A county-by-county analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the US that stand to see the biggest economic changes from the switch to cleaner energy because their job markets are most closely linked to fossil fuels. 

While many of those places have intensive drilling and mining operations, the researchers find, areas that rely on industries such as heavy manufacturing could also be among the most significantly affected—a reality that policies intended to support American workers during the energy transition may not be taking into account, given that some of these communities don’t qualify for federal assistance under the Inflation Reduction Act.

COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS

“The impact on jobs of the energy transition is not just going to be where oil and natural gas are drilled,” says Christopher Knittel, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and coauthor of the paper. “It’s going to be all the way up and down the value chain of things we make in the US. That’s a more extensive, but still focused, problem.” 

Using several data sources measuring energy consumption by businesses, as well as detailed employment data from the US Census Bureau, Knittel and Kailin Graham, a master’s student in the Technology and Policy Program, calculated the “employment carbon footprint” of every county in the US.

“Our results are unique in that we cover close to the entire US economy and consider the impacts on places that produce fossil fuels but also on places that consume a lot of coal, oil, or natural gas for energy,” says Graham. “This approach gives us a much more complete picture of where communities might be affected and how support should be targeted.”

He adds, “It’s important that policymakers understand these economy-­wide employment impacts. Our aim in providing these data is to help policymakers incorporate these considerations into future policies.”

Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early—when any available treatments are likely to be most effective.

The issue has to do with a subtle aspect of language processing: people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) struggle with certain ambiguous sentences in which pronouns could refer to people not referenced in the sentences themselves.For instance, in “The electrician fixed the light switch when he visited the tenant,” it is not clear without context whether “he” refers to the electrician or some other visitor. But in “He visited the tenant when the electrician repaired the light switch,” “he” and “the electrician” cannot be the same person. And in “The babysitter emptied the bottle and prepared the formula,” there is no reference to a person beyond the sentence.

The researchers found that people with aMCI performed significantly worse than others at producing sentences of the first type. “It’s not that aMCI individuals have lost the ability to process syntax or put complex sentences together, or lost words; it’s that they’re showing a deficit when the mind has to figure out whether to stay in the sentence or go outside it to figure out who we’re talking about,” explains coauthor Barbara Lust, a professor emerita at Cornell and a research affiliate at MIT. 

“While our aMCI participants have memory deficits, this does not explain their language deficits,” adds MIT linguistics scholar Suzanne Flynn, another coauthor. The findings could steer neuroscience studies on dementia toward brain regions that process language. “The more precise we can become about the neuronal locus of deterioration,” she says, “that’s going to make a big difference in terms of developing treatment.”