Earth Week Speaker: Environmental Engineer Jordan Peccia

On Friday, April 25, to close Earth Week’s festivities at Hopkins, the Student Sustainability Board invited Professor Jordan Peccia to speak about the environment at morning assembly on Friday, April 25. An engineer and professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale, Peccia discussed the progress human civilization has made in cleaning up the environment, as well as the work that remains to ensure a safe future for all species, particularly in reducing the carbon footprint.

In his speech, Peccia emphasized the interconnectedness of all living things. One example he shared was the pteropod, a deep-ocean organism whose calcium carbonate structure is being threatened by the ocean’s increasing acidity due to excess atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by human activity.

“Pteropods are at the bottom of the food chain, which means that everyone is impacted,” he said. He then showed an image of a starving polar bear on a thin sheet of ice, highlighting an example of another species directly facing the repercussions of climate change. “I hope I have driven the point home that we can solve environmental problems, but right now we have a bad one,” he said.

While Peccia’s presentation focused on environmental challenges, he also introduced “good news,” as he called it, including the development of a global carbon market—an incentivized system to help reduce corporate carbon emissions—the increase in wind and solar energy, and the decrease in carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution levels over the past ten years.

“I want to leave you with a message of more hope,” he concluded. “We are richer, more prosperous, we drive our cars more, and there are more of us—and we still have managed to decrease our carbon dioxide.”

Peccia finished his presentation with a photo of climate activist Greta Thunberg, saying, “Remember, you can always protest.”

After assembly, Peccia spoke with students in a special session in the Weissman Room.