Webinar on MACA Roadmap - A Tool for Advocacy and Engagement

Speaker: Jeremy Grace '83

When: Tuesday, July 20 at 7:00 PM EDT

Sponsor: MIT Clubs of Rochester and Western NY

Last April, a team of MIT Alumni for Climate Action (MACA) members completed a first version of “A Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change”. The document provides a brief history of the climate crisis and a set of recommendations for action to address it. Included in the Roadmap is a graphic representation of the recommended actions, presented in the style of a technology roadmap. When one considers applying road mapping techniques to the climate crisis, the considerable scale of the challenge becomes evident. Using the MACA Roadmap graphic as an initial conversation piece, MACA has engaged in meetings with staff who serve members of the US Congress, and staff who serve the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. Jeremy will describe how the Roadmap fits into a formula for engagement with organizations and elected officials, how its contents provide presentation material to guide meetings to advocate for actions commensurate with the scale of the crisis, and how MACA believes that such advocacy efforts can be carried out on a larger scale with the help of MACA membership at large and MIT alumni at large.

Jeremy Grace earned his S.B. in Physics (MIT ’83). After graduating from MIT, he continued his Physics studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his MS and Ph.D. Upon completing his doctorate, Jeremy chose a career path in thin-film science and technology, doing post-doctoral work at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center and Argonne National Laboratory, before starting a 20 year career in industrial Research and Development at the Eastman Kodak Company. More recently, he joined IDEX Health & Science, where he is a principal engineer. In 2007, while attending an annual conference of the AVS (formerly the American Vacuum Society) in Seattle, WA, Jeremy attended a lecture by Philip Mote entitled "Global Climate Change: Hoax or Catastrophe”. While there was considerable awareness of the connection between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in the 1990’s, by 2007 the connection was undeniable, and it was abundantly clear that the challenges were going to increase significantly with each passing year of inaction. As Philip Mote suggested in 2007, inaction would have catastrophic consequences. After seeing more than a decade pass without substantial global progress on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and after the US withdrew from the Paris Accord, Jeremy decided to explore ways to become active in promoting climate action. When he learned about MIT Alumni for Climate Action, in the Fall of 2020, he joined the group. Shortly thereafter, he was asked to coordinate and lead the effort to produce “A Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change”.