hope to capture.

Read the full article at roadtoparis.info

Report highlights enormous potential and discusses pathways toward affordable solar energy.

By David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

According to present plans, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) — now under construction across the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia — will be the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa, and one of the 12 largest in the world. But controversy has surrounded the project ever since it was announced in 2011 — especially concerning its possible effects on Sudan and Egypt, downstream nations that rely heavily on the waters of the Nile for agriculture, industry, and drinking water.

To help address the ongoing dispute, MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Laboratory (J-WAFS) convened a small, invitation-only workshop of international experts last November to discuss the technical issues involved in the construction and operation of the dam, in hopes of providing an independent, impartial evaluation to aid in decision-making. The group’s final report, which was shared with the three concerned governments in early February, is being released publicly today.

On March 23, the three governments signed an agreement to enter negotiations for final settlement of issues surrounding the dam’s operations. Though the agreement is preliminary, it marks a significant step forward.

Professor John H. Lienhard V, the director of J-WAFS, was among the organizers of the November workshop held at MIT. He says that the group was carefully selected to include top experts on water resources engineering and economics and on the Nile Basin, and was charged with reviewing the current state of technical knowledge on the GERD and its potential downstream impacts. The idea was “to give advice, and do it impartially,” Lienhard says.

“We went out of our way to find people who know about large dams and large rivers, and who are not affiliated with any of the three governments,” including people with “hands-on experience with dams of this scale,” Lienhard says. The meeting also included observers from Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. After the report was shared, members of the group also met with officials in Egypt and Ethiopia to review the technical issues.

Technical issues

The working group developed consensus recommendations, which were incorporated into the 17-page report. It reflects agreement reached at the November workshop, says Lienhard, who is also the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Food at MIT.

The report raises five technical issues that require resolution. First, the GERD will join the Aswan High Dam as a second large reservoir on the Nile River. Egypt and Ethiopia need to formulate a plan for coordinating the operation of these two dams, so as to equitably share Nile waters during periods of reservoir-filling and prolonged drought. Nowhere in the world are two such large dams on the same river operated without close coordination.

Second, the design of the GERD requires that a very large “saddle dam” be built to prevent water stored behind the GERD from spilling out of the northwestern end of the reservoir. The risks associated with a possible failure of this saddle dam may not have been fully appreciated, and must be carefully managed.

Third, there is concern about the location and capacity of the GERD’s low-level release outlets to provide water to Egypt and Sudan during the reservoir’s filling or periods of drought.

Fourth, the hydropower generated from the GERD exceeds Ethiopia’s current domestic power market, and it will therefore need to be sold outside Ethiopia. A plan is needed for such sales, and for the construction of transmission lines to regional markets. A power trade agreement will ensure that the Ethiopian people receive a good financial return on their investment.

Fifth, the ongoing accumulation of salts in the agricultural lands of the Nile Delta could accelerate rapidly; additionally, the GERD will enable Sudan to increase irrigation withdrawals upstream, further reducing the water available to Egypt. Studies are urgently needed to identify the magnitude of these potential problems, and to mitigate their impact.

Managing the flow

Perhaps the biggest question concerning the new dam is how Ethiopia will manage the process of filling its huge reservoir, whose capacity equals more than a year’s flow of the Blue Nile. Egypt has expressed concerns that if the reservoir is filled too quickly, it could severely diminish the flow upon which Egypt depends; 60 percent of the nation’s water comes from the Blue Nile.

“The Egyptians are very concerned about what a reduction in the amount of water would mean to them,” says Kenneth Strzepek, a research scientist at MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and a co-chairman of the November workshop.

Dale Whittington, a professor at the University of North Carolina and a co-editor of the MIT report, says: “Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan are currently hoping that a team of international consultants can quickly find technical solutions to these challenging problems to which they can agree. From our perspective, this is likely wishful thinking. The hard negotiations ahead will require that foreign policy and water experts from each of the three countries have a shared understanding of the technical issues and a willingness to compromise while hammering out detailed agreements on reservoir operation policy, power trade agreements, dam safety, and salinization control.”

But, Whittington says, “A shared knowledge base and modeling framework is unfortunately lacking, despite over $100 million in investment by the Nile Basin Initiative over more than a decade of engagement.”

Don Blackmore, former executive director of the Murray-Darling River Basin Authority in Australia and current chair of the International Water Management Institute, says, “Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia will try to work with their consultants to solve these five problems, but if these countries request assistance, we believe that the international community has an obligation to step forward.”

