Cambridge, MA-Friday, April 24: Over 300 people, including your faithful Warm Home Cool Planet correspondent, assembled in Walker Memorial Hall at MIT to hear from some of the major players and most provocative thinkers in the field of sustainability. Unlike the content you’ll find here, which stretches all the way from global energy policy to insulating your water pipes, the Sustainability @ MIT conference was exclusively focused on the big picture.
The morning keynote speaker was Arthur Holcombe, President of the Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund. He kicked things off by sketching out a doomsday scenario that had many of the attendees putting down their coffee and bagel and looking for a razor blade. Dr. Holcombe’s position is that unless we achieve an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, our planet will face catastrophic climate change, large scale starvation and the elimination of more than 90% of the species currently inhabiting the earth. This scenario was sobering enough–then Holcombe spent the next 30 minutes telling the audience why that this reduction could not possibly be achieved.
Later in the morning session, a panel featuring MIT Prof. Sarah Slaughter, Mindy Lubber from Ceres, plus a couple of corporate types from IBM and AT Kearney was convened to address how we can continue “Progressing towards Sustainability in a Recession”.
Apart from the news global warming had fallen to #19 amongst American’s biggest worries, there were no brilliant thoughts shared on how the nation’s collective attention could be refocused on this issue. Every panelist said this was due to Americans’ very short term focus on our problems. No arguments here. Recent polling shows our national concern over the environment barely cracked the top 10 before the global financial meltdown. Now it barely rates a mention behind the economy, jobs, Pakistan, health care, college tuition, property values, swine flu…
What we would have liked to hear from this esteemed panel–and the others convened on the day–was some insight on why our looming energy crisis/environmental nightmare seems stuck in the academic, think-tank ghetto in which it currently lives. Warm Home Cool Planet thinks the answer is right in front of us. Progress towards our sustainable future can only to be made while we are solving more immediate challenges. There is a reason why Cambridge Energy Alliance’s tagline reads “Save Money. Save the Planet.”
Only by linking environmental stewardship to improving our immediate financial prospects is it possible to bring about the wide-scale behavioral changes necessary to avert the global catastrophe global warming will one day bring.
Shellenberger-A for insight
The last speaker for the day was Michael Shellenberger, President of the Breakthrough Institute. According to Shellenberger, we can’t legislate or penalize people into changing their behavior. Alternative energy technologies must be properly funded through both government and private means, and consumers need to be both informed and incentivized to bring about permanent changes in the way we use energy.
Michael, thanks for living up to your organization’s tagline–The Era of Small Thinking is Over.
We look forward to bringing you more posts on this subject as MIT has a series of seminars and symposiums on the issue of sustainability over the next few months.