50 Years of Earth Day: MIT Perspectives in the Face of Radical Change

Host:
Welcome to MIT supply chain frontiers, where we discovered the future of global supply chain education research, and innovation brought to you by the MIT center for transportation and logistics. Every episode features, center researchers and staff who welcome experts from the field for in-depth conversations about business education and beyond today for the 50th anniversary of earth day MIT, sustainable supply chains, director, Alexis Bateman, and program manager, Suzanne green, welcome panelists from across MIT to discuss sustainability challenges and opportunities arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alexis:
My name's Alexis Bateman. I'm a research scientist at the MIT center for transportation and logistics as your host today, Suzanne green and I, my colleague at CTL and sustainable supply chains. When we found ourselves thinking about what the future is going to look like during COVID-19 and what sustainability will mean. And you think maybe why a supply chain researchers would bring together as type of session and really supply chains connect to the world. And it's making us see ourselves as a part of the bigger world. We ended last year 2019 and started 2020 fairly positive about sustainability and climate change. But YouTube saw 190% increase in posts about sustainability in 2018, 2019 engagements to climate change content on social media was up three times higher than ever before in the first nine months of 2019 climate strikes and collaboration and cooperation around that topic was really at an all time high.

Alexis:
So I think we ended last year, you know, very confident about our ability to work collectively, to drive some of these issues forward. But then this year hit, there's a lot of open questions about what COVID-19 will be doing. Is it the acid test for conscious capitalism and commitment to sustainability? Of course, we don't have all the answers right now, but we wanted to think about some informed insights. How can we recover and re redesign more strategically so that we are going back to the same way and that in fact, we're recovering better. Hopefully you can come out of today with some, some new thoughts since the new inspiration that can continue to drive you during this time of uncertainty. So now I'm going to turn this over to my colleague, Suzanne green, to talk about our agenda and introduce our panelists. Thanks Alexis. Um, thanks everybody for joining.

Suzanne:
I'm really excited to be here and to celebrate this earth day 50 years of earth day with you all, you know, part of the reason why we wanted to do this is that, you know, we hear a lot of kind of conflicting news about, you know, sustainability in the environment and this time of crisis. So, you know, on one hand I've heard some good news, right? We see clearer air cleaner air wildlife maybe seems happier. And, you know, we see sea turtles where they haven't been before and some pieces of very good news, but how can we make this a reality in, in the real world and under better? So we brought together an amazing panel of our colleagues. Um, we're really excited that they could join us today. We have Julie Newman, who's the MIT's director of sustainability and a lecture lecture in the department of urban studies and planning. We have professor John Fernandez, the director of the environmental solutions initiative and the urban metabolism group. And we also have Chris Kniddle the director of the center for energy and environmental policy research at MIT Sloan school. So for now I can turn it over to Juul.

Julie:
Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you to Alexis and Suzanne for organizing this important discussion and raising such good questions in your introduction and even your inspiring idea of building back better. I continue to hear that in meetings I've been in and articles I've been reading, but undoubtedly, this is one of many essential discussions that will take place on this topic at MIT. And beyond to be honest, I never imagined celebrating the 50th anniversary of earth day inside online while homeschooling a nine year old and working full time. And in the midst of a pandemic, um, I've come of age in this time and built a career on a vision for a sustainable world and a more determined than ever to come together with many of you to inform an actualize this vision. And in this timeframe, we have come together as a world to develop the sustainable development goals, which I think a few of us will hit upon and the Paris agreement and many other such international treaties and commitments.

Julie:
On the other hand, we've pushed our natural systems. And as we all know, now also our healthcare systems to the brink. So we have some challenges on our hand and also, uh, some great knowledge and experience to bring forward. And I think we are all experiencing a moment in time that we never could have imagined. And as we reimagine the future together, higher education will play an important role, uh, and informing our thinking and understanding of the future that we seek to rebuild. And it's also become clear to me that we have a mentor responsibility in contributing to how we rebuild and reimagine our future and to pay close attention to what has surfaced. And it sounds like many of you online or in that are interested in that, in that same level of contribution. So as the director of sustainability at MIT, my team, and I founded our office to transform MIT into a powerful model to generate new and proven ways of responding to the unprecedented challenges of a changing planet.