Other nations can potentially play three roles, says Blackmore, who was not involved in compiling the new report: providing impartial scientific advice; bringing legal expertise and experience on transboundary waters to help craft the text of technical agreements; and serving to arbitrate disputes that arise over time.

Given the potential for conflict among the nations dependent upon this water, Blackmore adds, “The international community needs to focus on the Nile as a matter of urgency.”

By Cassie Martin | Oceans at MIT

Earlier this year, weather and climate agencies around the world declared 2014 the warmest year on record, even though the increase in global mean temperature has slowed. This warming “hiatus” has puzzled climate scientists, as it deviates from climate models which project a continuing temperature increase. Climate expert Jochem Marotzke visited MIT last week to deliver the 15^th annual Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture “Recent Global Temperature Trends: What do they tell us about anthropogenic climate change?” in which he discussed the hiatus as well as the abilities and limitations of climate models.

Marotzke is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and was an MIT EAPS faculty member in the 1990s. He has spent his career researching the role of the ocean in climate and climate change, and recently expanded his interests to include multi-year to decadal climate prediction. “If you look at other central indicators of global climate, such as sea ice melt, ocean heat uptake, and sea-level rise, they show that global warming is continuing,” Marotzke said. “But this particular indicator, global surface temperature, is rising at a much lower rate now. This is something that as a climate research community we need to take seriously; we need to understand it and communicate the issues about it.”

For the past 15 years, increases in global mean surface temperature has slowed contrary to what climate model simulations predicted. Known as the warming “hiatus”, this phenomenon is largely due to natural variability: Cyclical climate processes such as La Niña and fluctuations in the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface can disrupt the warming trend. Additionally, the oceans absorb an enormous amount of excess heat energy trapped by the atmosphere—as much as 93 percent, Marotzke said. Light-reflecting aerosols from volcanoes also contribute to the slow down.

The failure of climate models to predict this hiatus has long perplexed scientists and bred some public mistrust in climate models. Climate change skeptics claim the hiatus is proof that global warming doesn’t exist, and that climate models overestimate greenhouse gases’ warming effects. Marotzke ardently disagrees. He shared with the audience a study published in Nature earlier this year in which he and co-author Piers Forster of the University of Leeds analyzed 114 model simulations of 15-year global mean temperature trends since the beginning of the 20^th Century. If their analysis showed that models consistently overestimated or underestimated the amount of warming compared to real-world observations, then the models must have a systematic bias.

Fortunately the simulations performed fairly well, producing a range of predictions for each 15-year period in which actual observed temperature trends for those periods fell. Even if the observed trends at times fell close to range edges, they were not biased to one side or the other. Although the models didn’t accurately predict the current warming hiatus, which is not unusual, they also failed to predict other accelerated warming or hiatus events. In fact, the models underestimated warming in some periods compared to the observations. “The claim that models systematically overestimate warming from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is unfounded,” said Marotzke.

To find out what these simulated short-term temperature trends actually tell us about the climate, Marotzke and Forster performed a multiple regression analysis, which aimed to identify the most significant factors contributing to the trend. For shorter 15-year periods, the analysis found random natural variability in the climate system had the largest influence—approximately three times the impact of all other physical factors combined. Only when Marotzke and Forster analyzed model simulations of global mean temperature trends spanning 62 years did differences in factors including ocean heat absorption, greenhouse gas concentration, and aerosol pollution begin to make a noticeable difference.

In other words, modeling 15-year-long periods only shows the impact of natural variations in the climate system. To see anthropogenic influences on climate change, we have to look at the bigger picture. “The hiatus masks anthropogenic warming,” said Marotzke. “It is a huge distraction, but an incredibly fascinating one.”

The 15th Annual Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture was sponsored by the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the MIT Center for Global Change Science. The lecture series honors the memory of Professor Henry Kendall (1926-1999), a 1990 Nobel Laureate, a longtime member of MIT’s physics faculty, and an ardent environmentalist. A founding member and chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists, he played a leading role in organizing scientific community statements on global problems, including the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity in 1992 and the Call for Action at the Kyoto Climate Summit in 1997.

Watch the full lecture here.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Dip a beaker into any portion of the world’s oceans, and you’re likely to pull up a swirling mix of planktonic inhabitants. The oceans are teeming with more than 5,000 species of phytoplankton — microscopic plants in a kaleidoscope of shapes and sizes. Together, phytoplankton anchor the ocean’s food chain, supplying nutrients to everything from single-celled organisms on up to fish and whales.

