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A leader in documenting man-made climate change, MIT's Ronald Prinn has also made it his business to inform world leaders--and the public--about the risks of ignoring it.

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could grow more quickly in the next 50 years than in the previous half-century, even with technological advances and current energy-saving efforts, according to a new study on The Implications of the Historical Decline in U.S. Energy Intensity for Long-Run CO2 Emission Projections, by MIT Global Change Joint Program authors Professors Richard Eckaus and Ian Sue Wing.

What's more, technology itself may be more the stuff that dreams are made on than the most available tool for reducing CO2 emissions or solving the global energy crisis, cautions Eckaus.

"There is no a priori reason to think technology has the potential for reducing energy use while meeting the tests of economics. It's politically unappetizing in the U.S., but in Europe, gas costs six dollars a gallon. Make energy more expensive: People will use less of it," Eckaus says.

And in a new paper on a related topic, Unemployment Effects of Climate Policy, Eckaus and Joint Program co-author Mustafa H. Babiker model the negative effects on labor employment of policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions. They then propose economic policies to counteract these effects.

"Climate change is a social and economic problem. If society wants to do something about it, it will have to bear the cost. It won't be free. It's an unprecedented social problem that requires a social response," Eckaus says.

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A novel study by the MIT Global Change Joint Program concludes that increasing levels of ozone due to the growing use of fossil fuels will damage global vegetation, resulting in serious costs to the world's economy. The analysis, reported in the November issue of Energy Policy, focused on how three environmental changes (increases in temperature, carbon dioxide and ozone) associated with human activity will affect crops, pastures and forests.

More: Reprint 2007-11

Boosting ethanol production by growing more corn in the United States without considering the quality and availability of water by region could put a significant strain on water resources in some parts of the country, a committee of the National Research Council said in a report released this week.

Coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy, this Synthesis and Assessment 2.1 report is titled Scenarios of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Atmospheric Concentrations, and Review of Integrated Scenario Development and Application, and provides a new long-term, global reference for greenhouse gas stabilization scenarios and an evaluation of the process by which scenarios are developed and used.

DOE Press Release

The MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research is one of six organizations to receive support in the first round of grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation as part of its $100 million initiative to tackle global climate change.

While Congress considers seven bills that aim to limit America's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, MIT researchers have offered an analysis of the legislation based on a powerful model they created. The MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change applied its model to the seven bills to determine how costs associated with each might affect the domestic economy.

As the global picture grows grimmer, states and cities are searching for the fine-scale predictions they need to prepare for emergencies--and to keep the faucets running. "The challenge is to increase our capability to accurately forecast climate at the regional level," says Ronald Prinn, an atmospheric scientist who directs the Center for Global Change Science at MIT. "That is what is needed in order to improve the information that government agencies get--[and] to then translate those regional forecasts into something useful at the city [or] state level."