Confronting climate change while advancing prosperity: The University of Chicago’s new Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth aims to help the world do both
The effects of the climate crisis are increasingly evident with the ferociousness of Hurricanes Helene and Milton being two recent examples. And, of course, we are only receiving a preview of what is coming as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere.
At the same time, people around the world aspire for a better life, and inexpensive energy is key to the growth that unlocks it. Recently, the International Energy Agency said it is revising upwards its outlook on demand for coal. The reason? Higher electricity demand projections, notably from China and India.
The reality is that, in many places and settings, the fossil fuels that cause climate change are cheaper than the alternatives—putting the goals of managing climate change and growth in conflict. And, the impacts of fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas emissions on global climate change are the same regardless of whether they are emitted in Mumbai, Memphis, or Moscow.
At the University of Chicago’s new Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, we believe that addressing climate change doesn’t have to come at the expense of humanity’s aspiration for prosperity—but that an acknowledgement of the tension between these goals is overdue. Our mission is to find ways for the world to do both, by bringing to bear the unique strengths and best traditions of our University.
We’ll do this at the new Institute in several ways.
First, the Institute will follow the University of Chicago’s tradition of using economics to help solve key social problems. In practice, this means producing research that characterizes the climate and growth challenge, including how trade-offs and priorities are different in the United States compared to places like Bihar, India, where annual per capita electricity consumption is 200 kWh, compared to 13,000 kWh in the United States. Perhaps even more important, these efforts will identify policies and market structures that make it easier to balance the urgent climate and growth goals across the world’s many different places.
As a recent example of how economics can help ease the balance, University of Chicago researchers worked with the Indian state of Gujarat to develop and pilot the world’s first cap-and-trade market for particulate pollution. The results were striking: pollution emissions declined by roughly 25 percent and industry’s compliance costs decreased by about 11 percent. The results have led Gujarat to expand the use of pollution markets, with other states now following suit.
Second, clean technologies need to cost less—especially batteries. To get clean energy on the grid and to get people to switch to electric vehicles, batteries need to become cheaper and longer lasting.
The University of Chicago is uniquely positioned to undertake this challenge. Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and partners at Argonne National Laboratory collectively make up the nation’s largest cluster of energy technology experts. The group is now home to one of just two Department of Energy national battery hubs. This past summer, the UChicago scholars developed the framework for the first sodium solid-state battery. By replacing lithium, which is scarce, with the abundant resource of sodium, the team brought the reality of inexpensive, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever. Now that they know the battery can work, the researchers have created a network of engineers and companies who can work to build it—and other—technologies and commercialize them.
Third, trillions of tons of greenhouse gases from the last 150 years of fossil fuel consumption are already in our atmosphere. What do we do about these existing emissions?
Through the Institute, the University of Chicago is creating a new field, Climate Systems Engineering, that will explore approaches and technologies that may be needed to manage these emissions, as well as vigorously debate the human and governance challenges surrounding these potential innovations. Applying insights from systems engineering and climate science, the scope of the initiative will include open-systems carbon removal, solar geoengineering, and local interventions to prevent glacial melting. Its goal is to advance understanding of the potential benefits and risks of using these technologies to inform decisionmakers and to educate students who will face the future challenges of managing civilization on a fragile planet.
Fourth, education programs in this area too often focus on one part of the climate and growth problem, instead of exposing students to all of its complexities and trade-offs. For this reason, we have developed the Chicago Curriculum on Climate and Sustainable Growth. The aim is to provide undergraduates, master’s students, and executive education students with a 360-degree understanding of all of the climate and growth challenge.
The Curriculum is truly interdisciplinary. It will require students to learn about the science of climate change, the economics around these choices, the technologies that are available today and might be tomorrow, the politics, how philosophers have thought about the relationship between humankind and the planet, and more. A central piece of this curriculum is an experiential course that will bring students to rural India or sub-Saharan Africa to see what it’s like to live with little electricity, an energy boom town to see the benefits of energy production, New York City to meet with capital allocators who are ruthlessly focused on private returns to their investments, and policymakers in capitals around the world. In other words, the curriculum will challenge students to hold multiple competing thoughts at once and help them find a way through.
A game change is needed in the climate fight. One that acknowledges humanity’s aspiration for economic growth and works with it, rather than against it, by relentlessly identifying how economics, policy, and markets can be used to pursue cheaper clean energy technologies. A change that arms the next generation with the tools we never had.
That’s the role the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth aims to play. In so doing, it will draw upon the University of Chicago’s commitment to free expression, to going wherever the best ideas lead, and to the very best of liberal arts education.
Sincerely,
Michael Greenstone
Founding Faculty Director, Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth
Faculty Director, EPIC
Milton Friedman Distinguished Professor in Economics
The University of Chicago