Through photosynthesis, these tiny organisms supply more than half the world’s oxygen. When these plants die, they drift to the ocean bottom, or evaporate into the air as carbon — a process that generates more than half the world’s cycling carbon.

Phytoplankton play a fundamental role in regulating Earth’s climate. But figuring out exactly how these organisms contribute to climate change is a tricky undertaking, primarily because they are so diverse: Any given species may have a set of genetic or physical characteristics entirely different from any other, leading to different behaviors and habitats.

Such diversity can appear, at the outset, “bewilderingly complex,” says Mick Follows, an associate professor of oceanography in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). He says wrestling such diversity into global climate models is a futile task. But lumping phytoplankton into a big “black box” can be equally unenlightening.

Instead, Follows is working at an intermediary level, developing models of marine microbes at the cellular and community levels, to tease out fundamental processes that may be worked into global climate models.

“We’re starting to open up the black box of simple models,” Follows says. “There’s a balance: Do you want to understand every detail of the world, or do you want to be able to stand back and have a big picture view? Somehow you have to keep circling around it from both directions to develop that view.”

For more than 20 years, Follows has worked as a research scientist at MIT, answering such questions. He was granted tenure as an associate professor in 2013.

“I’m now interacting with undergraduates in a way I wasn’t doing in my little research hole, and I have a whole new appreciation for the broader aspects of MIT,” Follows says. “I feel much more connected to the Institute as a whole.”

An ocean of opportunity

While growing up, Follows didn’t expect he would end up in academia: School wasn’t a priority then. 

Follows grew up in a small town in the British region of East Anglia, and fondly remembers “riding bikes around the countryside, and living quite freely.”

His father was a typesetter at a local newspaper, and his mother worked in a men’s clothing shop. Both his parents have roots in Manchester — “a downtrodden, post-industrial place,” Follows says — where his mother was nevertheless able to win a scholarship to a good public school.

“She worked in shops, and in the field, but would be quoting Shakespeare,” Follows says of his mother’s path.

Follows was less inclined toward school, and ended up leaving high school. “I don’t think people think of me this way now, but I was a bit of a loudmouth,” Follows recalls.

He ultimately continued his studies at a community college, and spent a year at an art school — a fact that he’d rather overlook: “My work was rubbish — terrible!”

He then decided to pursue studies in math and physics at the University of Leeds. “I liked the organization [the subjects] brought to the world,” Follows says. While exploring graduate programs, he was particularly drawn to atmospheric science. Follows enrolled at the University of East Anglia, where he earned a master’s degree and a PhD in atmospheric sciences, studying atmospheric circulation of ozone. In his research, he began to see parallels between the atmosphere and the oceans.

“How ozone gets down from the stratosphere to troposphere, there’s an analogous process, flipped, when you think of how nutrients get from the subsurface to the surface of the ocean, and I started thinking more about the ocean,” Follows says.

In particular, Follows felt there was an opportunity to contribute to a then-emerging field. “While coupled circulation and chemistry models were established for the atmosphere, the same was just spinning up in the oceans,” Follows says. “It seemed the ocean world was a bit less crowded, and there were interesting problems.”

Follows credits his colleague John Marshall, now the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography, for providing his path to MIT. Follows was still at the University of East Anglia when he first met Marshall, then a postdoc at Imperial College London.

“Being as I was the local guy, I said, ‘I’ll show you a place where we can go get a meal,’” Follows recalls. “I sat next to John and said, ‘Are you looking forward to going to MIT?’ And he kind of frowned as he does, and said, ‘You want to go?’”

A few weeks later, Marshall called Follows about a postdoc position opening up at Imperial College. Follows accepted the position, and then after a year, received a similar call from Marshall, this time to MIT. In 1992, Follows arrived on campus as a postdoc, and stayed for the next 20 years as a research scientist.

From a black box to the real world

At MIT, Follows has devoted his research to understanding the biological processes of phytoplankton and other microbes that contribute to the Earth’s carbon cycle. Initially, though, every microbe seemed to blur together.

He eventually teamed up with Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor in Environmental Studies at MIT, who discovered Prochlorococcus —the most abundant photosynthetic organism in the world. Chisholm was studying subpopulations of Prochlorococcus, and mapping individual communities in the ocean.

“Suddenly there was a beautiful system where organisms that are almost the same, but not quite, are taking different habitats, occupying different niches in the environment,” Follows says.

