63 Public Perception and Financial Risk Morgan Johnson Quamina, Jazmin Mucino Public Perception This report outlines a series of technology pathways that MIT could pursue to reach carbon neutrality. With any technology’s adoption comes the consideration of how the MIT community will react to the changes to campus. This is what we have labeled “public perception,” and it is crucial to the success of our plan to consider it in our final recommendation. Because of the importance of public perception, we have decided to tackle the issue head-on and gauge the opinions of the MIT community using a linear-scale survey. The survey will briefly detail every technology being considered in this report and ask the participants their feelings on it. There are two separate emotions that we chose to consider in the survey: fear and excitement. Using this, we condensed the emotional response that the participant could express into two questions: whether they would be excited and whether they would be concerned if this technology were to appear on campus. All questions are judged on a five-point linear scale. Each question has three components: the technology description and the two questions (shown in the image below). The first question, “How exciting do you think this idea is?” (referring to the related technology), is on a negative-to-positive scale. The second question, “How concerned would you be personally if this idea was implemented on the MIT campus?,” is also on a negative-to-positive scale. The survey begins by asking for an email address for the raffle (to incentivize response), asking what school the participant is affiliated with, and whether the participant is an undergraduate student, graduate student, faculty member, or staff member. It then continues to the actual content. After completing the first draft of this survey on Google Forms, we sent it to two separate groups of people: the seminar participants and an MIT undergraduate women’s living group. We received 38 responses out of ~130 people contacted, yielding a 29% response rate. The initial results communicate that most participants are in the School of Engineering and are undergraduates. Most participants feel not at all concerned about building retrofitting, high-res temperature controls, energy storage, and rooftop photovoltaic. The technologies with the most discomfort are nuclear batteries and deep geothermal, though further analysis is needed. Most participants are excited about everything except for the rooftop photovoltaic. Further analysis of this is needed. Some participants in the survey requested the negative aspects of technology to be disclosed to get a more holistic view of what they are reacting to.
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