Course Overview & Details
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Presenter: An engineer with a background in tech and cleantech entrepreneurship, founder of a community-funded climate project focused on slowing Arctic sea ice melt. With hands-on experience in cleantech accelerators including the Cleantech Open and Sustainable Silicon Valley, the presenter brings a pragmatic, engineer-first perspective to climate action, paired with close guidance from leading climate scientists.
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Host Context: Stanford University graduate-level course focused on climate action, clean tech entrepreneurship, and environmental engineering, designed for students across engineering, earth science, climate policy, and sustainable business tracks.
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Session Format: 60-minute lecture + 40-minute live audience Q&A, featuring IPCC data analysis, paleoclimate context, real-world geoengineering case studies, a first-person account of building a grassroots climate intervention project, and actionable frameworks for responsible climate innovation.
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Core Audience: Environmental and mechanical engineering grad students, climate policy students, clean tech founders, earth science researchers, and sustainability professionals.
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Central Thesis: Human-caused climate change is accelerating faster than the IPCC’s most conservative predictions, driven in large part by positive feedback loops like Arctic sea ice loss – which now accounts for roughly 33% of global warming. While rapid, global decarbonization of our energy system and infrastructure is the only permanent long-term solution, we are rapidly running out of time to avoid catastrophic, irreversible planetary tipping points. Reversible, low-harm, locally testable climate interventions – not reckless, ungovernable global geoengineering – can act as a critical “band-aid” to buy us the breathing room we need to decarbonize, provided they follow the non-negotiable rule of “first, do no harm.”