Chisholm’s data of diverse microbes stirred up an idea: What if the diversity in phytoplankton could be modeled based on natural selection? Could one predict the makeup of a microbial community, based on its inhabitants’ traits? It was a simple idea, and yet no one had attempted to realize it in global models.

Follows and his group developed a model — essentially a virtual ocean environment — in which a realistic set of microorganisms with diverse traits can interact and compete. The model determines which traits are the fittest phenotypes — the ones that will dominate in a given ocean community.

“I think that in the field, we had reached a bit of a stalemate, where you would just keep adding more parameters and tuning more knobs to fit the real world,” Follows says. “We turned around and said, ‘Let’s build a videogame — make an environment, throw some players in, ask how the system organizes itself, and acknowledge that in the real world, there is a huge diversity of organisms.’”

This radical thinking earned Follows a grant from the Moore Foundation in 2007, which he used to start the Darwin Project, a cross-campus collaboration between oceanographers, biogeochemists, and marine microbiologists at MIT to develop global ocean-circulation models built around fundamental microbial processes.

Follows is continuing to run the Darwin Project, and just recently became a member of SCOPE — the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology — a five-year project based at the University of Hawaii. He and his fellow researchers will measure and model ocean communities around Hawaii, which are thought to be representative of a large swath of the North Pacific. Their goal is similar to Follows’ original vision: to elucidate how such tiny organisms can have such huge climatic impacts.

“The climate system is incredibly tied up with life,” Follows says. “You can think of man in the same way as those first photosynthetic bacteria that changed the planet in a radical way, to a completely different set of requirements if you wanted to survive on that planet. Are we that thing now? Or are we a blip? It’s interesting to put it in perspective.”

“Sound climate policy makes for good politics.” In a nutshell, that was the message conveyed by a high-ranking delegation of government, civil society and business representatives from British Columbia, who discussed experiences with their province’s carbon tax at an Earth Day Colloquium organized on April 13, 2015 by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy (CEEPR). More than 200 participants convened in the Walker Memorial’s spacious Morss Hall to hear first-hand how British Columbia was able to introduce a carbon price, and what effects it has had on the local economy and the environment. Comments by MIT faculty and a local State Senator underscored the economic merits of carbon pricing and its prospects as a policy option for Massachusetts.

MIT Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart opened the event with a brief welcome address, handing over to Parliamentary Secretary for Energy Literacy and the Environment of British Columbia, Mike Bernier. In his keynote address, Bernier described the history, design and early impacts of his province’s carbon tax, which he praised for shifting costs from desirable to undesirable activities, namely from employment and investment to pollution. Because the tax is revenue-neutral, he explained, it has helped limit carbon emissions and fuel use while reducing individual and corporate income taxes, effectively boosting the British Columbian economy. “What we’ve been doing in British Columbia has not gone unnoticed”, Bernier noted, pointing to growing interest in his province’s experience with carbon pricing from the United States and elsewhere.

Moderating the event, MITEI Director Robert Armstrong introduced the remaining panelists and invited each to address a series of detailed questions about the British Columbian experience. Merran Smith, Director of Clean Energy Canada, began by reflecting on the political context at the time the carbon tax was introduced in 2008. Widespread public demand for climate action, coupled with bold leadership from the province’s then-Premier Gordon Campbell, were among the factors Smith credited with successful passage of the necessary legislation.

Susanna Laaksonen-Craig, Head of the Climate Action Secretariat in the British Columbia Ministry of Environment, provided further detail on the technical design and implementation of the carbon tax. In her remarks, she reminded the audience that the tax had been lauded as a “textbook example of a carbon tax” by former MIT professor and statesman George P. Shultz.

Speaking on behalf of the private sector, Ross Beaty, Founder and Chairman of the Pan American Silver Corporation and Executive Chairman of Alterra Power Corporation, conceded that companies usually oppose new taxes. Still, so Beaty, corporate leaders increasingly acknowledge the need for climate action, and British Columbia’s local economy, in particular, has seen far-reaching impacts from climate change. Enlightened companies were thus ready to embrace political leadership when the carbon tax was introduced, quickly seeking ways to innovate and reduce compliance costs under the stable policy framework it offered.

Christopher Knittel, the William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, commented on the carbon tax from an economist’s point of view. Despite almost universal agreement among economists on the merits of carbon pricing, he noted that few jurisdictions have decided to implement this policy option. On the contrary, the United States has recently seen a resurgence of rigid performance standards, which not only tend to impose higher cost than the externalities they avoid, but also have unintended consequence such as rebound effects. By contrast, he argued, a carbon price has positive spillover effects, such as revenue generation to reduce other taxes.