Julie:
And that's a term we now hear over and over again, but this moment in time has brought brand new meaning to the term unprecedented challenges of a changing planet. And one that we together with collective wisdom need to continue to more deeply explore and understand. I'm hoping today's conversation begins to, or rather continues to help frame what we even mean by that. You know, MIT has embraced sustainable development and climate change as defining challenges for the world in the 21st century and for MIT. And there's no backing down from that. That is still the case we're learning from COVID-19 the important and essential role of science. And then how am I at MIT? We can apply those lessons in solving for climate change and we building our, our economy. So it's still at the heart of MIT's commitment as the need to promote health and wellbeing for a growing world population while reducing our global footprint to within Earth's capacity to sustain us.

Julie:
But in the face of COVID 19, we need to revisit the meaning of this as well. And not only that it's really time for us to accelerate and scale our research and actions to advance this commitment. We have to bring this forward. So I have two parts to my comments that I'd like to share today. And the first part is in regards to considering the scales of impact and resiliency, which is really at the heart of MIT's campus, sustainability commitment. And the part two is how we might go about reconsidering and re-imagine acting on this at MIT. So when we launched the office of sustainability at MIT, we launched on this platform that we've already heard referenced today, which is considering the skills of impact of our work in the context of the role of the individual, the campus, the city, and the globe, and from climate mitigation and resiliency to consumption waste management and supply chains.

Julie:
This framework guides our thinking already. And so, for example, when we design and evaluate our carbon mitigation efforts to achieve carbon neutrality, we explore what needs to take place at the level of the individual actor on the campus, in collaboration with the city in the context of an evolving grid. And of course, in a context of global the global energy context, and we seek to understand the interactions of economic systems, local, the global policy infrastructure technology, and behavior to name a few of the important dynamics and informed by the very best science coming out of our institutions. And so pathways to carbon neutrality cannot and will not be achieved at one scale alone. Considering the role at these scales in an iterative manner will serve us as we move through and beyond COVID-19. And as we carry forward, lessons learned to behaviors. We have so quickly adapted today and apply them to solving for carbon neutrality, sustainable development.

Julie:
I've referenced this several times, but moreover, we have a global roadmap that does not necessarily need reinventing. In this time. We have 17 sustainable development goals that presents us with a set of shared global common values, shared global goals that call upon us to solve for health, wellbeing, poverty, inequality, climate change consumption, urban design, industrial systems, and then there's going to be a need and in reaction to rebuild the economy and our communities quickly. And we have to keep in mind a set of shared principles to consider in that time, or we're going to end up in this cycle again and again, and potentially more rapidly what's happening today is we're being forced to consider inner resilience as we are shelter in place, individual resilience, as we interact with our families and colleagues, organizational resilience, as we're experiencing in a whole new way by managing we're managing a $20 in personal organization, remarkably online, we have to consider community resilience, uh, planetary resilience.

Julie:
So so many layers. And we must plan for these skills of resiliency concurrently as they're absolutely interdependence. So coming out of COVID-19, we must embrace and deepen our interconnectedness and the boundaries and understanding between the role of these scales must become more transparent and must make them more deliberate in our decision-making. So, as we consider the future of sustainability at MIT and beyond the work that we'll be doing to rethink it, we'll think about how are we going to continue to design for sustainability, hopefully at an accelerated pace and applying what we know now, lessons we're learning today, bringing them forward and also redefining what we value. And I think, again, even starting with today's conversation, those issues are coming forth and are going to actually potentially be easier to talk about.

Alexis:
We're going to, we're going to have

Julie:
To reconsider how we design for choice, empowering community members to have an impact and understand the impact that they can have. And again, today we're recognizing the important role of individual choice and just reducing the curve, flattening the curve around COVID, it's going to be the same opportunity as we look at climate change. And the final piece here is to reconsider how and what we prioritize to solve for. So in conclusion, now more than ever, we have a shared responsibility and global responsibility that crosses in disciplines and calls upon all levels of expertise to contribute. We face a health crisis, a climate crisis and environmental crisis and education crisis. As I'm experiencing firsthand a food crisis, a supply chain crisis, and now an unprecedented economic crisis. And we must figure out how to invest in sustainable economies. As we seek to heal and rebuild, we will need to consider new collaborative leadership models, right from the get-go, as we're experiencing today already informed by data and science and to respond to these crises, not only in the near term, but plan for the longterm. And we have the infrastructure across higher education, municipalities industries, NGOs, and many state governments to join forces in a collective effort. So let's not celebrate another day inside and then solitude it's time to come together with collective wisdom, caring and informed action to move forward.

