This article emerged from discussions in the Corporate Growth and International Management Working Group of the Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft, a German association that brings together corporate practitioners and business scholars. Authors Martin Glaum and Ralph Schweens head the working group; Alexander Gerybadze and Thomas Muller-Kirschbaum are members. Whether driven by regulation or by conscience, many large companies have made commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as part of worldwide efforts to limit global warming. Doing so is particularly challenging for industrial companies that have energy-intensive production processes or sell products that consume a great deal of energy during their use. European Union programs and directives have put the identification, monitoring, and mitigation of carbon emissions unequivocally on the corporate agenda. As compliance with those regulations compels EU-based organizations to tackle the transition away from fossil fuels with greater urgency than many of their peers in North America, advances in practice are emerging....
Brent Minchew is an Associate Professor of Geophysics in the department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT. He studies the behavior of glaciers in response to environmental factors and is dedicated to understanding sea level rise and exploring viable interventions to stabilize ice sheets. SALLY KORNBLUTH: Hello, everyone. I'm Sally Kornbluth, President of MIT, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to this MIT community podcast, Curiosity Unbounded. Since coming to MIT, I've been particularly inspired by talking with members of our faculty who recently earned tenure. Like their colleagues in every field here, they are pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Their passion and brilliance, their boundless curiosity offer a wonderful glimpse of the future of MIT. Today, my guest is Brent Minchew, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Brent studies how glaciers and ice sheets are changing in response to global warming and other environmental factors, how they affect those forces in return, and whether there are practical ways to stabilize them. His central focus is understanding the processes likely to drive global sea level rise. So, Brent, welcome to the podcast....
Higher greenhouse-gas emissions, fewer jobs, more expensive energy and dirtier air that kills more people: researchers have begun plugging US President Donald Trump's energy and climate policies into their models, and the early results suggest far-reaching environmental, health and economic consequences. Trump, a Republican, began his second term on a promise to 'drill, baby, drill', vowing to make the United States rich again by promoting the development of oil and gas. To that end, Trump plans to roll back climate regulations, end clean-energy incentives and promote fossil fuels. It's not clear that Trump will be able to accomplish his goals. But if he does, researchers' models show that these policies are likely to have negative effects for many US residents. They also project that Trump's policies will undermine efforts to rein in global warming, affecting people around the world. Trump has vowed to roll back regulations put in place by his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from sources such as automobiles and power plants. Trump has also called for fossil-fuel development to be expedited, and for a halt to climate investments that Congress approved in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). As things stand, those investments are set to pump more than US$1 trillion into programmes to cut emissions and develop green energy by 2032....
Last year the Earth exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial times, a threshold beyond which wildfires, droughts, floods, and other climate impacts are expected to escalate in frequency, intensity, and lethality. To cap global warming at 1.5 C and avert that scenario, the nearly 200 signatory nations of the Paris Agreement on climate change will need to not only dramatically lower their greenhouse gas emissions, but also take measures to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and durably store it at or below the Earth's surface. Past analyses of the climate mitigation potential, costs, benefits, and drawbacks of different carbon dioxide removal (CDR) options have focused primarily on three strategies: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), in which CO2-absorbing plant matter is converted into fuels or directly burned to generate energy, with some of the plant's carbon content captured and then stored safely and permanently; afforestation/reforestation, in which CO2-absorbing trees are planted in large numbers; and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), a technology that captures and separates CO2 directly from ambient air, and injects it into geological reservoirs or incorporates it into durable products....
