I'm Maria Zuber.
I'm the Vice President for Research at MIT
I'm also the EA Griswold Professor of Geophysics.
I led MIT'S Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary
Sciences, which gave me a window into a climate and energy
problems.
And I was privileged to lead the institutional effort
to put together MIT's climate action plan.
We really need to be thinking not only of ourselves
and the cost to our current society
for addressing this problem, but also
what we're passing on to future generations.
And our children and our grandchildren, they
are not going to forgive us if we don't make decisions
that take into account their situation
as we move into the future.
We got a lot of input from our community
on what's the most important thing that we could
do to mitigate climate change.
And what we heard uniformly from our community
was that the most effective thing that we could do
would be put a price on carbon.
And that put us in a pretty interesting place,
because MIT as an institution, we typically
make institutional statements on the basis
of values and principles, but not policies.
And of course at MIT, we love to use science
to provide the basis for designing an engineering
solution.
And we fundamentally are problem-solvers.
All of the great engineering solutions
that we can come up with will do us no good on this problem
if we don't have policies in place.
We have activities that go across the campus, that
deal with climate and the environment.
We have a plan for action for climate change
that was released to the community about a year
and a half ago.
MIT announced a power purchase agreement
for a solar farm in North Carolina
for 44 megawatts of electricity.
It offsets 17% of the Institute's greenhouse gases,
but it does more than that.
It demonstrates the value of partnerships
in really working with others to achieve clean energy goals,
really in a cost-effective way.
And we're also making good progress
within our Energy Initiative of setting up and standing up
a variety of low carbon energy centers
to deal with issues and the energy and climate system.
In designing any solution, we need
to think not only about the developed world, but also
the very special case of the developing world
and what those challenges are.
The fundamental tenant of our climate action plan
is engagement, engaging with partners in industry,
in the nonprofit world, in government,
with the general public, international entities
and national entities to try to move this forward.
And we also felt like that we could use our position
as being an objective authority in science and technology
as a convener.
I just recently wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post
that talked about my own life growing up in coal country
and where the mines closed, and people lost their jobs,
and just observed firsthand a great deal
of economic hardship.
And really contrasting that with my understanding
of a scientist, as a scientist where it is well-known
that putting CO2 in the atmosphere
causes greenhouse warming, and knowing full well
that coal releases the most CO2 gases of other fossil fuels.
Which leads you to not want to burn coal.
It's an opportunity to start a conversation,
to say that we as scientists have a responsibility
to speak the truth about science,
but also to address the consequences of changes that
have to occur, because we do have
an understanding of the science.