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Climate News at MIT

There are now over 5,000 data centers in the United States, like this one in northern Virginia, and new ones are being built every day.

The multifaceted challenge of powering AI

Providing electricity to power-hungry data centers is stressing grids, raising prices for consumers, and slowing the transition to clean energy.
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MIT engineers developed a way to make clean ammonia, without fossil-fuel-powered chemical plants, using the Earth as a geochemical reactor, producing ammonia underground.

For clean ammonia, MIT engineers propose going underground

Using the Earth itself as a chemical reactor could reduce the need for fossil-fuel-powered chemical plants.
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Vijay Gadepally, a senior staff member in the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, discusses steps the research community can take to help mitigate the environmental impact of generative AI.

Q&A: The climate impact of generative AI

As the use of generative AI continues to grow, Lincoln Laboratory's Vijay Gadepally describes what researchers and consumers do to help mitigate its environmental impact.
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Giving people better data about their energy use, plus some coaching, can help them substantially reduce their consumption and costs, according to a study by MIT researchers in Amsterdam.

Study shows how households can cut energy costs

An experiment in Amsterdam suggests providing better information to people can help move them out of “energy poverty.”
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“I would love to see a world where we could eliminate thermal separations, and where heat is no longer a problem in creating the things that we need and producing the energy that we need,” Zachary Smith says.

Designing tiny filters to solve big problems

By developing new materials for separating a mixture’s components, Zachary Smith hopes to reduce costs and environmental impact across many U.S. industries.
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An MIT team recently published a study on public sentiment regarding climate policy. The co-authors are (left to right) Professor Evan Lieberman, Associate Professor Volha Charnysh, PhD student Jared Kalow, and Erin Walk PhD ’24. “Our research suggests that emphasizing a bit of blaming and shaming is more powerful than more diffuse messages of shared responsibility,” Lieberman explains.

Q&A: Examining American attitudes on global climate policies

Professor Evan Lieberman describes new research in which he and colleagues find a sharp partisan divide over providing aid to poor nations.
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