Fall 2024 Debate: Is Decarbonization worth it?


Debate: Is Decarbonization Worth the Cost?

November 14, 2024




On November 14, the MIT Free Speech Alliance  hosted the fourth in our series of campus debates at MIT, in partnership with campus sponsor the MIT Open Discourse Society, and joined by 20 additional co-sponsoring organizations. The debate was held in MIT's Wong Auditorium, with the following resolution up for discussion:

Resolved, The total cost of global net-zero decarbonization by the latter half of this century is well worth the projected global benefits.


Moderating this fall's debate was John Tomasi , President of Heterodox Academy former Professor of Natural Theology at Brown University.


The Affirmative Team consisted of Kerry Emanuel, MIT Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science and co-founder of MIT’s Lorenz Center, and Robert Pindyck, MIT Sloan School Professor of Economics and Finance and past President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

The Negative Team consisted of  Steven Koonin, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former Under Secretary for Science, and Mark Mills, Executive Director of the National Center for Energy Analytics and faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s school of engineering.  




Debate Photos



Debate Recording



Participants

Kerry Emmanuel is emeritus professor of atmospheric science at MIT, where he was on the faculty from 1981 to 2022. Before that he was on the faculty of UCLA from 1978 to 1981. He is the author or co-author of over 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and three books, including Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, and What We Know about Climate Change. He was a co-founder and co-director of MIT’s Lorenz Center, a climate think tank devoted to basic, curiosity-driven climate research. He is the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of WindRiskTech, LLC, which provides clients with advanced synthetic tropical cyclone events sets for assessing current and future tropical cyclone risks worldwide.



Robert S. Pindyck is Professor of Economics and Finance in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he has been a Visiting Professor at Tel-Aviv University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a past President and Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and a winner of the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Professor Pindyck has published numerous academic journal articles, and e is also the author or co-author of eight books. In addition to his academic research and teaching, he has been a consultant to a large number of public and private organizations.




Steven Koonin, a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has served as the Department of Energy’s Under Secretary for Science, as Chief Scientist for BP, as a University Professor at NYU, and as Professor and Provost at Caltech. He is member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Governor of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Koonin holds a BS in physics from Caltech and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT. He wrote the bestselling book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.








Mark Mills is Executive Director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, a contributing editor at the City Journal, a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s school of engineering, and co-founding partner in Montrose Lane. He is author of the book The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s, (2021), and previously: Digital Cathedrals, (2020), Work in The Age of Robots (2018), and The Bottomless Well, (2006). He served as chairman and CTO of ICx Technologies, helping take it public (2007). Earlier, Mark served in the Reagan White House Science Office and was an experimental physicist and development engineer in microprocessors and fiber optics.






John Tomasi (Moderator) is a political philosopher who earned his graduate degrees at Oxford University. He has held teaching and research positions at Princeton, Stanford and Harvard Universities. Tomasi was for many years the Romeo Elton 1843 Professor of Natural Theology at Brown University. In January of 2022, Tomasi left his (comfortable!) chair at Brown to become the first President of Heterodox Academy in NYC.


Heterodox Academy is a non-partisan, non-profit organization of 7000+ university professors and administrators who love their universities and try to help them to live up to the ideals of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.