Climate Change Series: About With increasing reports of extreme weather and headlines about 2012 being the warmest year on record, climate change can no longer be ignored. This spring Cognoscenti teams up with the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs at Northeastern University to bring you a series we’re calling Climate Change. Challenges. Solutions. Each week we will […]
Climate Change Series: Adapting To A New Reality Brian Helmuth is a professor in the Department of Marine and Environmental Science and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, and directs the university’s Sustainability Science and Policy Initiative. Climate change produces winners and losers, globally and locally, and science can help to predict which is which. Often the winners are […]
Climate Change Series: The Role Of Transportation The transportation of people and goods from one place to another creates about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Of that, 80 percent comes from cars and trucks. What are the prospects for reducing those emissions? How is global climate change already affecting existing transportation systems? And how will it affect the ways we build […]
Climate Change Series: Energy Efficiency Energy efficiency used to mean keeping the thermostat below 68 degrees or putting on a sweater. No longer. A generation of study and technological advances have transformed the field — making huge economic and environmental savings possible. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama challenged the nation “to cut in half the energy […]
Climate Change Series: Mitigating The Damage Mitigating climate change doesn’t sound as monumental as ending, or reversing climate change. But with global phenomenon already “contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion… annually,” according to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, MIT professor Henry “Jake” Jacoby explains why efforts to mitigate climate change […]
Climate Change Series: Corporate Responsibility Historically, corporations have tended to view global climate change and greenhouse gas emissions as environmental issues that don’t affect their bottom line, and therefore don’t affect how they do business. That’s changing as business leaders become increasingly aware of the ways in which climate change threatens the profitability and value of their companies — and […]
Climate Change Series: The Governance Challenge President Barack Obama pledged in his inaugural address on Monday to respond to the threat of climate change, saying: “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But Americans cannot resist this transition. We must lead it.” So, why is addressing climate change so ‘difficult’?
Climate Change Series: Where Science And Ethics Meet What do we mean when we talk about the imminent threat of rapid and irreversible climate change? And what ethical responsibilities do we — especially those of us in the societies most responsible for the emission of destabilizing greenhouse gases — have in the face of that threat? Harvard chemist James Anderson and Northeastern philosopher […]