Alexis:
So thank you so much, Julie, that was really interesting and insightful. And next up we'll have John Fernandez,

John:
Suzanne, thank you for the invitation. I want to get to some key ideas that are relevant to our situation, but also can I tell the research that we've been doing for a few years and beginning with climate change? Um, I think it's a good time to remember some basic facts about climate change and also to note how the progression of climate change is relevant to our situation and different from my situation. So climate change happens slowly until it doesn't, we've got accelerating trends, extreme events, and to be points in to these two quotes I've heard in the last couple of days from a couple of different people, you know, how do you go bankrupt or interest? Hemingway wrote two ways gradually, and then suddenly it comes upon you. And then all of a sudden you're bankrupt climate change is like that it's happening slowly around the world.

John:
And then all of a sudden there's a Superstorm that, uh, is being attributed to, or there's sunny day flooding of being attributed to our Australian fires, being attributed to climate change. The second quote is also telling there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen and those weeks we're in now. And it's very interesting to me to continue reading all the articles that pose parallels between climate change and the global pandemic, because I think a lot of them are making parallels that are interesting. And I disagree with a number of parallels that are being made. So a few things about climate change that are, that are different and you really unique is that it's here to stay. So it's essentially irreversible, certainly in our lifetimes. And certainly for many generations, I'm referring to Susan Solomon paper of 2016, which shows pretty clearly primarily because of the residents kind of CO2 in the atmosphere of several hundred years to a thousand years, that whatever effect radiative, forcing and warming of the atmosphere is essentially here to stay.

John:
Climate change is also going to affect everything, but unfortunately on equally and inequitably on equally geographically, uh, different parts of the world will feel it very differently and inequitably because we simply do have different vulnerabilities, um, around the world based on income and the conditions of the city or the countryside or whatever, whatever it is or the, or the state of infrastructure. And I think it's just good to remind ourselves that this is a model for us to act on climate change. And, you know, we can come out of this with achieving our goals. And I, I, I want to be optimistic, but I also want to be, be tethered to reality because to stay under two degrees, CO2 emissions has to be reduced by about 7% a year. That's extraordinarily aggressive. And just keep in mind that by 2050, to be able to hit the two degree goal and avoid catastrophic consequences, we really need to reduce carbon emissions by about 85% and then enable negative emissions technologies is happening at the same time that we will have about a 30% increase in the global population.

John:
So I'm going to focus in on, on the city's scale. And I think some of the things that we're learning today are, are relevant. So the city and metropolitan level of governance and control of resources under crisis is really critical. We've seen that the pre-positioning of assets, the mobilization of assets to address a crisis situation at a variety of scales is important, but the way in which resources are distributed and decision-making is made at least here in the United States, the city and the metropolitan region are really critical. One of the thing that I think we will come out of this crisis with a better understanding that investment in times outside of crisis is extremely important, but I want to highlight a couple of also one instance in particular of a change in industry practice after hurricane Sandy hit New York city. So it's no very typical in lower Manhattan, and this is clearly voluntary.

John:
This is by way of the building designers and engineers making a decision that the control rooms and the mechanical services for the building are, have been elevated above the second floor in most new development. But this is an adjustment that the, that the real estate industry has made in Manhattan and real estate industry in Manhattan doesn't make changes very often and they do so only under pressure for losing the value of their asset. And so that's, that's a significant change in that particular market. There's good evidence that we can learn and we can shift our behavior, and it doesn't always have to be mandated or instituted by organizations that have some regulatory power. Another topic we'll talk to them is that cities and nature are inextricably linked. So the concentrations of extracted bio materials and also our exposure to, uh, nature, natural systems, wildlife is extremely important to keep in mind.

