In The News
Program faculty and staff are frequently called upon by the media, and regularly provide statements to the press, appear on television news and discussion shows, and participate in radio news programs.
For many years MIT has run the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program in which a group of leading science writers spend a year on campus discussing with faculty and taking courses. Building on our interaction with the Knight Fellows, and other contacts in the media, efforts are under way to more effectively serve the needs of this community.
Recent News Examples
3 Questions: Sergey Paltsev on the costs of climate-change legislation
November 5, 2009 - MIT News
Renewable fuels may have hidden costs, study says
October 23, 2009 - MIT News
How to limit risk of climate catastrophe
October 2, 2009 - MIT News
A hard rain's gonna fall
August 17, 2009 - MIT News
Greenhouse gases made visible
June 22, 2009 - MIT News
Examples of Press Quotes
- "If it's sustained, it's bad news," said MIT atmospheric scientist Ron Prinn, lead author of the methane study, which will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters Oct. 31. "This is a heads up. We're seeing smoke. It remains to be seen whether this is the fire we're really worried about. Whenever methane increases, you are accelerating climate change," he said.
USA Today - October 24, 2008 - 2 greenhouse gases on the rise worry scientists
- Decision making in public policy, according to [Mort] Webster, is complicated by the reluctance of leaders to reverse course after they have made important policy choices. "A large-scale international policy issue such as climate change is especially vulnerable to path dependencies. If significant global emissions reductions are required in the long-run, this will be an extremely difficult problem to coordinate across nations," he said.
The Economic Times - July 2, 2008 - Short-term goals to be focused on to reduce carbon emissions: study
- "We are holding ourselves hostage to the weather," said John M. Reilly, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an ethanol expert. "Agricultural markets are subject to wide variability and big price spikes, just like oil markets."
The New York Times - July 1, 2008 - Weather Risks Cloud Promise of Biofuel
- "People don't understand the magnitude of the problem," said Howard Herzog, principal research engineer for M.I.T.'s Carbon Capture and Sequestration Program. "How can we do hundreds of these plants by 2050 — and that's what we'll need — if we can't even do one?"
The Wall Street Journal - February 2, 2008 - Illinois: After Washington Pulls Plug on FutureGen, Clean Coal Hopes Flicker
- [Ronald] Prinn is convinced that the United States can't wait any longer to mitigate climate change, and he harbors only cautious optimism that it will act quickly enough. "I have a wait-and-hope-and-see attitude about what [policy changes] might happen to address this issue," he says. "Energy security is looming [larger and larger]. These are issues liberals and conservatives are concerned about." Within academia, "the students are driving change," he says. "Young people are not climate skeptics."
Technology Review - January/February 2008 - Wheel of Global Fortune
- "If we can't solve the problem of coal in electric power plants, we can't solve the problem of climate change," said Henry Jacoby, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
Market Watch - May 16, 2007 - King Coal faces a clean-up