3

Looking Ahead

The engineering response to climate change extends to educational institutions. Peters observed that large new industries are starting to emerge in sustainable energy management, climate risk, decarbonization technologies, carbon capture, and so on. Engineering students need to be knowledgeable about resilient infrastructure and risk hazards.

EDUCATION

Curricula need to be reformed through new teaching materials. Faculty hires need to be assessed on how they will engage students on issues of vital importance for the future. “Just as engineers and researchers have turned our attention to low-carbon technologies, so we should be preparing our students for a net zero future,” Peters said.

“If we start thinking about net zero in the university, it’s too late,” added Shahidehpour. “You have to start from elementary school, you need to educate people from the very early stages to understand that they need to conserve energy, that they cannot waste any time.” Such efforts would help meet a demand that already exists. “At Future Engineers we do K–12 engineering education and work every day with contests and challenges,” said Bell. “We’re seeing increased demand for climate-related projects, climate-related activities, climate-related education.”

Washington observed that “it’s not just young people. It’s grownups. It’s policymakers. It’s people who aren’t [seeing] this problem.” He elaborated: “How do we do a better job of educating grown men and women about their choices and the importance and urgency of this issue? In the circle of people that I interact with, young people get it before older people do. That’s the bigger challenge. How do we raise the awareness and sense of urgency of this?”

Particular issues raise their own educational challenges. For example, said Shahidehpour, levelizing electricity loads will require that consumers buy into the idea and into the changes in behavior that will make it possible. When some people object to smart meters by saying that government wants to install them to know what they are doing in their living rooms, others will need to be able to explain that governments can learn far more about people simply from their smartphone. Customers will need to know why electricity use needs to change and what they can do to help. “We have a long way to go, but the sooner we start, the better we’re going to be.”

THE NEED FOR NEW POLICIES

Engineering solutions are essential but will not be enough to respond to climate change, the forum panelists agreed. The right policies are also needed to support both the development and the implementation of engineering solutions.

Shoemaker argued for the “alignment of public policy with technology.” Policies both drive and enable technical solutions. They include such things as master planning, anticipating the impacts associated with urbanization, forecasting future needs, and recognizing the cobenefits of engineering solutions. “The more we get alignment between public policy and climate change–related activities—[including] carbon management as well as adaptation—the more likely that we’ll be able to influence land use–related activities and build them into how cities are actually designed.” Furthermore, to optimize their effects, “Policies at every level—local, state, provincial, national, and global—need to align or they are very difficult to implement.”

As a specific example of alignment, Shoemaker discussed how to minimize the amount of concrete used in construction projects through

the substitution of products that can reduce overall carbon emissions. The policy question is how to add carbon to the decision process to “make it more desirable, for instance, to make a home or other building out of timber construction versus concrete?” The alignment of policy, finance, and the preferences of developers can influence such decisions, she said. In addition, “most large corporations have a focus on environmental, social, and corporate governance and their own sustainability goals, which becomes yet another driver for that type of decision making.”

Washington similarly observed that a global transition to renewable energy sources will require a mix of policies and technology innovation. “It’s not one or the other, it’s got to be both, because people are not going to open their wallets to do things for the climate—a few people will, but not everyone.”

The panelists specifically discussed a carbon tax as a policy that can change behaviors. A carbon tax could move entire countries and ultimately the world in the direction of using electric vehicles, Shahidehpour said. It could boost the economic feasibility of renewable sources of energy like geothermal or wave energy or heat recovery from buildings. It could affect, for example, whether a new infrastructure project relies on a nature-based solution. “We shouldn’t underestimate the degree to which that can change the way people make decisions,” Shoemaker agreed.

The “economic delta” of a tax needs to be sufficiently large to meaningfully affect behaviors, Washington observed. Price increases can make a difference, “but we haven’t had the political will to put that in place, at least not on a big scale.” In addition, taxes need to extend across borders to avoid shifting carbon-emitting activities from one place to another. “The broader geopolitical issue is a tough one,” Washington acknowledged. “We have to figure out a holistic solution globally for addressing this, and that’s what makes this type of strategy so difficult.” As Lieuwen pointed out, “it’s wonderful for this city or that state to reduce its carbon footprint, but ultimately what matters is global carbon dioxide emissions, and sometimes it’s not obvious to understand how these things interact such that our behaviors either increase or decrease the global climate problem.”

