For 58 days, we sat at the doorstep of MIT’s president. 1,400 hours. Long enough to see the seasons change. Long enough to see atmospheric carbon dioxide levels creep quietly above 400 parts per million. We saw Halloween andThanksgiving come and go. During finals week between exams and other end of semester obligations, still the scientists sat in. Believe me, between homework and lab work, sore backs and tired eyes, none of us wanted to be here, planted in the hallway outside President Reif’s office. But when MIT announced that it would not divest its $13.4 billion endowment from fossil fuel companies, opting instead to “bring them closer,” we were left little choice.
“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act,” Albert Einstein once said. I’ve been doing renewable energy research since I was 16 years old, and one thing I’ve learned during my PhD makes inaction impossible: The bottleneck to tackling climate change isn’t technology or policy know-how anymore. It’s a lack of political will. The will to put a price on carbon. The will to end hundreds of billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies and move them to renewables. The kind of will that put us on the moon.
Loosening the political bottleneck means understanding where it comes from. “Climate policy lost the plot,” George Marshall concludes, because of a “cognitive error on a vast scale.” The mistaken attempt to treat the climate challenge – a multivalent, irreversible, and systemic crisis – identically to how we dealt with the relatively manageable and reversible hazards of arms reduction, ozone depletion, and acid rain. The result has been a misframing of the climate crisis as a technocratic problem exclusively about greenhouse gases. And the consequences have been calamitous. Fossil fuel divestment aims to help reframe the climate narrative as a moral problem about fossil fuels, and evidence suggests it is working.