Drawing the discussion to a more local context, Massachusetts State Senator Michael Barrett of the 3rd Middlesex District answered questions on his own bill aimed at introducing a fee on carbon-based fuels in Massachusetts. All the revenue, he explained, would return to taxpayers by way of rebates, distributed in such a way that low-income households pay less for pollution than high-income households. Because of its revenue neutrality, moreover, the fee – so Barrett – does not fit the legal definition of a tax, allowing state officials who have pledged to oppose new taxes to support his bill.

An engaged discussion with the audience ensued, reflecting interest in carbon taxation as a policy option for Massachusetts and the U.S., and leading to detailed questions to the panel about policy design, impacts and ways to avoid hardship for different segments of society. Secretary Bernier’s parting advice to Senator Barrett and the largely Massachusetts-based audience was to “take the politics out of carbon pricing.” But once introduced, he added, it will limit pollution without harming the economy.

A video of the full event can be viewed here.

	Photo: Christopher Harting

by Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Joint Program researchers Prof. Valerie Karplus and Prof. Noelle Selin receive grants from from the Environmental Solutions Initiative to examine how current efforts to reduce coal use in China affect toxic air pollution across Asia.
 
How can sustainable consumption in U.S. cities be fostered? Can the ocean floor be mined in an ecologically benign way? What are the health risks associated with the mining of rare metals used in energy-efficient products like photovoltaic devices? And how can truly promising environmental solutions have a better chance of becoming real economic policies?

These are some of the complex questions that researchers at MIT will now be able to tackle, with support from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). The initiative was established last May to inspire solutions to major environmental problems through collaborative partnership.

In response to a call for research proposals, the ESI received 59 submissions. In March, the initiative awarded seed grants of up to $200,000 to nine research groups over the next two years.

ESI director Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the seed grants have jumpstarted new collaborations among a variety of disciplines across campus.

“I was really pleased that so many people reached out to colleagues and looked at new collaborations, which was exactly what we were hoping would occur as a result of this process,” Solomon says. “There’s a lot of new thinking here. … I’m really pleased that people began those conversations. I think they’re just going to continue to grow and blossom as this initiative moves forward.”

The nine winning proposals fell into four main themes: sustainability; metals and mining; healthy cities; and climate/risk/mitigation.

Sustainability

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, humans have consumed more material and natural resources in the past 50 years than in the entire previous history of human existence. To curb consumption, the environmental community has encouraged the practice of sustainable consumption, using the mantra: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”

But how are U.S. cities — hubs of materialism and consumption — actually practicing sustainable consumption? A group of urban planners, architects, and historians led by Judith Layzer, a professor of environmental policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, will carry out a survey of 285 municipalities to explore the degree to which sustainable consumption goals have been adopted by local governments. The group wrote in its proposal that it hopes the survey will serve as a “valuable resource for cities that aspire to move toward sustainable consumption.”

Finding solutions to major environmental problems often involves input from both technology and policy experts — but it can be frustrating for both parties when they find that reasonable solutions can be difficult to put into practice. A classic example is the shared resource, such as a groundwater aquifer, that is overused to the point where it fails to benefit all parties. A group of engineers and economists, led by Dennis McLaughlin, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Parag Pathak, an associate professor of economics, will examine the behaviors that drive competition for natural resources using game theory, a framework that has been used to analyze cooperative behavior in economics.

“There is a gap between the promise of game theory and the continuing difficulty of designing workable policy solutions to environmental issues,” the team wrote in its grant proposal. “The ESI seed grant program gives us a chance to narrow these gaps, so that the environmental solutions we propose as a community have a better chance of being implemented as real policies.”

Metals and mining

Metals and mining products are increasingly used to support development. For example, they are essential to building wind turbines, solar panels, photovoltaic devices, and lithium-ion batteries.

But as societies depend more on rare metals for products, what impact will rising demand have on the environment? A group of engineers, led by Antoine Allanore, the Thomas B. King Assistant Professor in Metallurgy, and Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering Practice, plans to launch a metals and mining initiative at MIT. As part of the project, the team will organize several symposia on campus that will connect industry stakeholders with MIT researchers to explore issues of sustainable mining.