Other potential policies center on promotion of what Lieuwen called a circular economy. “We’ve built our economy around these con-

sumptive ideas where you manufacture it, you build it, and you trash it,” he said. “What if we were to design things so it was very simple and easy for them to be recycled and reused?” He mused that such work would involve fascinating chemical engineering and broader engineering problems.

Policies can also influence the release of methane, which, molecule for molecule, is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, said Peters. “There need to be better strategies, technologies, and mandates for measuring methane releases from all sorts of sources—from oil and gas operations as well as from agricultural sources and landfill gases. These are some of the big sources of methane, but we don’t really have good inventories. We need much better ways to measure that, as well as mandates for monitoring.”

Policy approaches are complicated by the need for different solutions in different places. Even within the United States, solutions will differ among regions. “With so many of the low-carbon technologies we’re talking about, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all for every state in the country,” observed Peters. The same applies in other countries. For example, in some parts of the world, social and economic issues will make it difficult to reach net zero in the short term, said Shahidehpour. “You’re going to move in that direction, but it may not happen in the near future.”

The complexity of the problem is itself a challenge. “One of the things that stretches our brain in new ways about the climate change issue is that it’s such an interconnected system,” said Lieuwen. “If you think about other forms of pollution, like something in the water, you can figure out that the people affected are those downstream. Or if you have a car that spits out nitrogen oxides, which are bad for people’s lungs, you can figure out where that goes. With the carbon dioxide problem, it’s a global issue, so everything interacts.”

Shoemaker recalled the phrase think globally and act locally. “Climate change is challenging because it’s a global environmental problem and… because the impacts are locally felt, and solutions are different at different spatial scales. That’s something that we need to constantly remind ourselves about.”

TOWARD THE YEAR 2050

Bell concluded the forum by challenging the group to think about the year 2050. “What are the engineering solutions that you feel are at the crux of us turning this ship around and developing sustainable technologies? How is society going to look different so that we can address this problem? What are the big-ticket items that you envision that are going to help us solve this?”

Lieuwen pointed to the fantastic amount of innovation that is under way. “You always overestimate how much you can do in one year, but you always underestimate what you can do over 10 years.” Exciting things are happening as engineers get out of their cubicles and interact more deeply and meaningfully with the problems that need to be solved. “These are technical problems, but they’re also deeply social problems.”

Shahidehpour cited the need for greatly expanded spending on R&D to develop the technologies that are needed when they are needed. “Spending more money on R&D, on education, on AI, these are the issues that we need to look into for the future.”

Shoemaker emphasized the potential for rapid change. When the covid-19 pandemic hit, human behavior changed substantially, as when a sizable fraction of the workforce began doing their jobs from home. Also, the ability to understand the natural world has been increasing rapidly because of new sensors and analytic capabilities, she pointed out. “That is something I don’t think we’ve fully taken advantage of yet.”

Washington pointed to “inflection points” that could catalyze rapid change. For example, innovations and breakthroughs in battery design have produced an inflection point for electric vehicles, “and you’re seeing that same inflection point happening with solar energy and the distributed power grid. I expect that to continue as technology continues to advance.”

Peters pointed out that, even without innovation, a large array of existing technologies can be brought to bear on the problem. “We already have tools that exist and can be used, we just have to do it. When I hear energy systems analysts doing their analyses, I don’t hear them saying, ‘We don’t know how to solve this problem.’ What I hear is,

‘There’s a broad array of ways to solve this problem, we need them all, and we should get down to business.’”

Bell wrapped up the discussion by thanking the presenters and noting that she has two children, a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old. “When I was little I dreamt of flying cars and Jetsons machines. But now what we dream about is developing technologies that are going to make their future a brighter place, so this is another call that the time is now. There is urgency, there is motion. No matter what sector of engineering you’re in, we need you. We can all use our engineering to make this world a better place.”