Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Friday, March 24th, 2023 Michael Garjian on Carbon Dioxide Removal

Michael Garjian will speak about how climate change provides an opportunity to create sustainable community economies by utilizing sustainable power systems and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies such as the CarbonStar system. His 16 years spent in the CDR industry culminated in Michael Garjian’s development, patenting, and successful demonstration of the mobile CarbonStar catalytic vacuum pyrolysis system. The CarbonStar system sequesters atmospheric CO2 by pyrolyzing a variety of biomass feedstocks to produce biochar, bio oils, wood vinegar fertilizer, and biogas to generate electricity to power the CarbonStar system. If widely deployed, the self-sustaining CarbonStar system could sequester megaton levels of CO2 while providing carbon neutral energy and power to urban, rural, and even remote locations wherever a supply of biomass is available. The CarbonStar system has been ranked among the top 80 of 1,300 global CDR technologies entered in Elon Musk’s Carbon XPRIZE.

Michael left the farm to earn a degree in business management from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Isenberg School Of Management. As a lifelong commercial entrepreneur, social entrepreneur, and author, he holds 11 international patents for alternative lighting systems, electronic power supplies, and atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (CDR) systems. As a commercial entrepreneur he and his wife Irene employed 400 associates producing innovations he developed and sold internationally. As a social entrepreneur in the 2000s, he conceived of and pursued the development of sustainable economic systems while working in community development organizations helping more than one hundred very low income individuals and refugees start small businesses. His work earned a number of awards and was recognized widely by the community, business, and social media of that time. He and his wife Irene are the founders of CarbonStar Systems, Inc., a Massachusetts domestic benefit corporation (B-Corp).

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Friday March 10th, 2023 David Hsu on The Origin of Community Choice Aggregation

On Friday, March 10th, David Hsu will speak on The Origin of Community Choice Aggregation and other aspects of the role of concerned citizens in moving local and national policy regarding the energy transition necessary to avoid worsening climate change. A recent paper on the invention of Community Choice Aggregation in Massachusetts sheds light on how to achieve changes in the energy system from the bottom-up, with local organizing and government action. A second recent paper, on the interactions between land use and the built environment with national, economy-wide decarbonization, illustrates how local cities and regions must act to contribute to the energy transition.

David Hsu is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Cities connect to their environment through infrastructure, built through physical, technological, and social systems. David's research and teaching focus on how planners, policymakers, and advocates can shape and implement these complex systems using technology, data, and analysis. David taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, and worked in structural engineering, real estate finance, and as a policy analyst in the city governments of New York and Seattle. He holds a B.S. from Yale University in physics; a M.S. from Cornell University in applied and engineering physics; a M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in city design and social science; and from the University of Washington in Seattle, a Ph.D. in urban design and planning with a certificate in social science and statistics. David is working on a book contracted with the University of Chicago Press on governance of utilities and infrastructure.