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- We're living at a pivotal point in human history.
Almost two centuries we have relied on coal and then oil,
then more recently on natural gas,
so now we have to make the transition
to a new energy system.
It's going to be as fundamental as the changes
that took place during the first industrial revolution.
I think it's critically important for a good university
with international footprint
to take these issues on in a serious way.
- India is home to the second largest population
in the world.
It's going to be the country where the largest set
of young people live.
Many of us think that this is a country
where a lot of the world's economic growth
is going to come in the future.
We're likely to also see many of the costs,
especially on the environment,
being increasingly borne by India in the next two decades.
And for all these reasons,
India becomes an incredibly important player
when we start thinking about how do we protect human health
and how do we deal with climate change.
- The transportation sector faces
really substantial challenges
in terms of transitioning to a low-GHG future,
and we don't know what that future's going to look like.
But I think that biofuels could play a potentially
an important role, especially an important role
in the transition.
The challenge that we're looking at in our project
is how to facilitate low-GHG biofuels
and their use in the transportation sector.
- I think we're used to thinking about climate change
in terms of averages, global warming is the phrase.
But increasingly, we're finding evidence to believe
that actually it's the change part of climate change
that matters more than the warming part of global warming.
Most of the damages come from a few extreme events.
Climate change is an economic competitiveness issue,
that it will affect economic growth.
The economic aspects of climate change are crucial
in thinking through what are the costs and benefits.
How much should we as a society be willing to invest
in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions?
- Most scientists believe strongly that CO2
is altering our Earth's system.
What the artificial leaf does is it stores
renewable energy, wind and sunlight,
in the form of a fuel.
You just drop it in water and sunlight hits it
and off one side comes hydrogen
and off the other side comes oxygen.
So it really is like a leaf.
It doesn't have gears
and it's not a heavily engineered system.
Instead of having a gas station,
you could have a solar gas station.
- One of the main problems that we see
is that these extreme heat events really pose a threat
to some of the people living in buildings
that are not designed to deal with these temperature levels.
So what we want to do with our research
is use sensors that characterize
indoor environmental quality and biometrics on people.
We can also think of ways of recommending changes
to the building environment and behavioral choices
that people can do to adapt better to these conditions.
- We use an enormous amount of oil, pesticides,
fertilizers, water, other resources to make food,
and when we're throwing away somewhere around 40%
of that food, that means 40% of those inputs
are just being wasted.
One of the big areas we worked on is around date labels,
sell by, use by, enjoy by, born on, packed on,
which cause many, many people to throw something away
because they think it's gonna be unsafe
when in fact, it has nothing to do with safety.
And then on the back end of that,
the food that winds up in landfills
actually is a huge contributor to methane emissions,
which is a really potent greenhouse gas.
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- Harvard's important role in climate change
is it has all the pieces.
So you have the government piece, the policy piece,
the law piece, the business piece.
But the piece that's most exciting for me
is the solution piece,
which is the science, engineering, discovery piece.
When you get to Harvard,
they have the full card deck.
- The entire debate on climate change
has often focused on questions relating
to what are the facts,
but then more importantly,
even if you want to address this problem,
how do we go about going it?
Understanding how in countries which are seeing fast growth
but have weak institutions,
how you can implement good policies
is to think about, how do you change human behavior
by giving them incentives and getting an answer
to these implementation issues is going to be critical
in implementing any climate change policies.
- We're trying to make policy on 50-
to 100-year time scales,
something that we really haven't done before
as a civilization.
Being able to clarify even small patches
of this shroud of uncertainty that surrounds this issue
is a hugely valuable task that places like Harvard
are uniquely well-positioned to tackle.
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