Yale climate summit opens in New York: Hard realities, real opportunities

Yale’s top leaders on Tuesday kicked off a four-day summit in New York that underscores the university’s commitment to addressing the climate crisis and its ability to engage people across realms of expertise to do research and provide tools that advance solutions to environmental threats.

During the opening night of the first-ever Yale @ Climate Week NYC, leaders in climate policy, politics, and the law addressed the urgent challenge of curbing the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten to destabilize human society worldwide as well as the opportunities for changing course.

Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry ’66 — who served as the inaugural U.S. special envoy for climate and who was one of several prominent Yale alumni with a marquee role in the summit’s first day — acknowledged the grave danger humanity faces, but also insisted that “we can win this battle.”

Through Friday, Yale experts and other thought leaders from across intellectual disciplines will dig deeper into potential solutions to the crisis during more than 20 panel discussions and events, highlighting the breadth and depth of the university community’s related work. View the full schedule here.

The summit, held at the Yale Club of New York City, coincides with Climate Week NYC, the largest annual climate event of its kind, and a meeting of the UN General Assembly. It is hosted by Yale Planetary Solutions (YPS), the university-wide initiative created to amplify and drive solutions to the greatest environmental threats facing the planet.

The choices made by today’s leaders, including those at Yale, will affect generations to come, said Yale President Maurie McInnis who, along with Provost Scott Strobel, welcomed a live audience of alumni, faculty, students, and other guests. (The opening day was also broadcast via livestream.)

“That’s why I’m so proud of the work that Yale Planetary Solutions is doing — bringing together research, scholarship, operations, and experimentation to usher in a new era of collaboration and innovation in the ways we do our work at Yale, but also demonstrating that work to the rest of the world,” McInnis said.

In a live interview with New York Times climate reporter Lisa Friedman, Kerry said that tackling the global climate challenge will require solutions that can be achieved at scale — and must happen soon. But, he added, there are reasons for optimism, including a drop in prices for solar technologies, advances in battery storage, and the potential of geothermal energy.

Ultimately, he said, the solutions to climate change will not be determined by ideology or political philosophy. It’s about physics, he said, “and the physics is telling us if you continue to burn fossil fuel, here is what’s going to happen.”

“I’m not kidding when I say that we can win the battle,” he added. “But we’re not going to win it the way we’re behaving now.”

Earlier, Daniel Esty, the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale, led an hour-long panel conversation about the leadership required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the kinds of policies that can result in meaningful change. He was joined by U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse ’78 of Rhode Island; Rob Bonta ’93, ’98 J.D., California’s attorney general; and Fred Krupp ’75, president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

For many years, Whitehouse has championed climate action, including proposed legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions. These efforts, however, have been undermined by years of partisan division, said Whitehouse, who joined Tuesday's panel event remotely from his office in Washington, D.C.

Policies adopted in the UK and the European Union, however, including the passage of a “carbon border adjustment mechanism” — or CBAM, which imposes reporting requirements on companies that import emissions-intensive goods — will put new pressure on the United States. Another factor, Whitehouse said, is the threat posed by rising sea levels and extreme weather events on coastal insurance markets — and, ultimately, to the mortgage industry. 

“We are, I think, at the leading edge of that economic catastrophe driven by climate change,” he said. “And that’s going to focus everybody’s attention quite a lot.”

Another key mechanism for addressing the climate threat is the judicial system, said Bonta. A year ago, he filed suit against six major fossil fuel companies for their role in the climate crisis. Then, this week, his office filed suit against ExxonMobil, alleging that the company has knowingly misled the public about the recyclability of plastic waste; the company, he said, waged a “campaign of deception” by suggesting that plastic materials are a sustainable option despite knowing that 95% of these materials are either incinerated or buried in landfills.

If the world is to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change, said Krupp, who is also a Yale trustee, it will have to cease burning the world’s tropical forests. And it will have to reduce global emissions — not just carbon dioxide but also methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps significantly more heat in the atmosphere than CO2.

One strategy for achieving the latter, he said, is the creation of accountability frameworks, such as one announced by EDF and other allies that uses satellite-based technologies to track methane emissions and hold companies accountable.

“That data will be used to congratulate those companies that do live up to their pledge, and to shine a spotlight on the others [that don’t],” he said.

‘We have a plan’

In Strobel's remarks, he emphasized that Yale’s commitment to environmental leadership has deep roots, from the birth of the Yale Forest School (now Yale School of the Environment) — which graduated some of the first leaders of the U.S. Forest Service — to G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s contributions to the birth of modern ecology, to the pioneering work on environmental economics by Nobel laureates William Nordhaus and the late James Tobin.