Rare metals like indium and lanthanide are increasingly mined for use in high-efficiency photovoltaic devices, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and batteries for hybrid cars. The effects of these metals on the environment and human health are unknown. A team of engineers led by John Essigmann, the William R. and Betsy P. Leitch Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering; Bevin Engelward, a professor of biological engineering; and Harold Hemond, the William E. Leonhard Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will combine techniques in geochemistry and cell and molecular toxicology to assess the adverse effects of rare metals in the environment, and their potential impact on human health. Such an assessment, the team wrote in its proposal, should occur before new substances are introduced widely in the environment: “History provides numerous cautionary examples of the great economic and societal costs incurred when knowledge lags behind the deployment of new products.”

Deep below the ocean floor, there exist vast resources of gold, copper, platinum, and other rare metals — resources that are increasingly in demand for use in electronics and energy-efficient products. The world’s first deep-sea mining operation, scheduled to commence in 2017, will dig beneath the Bismarck Sea, off Papua New Guinea, for minerals. But scientists are concerned that mining operations may create currents that carry pollutants up from the deep sea, potentially poisoning marine species and the humans that consume them.

A team led by Thomas Peacock and Pierre Lermusiaux, both associate professors of mechanical engineering, and Glenn Flierl, a professor of oceanography, will develop a detailed ocean model to identify key circulation patterns in the region and determine the biological impacts of the mining operations. The team says the modeling tools developed through this effort “can be applied to any proposed location for the growing field of deep-sea mining.”

Healthy cities

China has some of the world’s worst air pollution, as well as half its mercury emissions, due to its rising use of coal. In the last few years, the country has adopted policies to curb coal use and reduce air pollution. It is unclear, however, whether these measures will be consistent with the air-quality improvements set by newer policies.

A team of economists, engineers, and atmospheric chemists led by Valerie Karplus, an assistant professor of global economics and management, and Noelle Selin, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor in the Engineering Systems Division and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, will examine how current efforts to reduce coal use in China affect toxic air pollution across Asia. The team will also estimate changes in coal demand throughout Asia, as China’s own demand for coal falls. The team’s proposal states: “Our systems approach enables us to fully evaluate and identify effective efforts to address regional air quality, taking into account both the complexity of economic interactions and atmospheric chemical behavior.”

Detailed measurements of air quality, particularly in urban environments, will ultimately help to reduce populations’ exposure to air pollutants. In recent years, advances in sensor technology have offered the promise of sensitive, distributed, urban air-quality networks, although few actually exist. A group of urban planners, atmospheric chemists, and civil engineers plans to address the need for air-quality networks, using “big data.” The team plans to examine air-quality measurements around the MIT campus and in Beijing, and apply advanced data-analysis techniques to gain “quantitative insight” into pollution sources.

This project, the team says, “would represent the first application of machine-learning tools to environmental sensors.” The work will be led by Marta Gonzalez, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; Colette Heald, the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor in Contemporary Technology; Jesse Kroll, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Jinhua Zhao, the Edward H. and Joyce Linde Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Climate/risk/mitigation

Tropical peatlands, swamp forests found mostly in Southeast Asia, are thought to be vast carbon sinks, containing up to 70 billion tons of carbon — about 3 percent of the world’s soil carbon. Over the last 25 years, peatland forests have been cut and drained so that the underlying peat acts not as a sink, but a source, emitting enormous stores of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Policymakers and researchers suggest that controlling these emissions would be a cost-effective way to reduce the world’s total greenhouse-gas emissions. But there’s little knowledge about the physical and biological processes within peatlands that control carbon and methane fluxes. A group of engineers and atmospheric scientists will study soil processes in Brunei, on the island of Borneo, to characterize the flow of carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. The researchers ultimately hope to apply their results to strategies for controlling greenhouse gas emissions. The group includes Charles Harvey, Benjamin Kocar, and Martin Polz of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Shuhei Ono and Roger Summons of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

While two-thirds of greenhouse-gas-induced warming is due to carbon dioxide, other gases, such as methane and halogen-containing gases, contribute significantly to climate change. In the near future, these emissions may increase as a fraction of total greenhouse-gas emissions, as policies to reduce carbon dioxide bear results. As countries transition from coal to natural gas for electricity, more methane may escape into the atmosphere through leaks in natural-gas pipelines.

A team led by Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Assistant Professor in Energy Studies, and Francis O’Sullivan, director of research and analytics at the MIT Energy Initiative, will develop metrics to compare climate impacts of non-carbon dioxide emissions, such as methane. The researchers will use the metrics to identify ways to reduce these emissions, particularly those of methane through the natural-gas supply chain. The team will use these results to inform current U.S. policy, including a new federal initiative to reduce methane. “Climate change mitigation is a multi-gas problem,” the researchers wrote in their grant proposal. “This work will inform important policy decisions that are slated to be made in the next few years.”