John:
For example, China, after coronavirus emerged, China has instituted a ban on wildlife in food markets. Uh, it may become permanent. There's a good bit of a writing that suggests that even if it is made permanent, those things don't really last. And it's a lot of, you know, a lot of loopholes that get around that. So for example, soon afterwards, pigeons and rabbits were labeled a livestock in China so that you can get around that they're not wildlife anymore, but so we have to keep in mind our exposure to ecologies that are under pressure and are, are, are being opened up and, uh, novel viruses that may be coming out of that overall. And I'm not going to go into the next point in much detail, but I think the let's just open it up for discussion climate change consequences are like the COVID-19 situation and are quite unlike the COVID-19 situation.

John:
I think, I think it would be really good to have a more nuanced discussion about, about that. And finally, the, one of the solution sets that is important for us to keep in mind is that the circular economy at the city level, and this is part of the work that we do in urban metabolism is a really interesting and promising scale at which cities can build resilience, resilience to climate risks, resilience, to any kind of risk we are seeing that cities are able to control their situation and being able to do that in a low carbon future. So being able to build resilience into a city, it's important to consider that there are districts smaller than the city neighborhood scale in which resilience can be built in with smart grids, with water harvesting, even food production, urban agriculture. And just to end this with a, again, a reality check on the, on the threats, not only are the consequences of climate change, accelerating, but are our understanding of those consequences are, are also becoming a little bit more dire. And finally the sense that there is a connection between cities and the biological world we're doing work, and there's, there are other groups around the world doing work on the connection between biodiversity and all its different facets and urban economies and urban consumption. So thanks so much. I'll leave it at that and we'll move on to Chris. Thank you.

Suzanne:
That was super interesting and definitely a lot of things that I want to look into and think more about. So

Suzanne:
Now we'll turn it over to Chris.

Chris:
Great. Thanks. And Alexis and Suzanne, thank you very much for having me. Um, I'm going to be fairly brief, more wanting to tee up some conversations that we might have about how the current economic times might influence sustainability, not just in the short run, but also leading out of the current crisis. And of course, I think we have more questions and answers, but I'll try to bring some perspective in terms of what are the larger issues at play as the economy gets back going before that. So this is the 50th year anniversary of earth day, and I realize economists are usually asked to be on these panels to be sort of the wet blanket and the pessimist and the Debbie downer. Um, so I'm going to try to break that mold a little bit, and I think it's worthwhile to celebrate some of the successes we have had over the last 50 years.

Chris:
No, I just quickly today went, went on line to track, uh, different pollutants, um, since 1970, I think it's great that, and we should Pat ourselves on the back that so two emissions have fallen by about 90% since, since 1970, right around 1990, that the acceleration of that drop and that points to the importance of policy. Um, and I'm going to get to policy at the very end. What that says is actually the policymakers and regulations can actually have an effect. Uh, so carbon monoxide emissions have fallen by 70% since 1970. And again, it shows the same pattern with Knox. And, uh, so to that in, in 1990, that accelerated, uh, because of the clean air act amendments of 1990. Uh, but since 1990 PM, 2.5 was fallen by 20%. Those are major successes that we've had, uh, over the last 50 years. So of course I didn't show, uh, CO2 emissions, which would not have shown a decrease since 1970.

Chris:
And that's what we're, we're mostly talking about today, but every once in a while, it's good to remind ourselves that the environment on some dimensions, at least in local pollution, um, is much cleaner than it is than it was, uh, in the 1970s what's happening in the economy. Um, or with emissions due to the Corona virus crisis that we're going through. Okay. And the first thing we talked about is the short run. So in the short run, we see large reduction yeah. In pollution, uh, by our calculations, there's about a 20% decrease in us carbon dioxide emissions relative to last year, the largest decrease has been in gasoline consumption. So gasoline consumption is fallen by about a half, but electricity consumption has also fallen natural gas consumption as well. And that decrease in gasoline consumption is despite the fact that, uh, we had actually negative price.

