Skip to Content
77 Mass Ave

Act Now

MIT’s climate-change action plan.
December 22, 2015

On October 21, MIT released “A Plan for Action on Climate Change,” a five-year road map outlining steps the Institute will take—and announced that it will not divest from the fossil-fuel companies in its investment portfolio.

Citing “overwhelming” scientific evidence for climate change, the plan states that the problem “demands society’s urgent attention” and that “the world needs an aggressive but pragmatic transition plan to achieve a zero-carbon global energy system.” MIT will fund further research on the process of climate change as well as eight new centers for research on low-carbon energy technologies. It also pledged to use the campus as a “test bed” for carbon reduction ideas while working to lower campus emissions at least 32 percent by 2030, matching a U.S. government goal.

MIT hopes to attract industry partnerships producing at least $8 million in new annual funding for each of the eight research centers, totaling over $300 million over five years. The centers will focus on solar energy; energy storage; materials; carbon capture, use, and sequestration; nuclear energy; nuclear fusion; energy bioscience; and the electrical grid.

FossilFreeMIT, a student-led group founded in 2013, has collected over 3,400 signatures from MIT community members favoring divestment from about 200 companies in MIT’s portfolio. The report credits the group with helping to bring climate change “to the top of MIT’s institutional agenda” but states that the Institute will instead pursue a policy of “engagement” with industry to help make progress on climate change. To protest the decision not to divest, members of the group staged a sit-in outside the president’s office that was still under way as of mid December.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.