Climate & Environment

What can we do now to avert the worst climate impacts?

The Hill    ·    August 18, 2021

Sergey Paltsev (MITEI, MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change) examines the findings of the most recent IPCC report on climate change, underscoring the need to take more aggressive action to cut carbon emissions.

Climate change has reached an unprecedented level, with little time to act, a stark new UN report finds

The Boston Globe    ·    August 9, 2021

A new landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows how humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is driving changes to the planet’s climate unseen for thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of years. Sergey Paltsev (MITEI, MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change), the lead author of a past IPCC report says, “the reality this report presents is alarming.”

Climate change goals and oil production are clashing in the U.S.

National Geographic    ·    July 19, 2021

Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, emphasizes the importance of reaching net-zero emissions as fast as possible. “By pushing natural gas—which is indeed cleaner than coal, but it’s still a fossil fuel that releases a lot of CO2 and more importantly, a lot of methane—we are actually hurting renewables,” says Paltsev.