Dr. Leah Stokes at MACA's Annual meeting

Shiladitya DasSarma started the meeting  with an update on MACA activities in 2023. His slide deck contains information about the recent record-breaking heat-related events in 2023, the continuing trends of increasing global temperature, increasing extremes weather events and costly disasters, trends in atmospheric CO2 levels, and greenhouse gas emissions trends.

Against the backdrop of the climate trends since 2019, Shil described the history of MACA in terms of key MIT Alumni communications: a letter to Maryland, a letter to MIT, the Roadmap document, Congressional Letters and further MIT engagement, and most recently, our drafting of bylaws, creating a board of directors, and electing officers (see slide deck for details). Over the past year, MACA members met with the MIT Technology Licensing Office and the Alumni Association, the MIT Climate Nucleus, and the Presidential search committee. MACA was awarded the MacVicar Leadership Award and was invited to become an official member of the MIT Alumni Association.

Notable MACA members made impact. Quinton Zondervan created a TED talk: Go Solar, and Save and spearheaded the successful effort to amend Cambridge’s Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance to make it a Building Energy Use Disclosure and Emissions Reduction Ordinance.  Tom Gurski recorded a podcast “Hardware to Save a Planet - Retrofitting a Billion Cars to Hybrid EVs to Impact Change. That podcast is posted to MACA.earth.

The Education Team, lead by the efforts of Yuqi Zhu, Chris Harding and other created a Climate Introduction. The Advocacy/Policy team, led by Jeremy Grace and the efforts of Martyn Roetter, Chris Harding, John Dabels, Rowena Low, Quinton Zondervan,  Frances Stewart, and Shiladitya DasSarma released a position paper on Green Alternative Fuels. The MIT Campus Team led by Susan Murcott,  with the efforts of Rick Clemens, John Dabels, Judy Sign, David Williams, and Herb Zien created a plan for 100% decarbonization of MIT Campus by 2035.

MACA members made panel presentations at the MIT Clubs of Washington DC, Boston and Hawaii, the MIT Climate Community Collaborative, a Climate Cardinals Career Event, and an IRA Panel Event by CUSP - the Consortium of University alumni for a Sustainable Planet. Along with Harvard Alumni for Climate and the Environment, Stanford Alumni in Sustainability, and the Yale Blue Green, MACA founded CUSP and MACA members are working with CUSP to find ways to “amplify the message”.

Shil ended his presentation with a description of MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s position on Climate Change and announced a special MACA event to be held on March 10, 2024 with the president. Professor Jeffrey Steinfeld is leading the effort to communicate MACA’s position with the President and her team and prepare for this special MACA event - a dialogue with the MIT president on how we can work together to address climate change.

After Shil’s MACA summary, Rowena Low introduced our keynote address The Future is Electric!, by Leah Stokes , who happened to be in Cambridge MA on a break from Stanford to write another book. As described in the summary of her talk Leah spent a short time introducing herself and reserved most of her time for interactive Q&A, moderated by Margaux Filippi and Rowena Low. Having heard Shil’s summary prior to her talk, Leah was able to speak to the value of some of MACA’s key accomplishments. In addition, she emphasized the value of local action at a deep level on measures that have real chances of success. A key factor in having impact at any level is building relationships, and Leah discussed this point and mentioned some organizations that are engaged in coordinating local action.

After the Q&A session wrapped up, we broke the group up into seven breakout rooms: EV’s, CDR, Entrepreneurship, Education, Justice, MIT Campus, and Advocacy. The discussion leaders engaged the participants in discussion about the breakout topic and what the focus should be for 2024. After the 15-20 minute discussions, the discussion leaders presented short summaries of the breakout discussions. A compilation of the discussion summaries can be found here: 2023 MACA Meeting Breakout Discussion Summary. Of the seven topics, which represent MACA thrusts, Entrepreneurship and Justice had concerns about path forward. In the Entrepreneurship discussion there were no active entrepreneurs aside from the discussion leader. For Justice, only Rowena and Jose were in the discussion, and more engagement is needed from MACA membership on this thrust. We discussed this challenge briefly, and Shil mentioned that it would be good for every MACA thrust to include Climate Justice into its thinking and its work, as issues of climate justice touch on every thrust activity in some fashion.

The meeting remained open after the summaries for some informal discussion for those who wished to stay. The meeting adjourned at approximately 3:45 pm.