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

Panelists at an MIT discussion yesterday on how to improve communication about climate change said that while serious obstacles remain in making the issues and potential solutions clear to the public and political leaders, there is some cause for optimism, especially when the messages focus on readily available solutions.

The discussion, part of the MIT Conversation on Climate Change, was moderated by John Durant, director of the MIT Museum, and introduced by Nate Nickerson, MIT’s vice president for communications. The event — titled “Getting Through on Global Warming: How to Rewire Climate Change Communication” — featured journalists, scientists, and policy experts who deal with the issue of climate change. Durant opened the session by asking, given the often-polarizing nature of the subject, “how the MIT community … can do a better job of contributing to the discussion.”

Chris Mooney, an environmental reporter at the Washington Post, pointed out that rhetoric can quickly give way to action when people are confronted by serious impacts in their own backyards. For example, in Florida, four southern counties most affected by rising sea levels and storm surges are proceeding with serious countermeasures.

In that part of Florida, Mooney said, “the climate debate is not particularly partisan”:  People see the need for action to protect vulnerable coastal lands, and have focused on specific solutions — such as installing one-way valves in storm drains to prevent storm surges from backing up into homes.

Such contrasts between rhetoric and action provide a ray of hope, panelists said. Drezen Prelec, the Digital Equipment Corp. Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said that sudden and unexpected shifts in public opinion — on issues such as smoking and gay marriage — show that rapid changes are possible, even in the face of strong resistance from political leaders.

Judith Layzer, a professor of environmental policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, said that politicians will begin to take action on issues such as limiting greenhouse-gas emissions when it becomes clear that their constituents take the issue seriously enough to vote accordingly. “We only will make progress if we let them know we will vote them out of office,” she said.

Tom Levenson, a professor of science writing and head of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, said that a key to getting people to internalize the importance of climate change is through memorable storytelling. “If you wish to communicate with human beings in ways that they will remember, you need a story,” he said.

Susan Hassol, director of the nonprofit group Climate Communication, said that research has shown that when Republicans who had resisted climate change are presented with potential solutions based on free-market mechanisms, they are three times more likely to accept those rather than solutions based on government regulations or taxes.

“We all want clean air and water and a better world for our kids,” she added — so it’s important to stress “how climate change is affecting these things.”

Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, whose research has shown the potential for stronger hurricanes as a result of climate change, said that he has made a particular effort “not to preach to the converted, but to go to the heart of skepticism.”

Emanuel said he has spoken to numerous groups known for their opposition to measures to curb greenhouse gases, and for skepticism about the human influence on climate — including conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. He believes that such groups’ resistance has to do with their sense of possible solutions involving government actions.

“They have a very narrow perception of what the range of possible solutions is,” Emanuel said. “Once they understand there are solutions out there that they can embrace, then suddenly they start to accept the science.”

These audiences are much more receptive when presented with a panoply of possible actions, Emanuel added, including ones based on market forces, entrepreneurship, and national competitiveness. “There are a lot of things we ought to be embracing that are worth doing anyway,” he said, such as developing low-carbon energy technology that the U.S. might “sell to other countries, instead of buying it from them.”

Such technologies, Emanuel said, could include next-generation nuclear reactors and carbon-capture systems that could allow fossil-fuel power plants to operate with drastically reduced emissions.  

Hassol summed up lessons she has learned from her attempts to communicate about climate change: “We need to stop trying to give science lessons, and talk about the solutions. The sweet spot is on the solution side.”

When it comes to solutions, panelists said, MIT is especially well positioned to take a leadership role. Among many proposals that have been made through MIT’s “Idea Bank” on climate change, the panel discussed the possibility of opening an MIT facility in Washington to educate political leaders and their staffs on climate and energy topics. Another suggestion was the creation of a rapid-response team of impartial experts who could quickly respond to media reports that contain misleading or incorrect information.

Solomon Asaba | The New Times

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for Global Change Science are in advanced stages to start a climate observatory centre in Rwanda, next year, with an aim of collecting atmospheric observations from the slopes of Mt. Karisimbi, a volcano located in the northwest of Rwanda. The project is spearheaded by Prof. Ron Prinn, a professor of atmospheric science, department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the university. The New Times Solomon Asaba had an interview with him.

Excerpts.

Whom are you collaborating with to start this observatory and how much has been achieved so far?