Chris:
This is, uh, for, uh, oil futures contracts, uh, just this week for the first time in the history of futures markets. But yeah, you know, clearly, although this is a gain from a climate perspective, no, nobody, uh, even mildly suggests that that the net impact of this current crisis is not a huge negative. Everybody is trying to get out of the current crisis. And I think the next thing that we need to have a conversation about is how we do it, that in a way that protects the environment and protects, uh, the trends that we've seen at least partially in carbon dioxide emissions. And that's where, you know, I use the term it's complicated in terms of how, as we out of this current economic crisis, how emissions will flow, the first thing to worry about, and this is now I'm putting on my economist pessimist hat.

Chris:
The first thing to worry about is that in recessions governments usually have smaller budgets and they might be using the budgets that they have for putting out fires somewhere else. The first order effect is likely to slow down the transition to a low carbon economy. That transition requires investment. And it might very well be the case that governments certainly at the federal level, perhaps also at the state level will have less of an appetite for that investment. So it really will be as we move out of this recession and we're likely to be in a recession, a fight between the recession is going to lead to less consumption of energy products, electricity, gasoline consumption, and so on. So that'll be an effect to reduce CO2 emissions. But at the same time, we probably won't see as quickly of a trend at decarbonizing emissions per unit, and whether that's, uh, solar and wind and investment or investment in electric vehicles and so on.

Chris:
So the huge wild card here is going to be policy. You know, one could argue to, to use John's point. And I believe it's pushed back as is to how climate change is very different from the Corona virus. But one might hope that the coronavirus has elevated the importance of science in our community and the importance of scientists, and also elevated the discussion of extra analogies. The of virus is an extra [inaudible] you you're aware, you're asked to wear a mask, not to help yourself, but to help somebody else. The glass is half full argument in terms of the economics, is that we will have more honest discussions about science, about technology and about how we're all interrelated on this globe. And that could potentially elevate the discussion of climate change. Am I optimistic? That's going to happen? I'll say a lot of that optimism is going to depend on what happens in November. Policy is going to be important and clearly the next a major election in the U S will, will be a driving force as to what that policy going forward looks like.

Alexis:
Thanks a lot, Chris. That was great. And, um, I'll turn it over to Alexis now to moderate the Q and a thanks, uh, to John Julian, Chris, that was super insightful and helpful and thinking framing kind of the situation we're in now. And so one question that Sameet asks is, uh, to John in particular, is will mega cities eventually move to transform to be smaller symbiotic and sustainable units following this? Do you think there will be impact there? Yeah. So, um, on the first sort of smaller, not necessarily. So,

Julie:
Um, the UN world projections for urban populations still shows that we're going to see some really enormous growth in urban populations. So for example, Legos is projected to have a population of 88 million in 2100 we're in the midst of unprecedented urban population growth. Having said that cities cannot grow on the basis of a centralized distribution of resources. They have to actually develop cells that have their own power plants and their own water system and their own waste treatment. And there's the opportunity not to plan and grow in the way that large cities have so far, but to actually do segregate units, even if it's part of the larger city and provide for that last mile, low carbon, uh, mass transportation, uh, local food, harvested water, all of that. So now a question for Julie, which comes from Michelle, what will working from home mean for energy and resources on campus and organizations in general?

Julie:
What, what do you think that's going to look like? I think that's a great question and something that we're all grappling with at the moment. Um, I mean, just, just this week in the Boston globe, an article came out, starting to look at, you know, what is going to be the impact and people's choice with respect to public transportation. We subsidize access to public transportation at the moment. So I think as we reconsider how people are going to be moving to from around campus in Cambridge, we're going to have to better understand what the opportunities are to integrate work from home policies, so that the immediate rebuild option, isn't just more garages. So we're getting to figure out how to ease back and, and understand, and again, reimagine what the next version of sustainable mobility 2.0, looks like. And then I think where work from home policies fit into that when I'm on calls, one thing, everyone craves is being together again, you know, and reconnecting and finding places to bump into each other.

Julie:
So again, I can't speak on behalf of MIT, but I don't envision us running MIT from our homes. On the other hand, I think similar to what Chris said, I think there's going to be more opportunity for some deeper conversation in terms of, um, what that portfolio of options looks like and how we incentivize, uh, how people engage with those portfolio of options reopening the world post COVID COVID is almost a once in a lifetime opportunity to prioritize environmental issues. And his question comes from a mint, but how do we convince policymakers worldwide not to push this back to the back of other agendas?