“The legacies of these individuals and the strength of our university have inspired us to take bold action in the 21st century,” Strobel told the audience.

Addressing current planetary threats, he said, will require more than just expertise in science and engineering: it will require contributions from nearly every discipline.

Today, scholars from across the Yale campus are advancing knowledge and solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss, among other environmental threats.

Since 2020, Yale Planetary Solutions (YPS) has fostered cross-disciplinary collaborations across the university community that fuse technical innovations, new data tools for modeling and monitoring, and the best scholarship from practically every field. Its ambitious efforts also reflect the unique and critical role that universities can play in meeting the existential threat of climate change, university leaders say.

In recent years, YPS has provided millions of dollars of seed grants to support innovative projects led by faculty and staff across the Yale campus. The university has established the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture and the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions. And new faculty members have been hired to expand Yale’s expertise in these fields and partnerships across the globe.

Meanwhile, Yale continues its work to train the climate leaders of the future.

And although the dangerous consequences of climate change that scientists have predicted for decades — including record heat, catastrophic drought, and sea level rise — are now evident worldwide, there is good news, Indy Burke, dean of the School of the Environment, said Tuesday.

“We have a plan to create solutions at scale to address these planetary challenges,” she said, and many of these ideas will be showcased at the summit.

Upcoming panels at Yale @ Climate Week NYC will address the role of the academic community in tackling climate change; strategies for achieving climate justice; the public health costs of climate change; how to better align the global trade system with sustainability goals; how to hold meat and dairy companies accountable for climate harms; the state of carbon markets; the role of architecture in creating a more sustainable society; the geopolitical implications of climate policy; the transformative benefits of green chemistry and green engineering; paths to a more sustainable health system; and how thought leaders and organizations can translate innovative solutions at scale.

During a fireside chat on Wednesday, Tom Steyer ’79, the investor and business leader who over the past decade has become a global champion for climate action, will discuss ways to galvanize solutions.

Emphasizing the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of YPS on Tuesday, School of Art Dean Kymberly Pinder spoke of the “transformative” power of art to effect change, and described ways Yale students are using it to explore threats to global ecosystems and human societies — including through the creation of public murals in partnership with the City of New Haven.

Music, too, has the power to bridge divides and prompt social change, said José García-León, dean of the Yale School of Music, who introduced a pair of musical performances by Yale students inspired by the existential threats of climate change. The pieces, one of which represented a melting glacier, were also written by Yale composers, Dayton Hare ’24 M.M. and current graduate student Luke Haaksma.

“When we say all of Yale [is part of Yale Planetary Solutions],” said Julie Zimmerman, Yale’s inaugural vice provost for planetary solutions and a driving force behind the summit, “we truly mean, all of Yale.”

Ushering in ‘a new era’ at Yale

In McInnis' opening remarks, she recalled that during her first weeks as Yale president this summer, she donned a hard hat and toured the sites of several campus construction projects. Important for achieving Yale’s priorities, they are also happening in the context of Yale’s ambitious climate commitments, she said.

“While we [are] enhancing our physical footprint in New Haven, we [are] doing so with a commitment to reducing our carbon footprint in mind, designing new construction and renovating older facilities to draw us closer to our ambitious and urgent climate goals,” she said.

One of the key strategies for achieving these goals is a long-term investment in geothermal energy systems, which draw on the temperatures deep beneath the ground to heat and cool campus buildings. Geothermal systems have been used in earlier campus projects, including the construction Kroon Hall, the flagship home of the Yale School of the Environment, and more recently as part of a project at Yale’s Malone Engineering Center.

This fall, on Science Hill, she said, teams are drilling holes deep into the ground for another geothermal project intended to reduce the university’s reliance on fossil fuels. The project, she said, “requires cutting-edge technology, interdisciplinary collaboration, and clear-eyed focus on what the future demands of us,” McInnis said.

“To me, it typifies Yale’s approach to doing our part to solve this global crisis — and the kind of transformation that Yale Planetary Solutions is driving every single day.”

She added: “We have bold ambitions, supported by a community that is motivated, passionate, and prepared to invest in Yale’s trailblazing spirit and expand an international effort that guides humanity toward the solutions it needs to ensure the health and vibrancy of this planet.”

YPS, she said, “is a home for that work and a bridge between different communities on campus, between our academics and our operations, between our university and the city of New Haven, and between Yale and the world.”

Click here for more coverage of Yale @ Climate Week NYC.