The observatory is a partnership between the Government of Rwanda and the MIT Centre for Global Change Science. We already have in place an interim observatory that has been placed on Mt. Mugogo and is operated mainly by Rwandans.

What kind of information will be obtained at the observatory and who will have access to its final site?

The observatory will measure the composition of air coming from East and South Africa as well as the Middle East and India.

The final site for the observatory is the summit of Mt. Karisimbi. When the Cable Car for ecotourism is complete, all scientists will be in position to access this summit.

How will Rwandans benefit from this kind of modern facility?

If the observatory is successful, it will help educate Rwandans interested in atmospheric science. It will join the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), a global network measuring greenhouse gases and other climate driving agents. Rwandans are already on their way to running the observatory.

Read the full article at the New Times.

Jessica Fujimori | MIT News correspondent

On Tuesday, March 31, MIT students, faculty, staff, and administrators will gather for an interactive panel discussion about challenges in communication around climate change.

The event, titled “Getting Through on Global Warming: How to Rewire Climate Change Communication,” will be held from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in Room E51-115, and will be webcast live. It is the third of four open-forum spring events that are part of the MIT Climate Change Conversation, and the first to focus specifically on communication.

“It has become clear that a major bottleneck in the current inability to make progress in attacking climate change has to do with communication,” says Roman Stocker, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and chair of the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation. “The input we obtained from the MIT community identified this topic as a priority and highlighted the need for better communication at multiple levels.”

Tuesday’s conversation will center on perceptions about climate change, how the subject is discussed, and how changes to the way it’s discussed could inspire action.

“There’s a consensus that this is a serious issue, that the climate change threat is significant, but there’s a lot of inattention, or apathy, or division around this topic in general,” says Anne Slinn, the executive director for research at the MIT Center for Global Change Science and a member of the Committee on the MIT Climate Change Conversation. “Really what we’re looking at is: What can MIT as an institution do? How can we advance the level of discussion around this topic, locally and nationwide?”

The event will feature a panel discussion followed by a discussion with the audience, wherein participants can ask questions of panelists and give input via email or text message.

Panelists at the Tuesday event will include MIT professors Kerry Emanuel (Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences), Judy Layzer (Department of Urban Studies and Planning), Tom Levenson (Comparative Media Studies / Writing), and Drazen Prelec (MIT Sloan School of Management). Joining the conversation from outside the Institute are Chris Mooney, a journalist for who writes about global warming for the Washington Post, and Susan Hassol, director of the organization Climate Communication, which works with scientists and journalists to make climate science more accessible to the public. The discussion will be moderated by John Durant, director of the MIT Museum.

The committee encourages community members to submit questions and topics of discussion prior to the event by emailing climatechange@mit.edu. Participants can also send questions and comments via email and text message during the event.

From Tuesday’s event, the committee hopes that attendees leave with “an awareness, but also hope, in the sense that there is a way around the issue: If we recognize the problem, we can come up with solutions,” Slinn says. “Some [solutions] might be as easy as saying things in different ways — if we focus on things we have in common, as opposed to what pushes us apart.”

By Angela Fritz | The Washington Post

Late last week, one of the strongest tropical cyclones on record in the South Pacific made a direct hit on the island nation of Vanuatu, leaving more than 20 people dead and massive destruction in its wake.

Tropical Cyclone Pam’s sustained winds of 165 mph and gusts nearing 200 ripped trees from the ground and flattened homes. In the course of a day, Tropical Cyclone Pam intensified from the equivalent of a category 2 hurricane to a category 4, before going on to become just the second category 5 on record to directly hit an island in the South Pacific. At the time, Pam was the strongest of four concurrent cyclones in the western Pacific and Indian oceans.

It was “one of the largest and most intense cyclones” the region has seen, says Greg Holland, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has specialized in South Pacific tropical storms. “Taken together I have not seen a storm with higher damage potential in the region,” Holland told The Washington Post, “and this shows in the extensive damage that Vanuatu has suffered.”

Now, as the death toll grows and the people of Vanuatu pick up the pieces of their devastated lives, scientists are pondering what role Earth’s changing climate may have had in the destructive potential of the storm.

In a post on the climate science blog RealClimate, MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel dissects the science embodied in the question, coming to the conclusion that “while Pam and Haiyan, as well as other recent tropical cyclone disasters, cannot be uniquely pinned on global warming, they have no doubt been influenced by natural and anthropogenic climate change and they do remind us of our continuing vulnerability to such storms.”

Read the full article on the Washington Post