Chris:
Wow. If I knew how to do that, I would, uh, I would, I'd probably have easy one for you really. I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for one. I also think that there'll be some more incentives that might drive sustainability in, in sort of unusual ways, even among policy makers that aren't doing it because of sustainability. So one question have is whether or not given the back to supply chains, given the importance of the supply chain from China to the us and China, to the rest of the world, whether or not we'll start to see pressures for more autarky, um, which could in principle reduce pollution in so far as emissions save in electricity per kilowatt hour or lower in the U S and in Europe than they are in China. If more of that production is done here, you have less shipping and fewer emissions up the supply chain.

Chris:
Now I know that's not what everybody was hoping for, and that's not really the front and center way. We would want to deal with climate change, but one of the byproducts of policies like that would be to reduce emissions beyond that. It's really going to be trying to convince policy makers of the threats of climate change and trying to make parallels, although John's caveats are good. One of my friends referred to COVID-19 as sort of climate change on steroids, and there's lots of differences, but everything was ramped up, right? Climate change is happening over centuries or over decades, and COVID-19 was happening over days. There still is that negative externality piece to it. So there are some links that one can make. There's still the strong science link and the policies that, that try to overcome those negative externalities, I guess I'll just end that my hope is that policymakers will see those connections and be more likely to do something about them.

Alexis:
Great. Now I know that was not the easy question, but I think that provides some insights there. And so this question from Kurt recognizing, you know, there's a lot of barriers, but what can we do as individuals to drive institution institutional commitment to near-term goals in line with what the science says around climate change when we don't know exactly how to achieve it than another easy one?

John:
I, um, answer guessing what Chris would say. Sure. Vote. I think you've answered that question then in another context, Chris, that's why I'm venturing to, to suggest that, but one, one quick point about that on the topic of the general topic of what one can do as an individual versus not, you can do a lot as a, as an individual, as we've shown collectively, we can do a lot collectively as individuals, but there's some things we can't change. So we can't change as individuals, the fuel mix of the electric grid that has to come from industry and really from regulation. So as an individual, again, I go back to the, the answer being, you know, vote being the way in which to really affect the larger landscape.

Chris:
I think John channeled my thoughts, exactly.

Alexis:
I just want to ask each of the participants to give sort of a, a final statement perspective on, on time period, knowing, you know, that we're rethinking our values, we're rethinking our role as individuals, as communities, as organizations. Can you just say a final phrase statement about, and what people can take away from this? I guess I just have two points. One is, as I mentioned, I think we need to rethink leadership and figure out what is the new leadership model we need to both address short-term needs a long-term strategic planning, and there's some excellent questions that are raised. I think we all have so many of the same questions around, you know, how to prioritize and revalue the role of human health and environment, uh, in policy-making decision-making supply chain management. So I'll just leave it at that time wise. Thanks. Perfect. So new new leadership models and collaborations. Yes. Right. Uh, John, an optimistic note on the public. So I read yesterday in the guardian that a very small number of Britain's. I think it was, I think it was 9%, want things to go back to the way they were. And so there is an enormous appetite for change. And I do think that we can leverage that. Wonderful. And finally, Chris,

Chris:
Yeah. I'll just say, I think two things that this crisis has stressed to me is just how interconnected we are, not just within a country, but globally. Um, and that obviously ties with how interconnected we are from a climate perspective, somewhat tongue in cheek. But, um, it is also underscored how poor decision-making can exacerbate problems. So hopefully we can learn from that going forward.

Alexis:
Absolutely. No, thank you for the, those final words. I think each of those really kind of frames the things we're going to be thinking about going forward, our interconnectedness, um, how we really have to think critically and make science-based decisions and, and how we can move forward better. So thank you for spending an earth day with all of us and thank you for our expert panelists. Thank you all for joining today and, and stay safe and healthy out there and stay committed happier day. That'd be here. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody.

Host:
All right, everyone. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this edition of MIT supply chain frontiers. My name is Arthur Grau communications officer for the center. I invite you to visit anytime at ctl.mit.edu or search for MIT supply chain from tears on your favorite listening platform until next time.