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MIT hosts climate policy summit, Bloomberg speaks

On Dec. 7 and 8, MIT hosted the Northeastern North America Policy Summit, which brought together climate researchers, policymakers, and business and civic leaders from the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada to share climate leadership strategies.

In light of the changing national policies regarding climate change, this year’s focus was on strategies at the local level for states, provinces, and mayors — by lowering carbon emissions from various sectors, implementing carbon pricing, and using natural systems to augment climate mitigation.

Among the speakers were Michael Bloomberg, businessman, and three-term New York City mayor; Ernest Moniz, Special Advisor to the President and 13th U.S. Secretary of Energy; Maria Zuber, Vice President for Research at MIT; and Robert Millard ’73, chair of the MIT Corporation.

As Moniz put it, “There is no going back after Paris. We are headed to a low carbon future. That is not going to be deflected in any permanent sense by the current dialogue in the United States because it will be carried out by the states and cities and business.”

Webcasts of the event are available on climatesummit.mit.edu.