My career ended almost exactly 8 years ago when I sent out an email invitation to an open house/brunch at my Somerville apartment. I worked in an MIT department with two buildings, and I was inviting the people in one building, where I worked as the Building Manager, to mark my 60th birthday.

On the same day that I sent the invitation, I got a call from Human Resources telling me that someone in the other building “felt threatened” by me, and that, going forward, I needed to “stay away from Building 1.” No details, no discussion, no defense.

If you’re a man there is no surviving an accusation like this. The casual absurdity of such a devastating accusation— if someone looked out their window and saw me walking along the sidewalk, was I escalating? Was arrest the next step? How was I supposed to do my job, and why would I want to? No one would answer any question I had.

I mention this history because tomorrow is my birthday, and I’ve spent the past 8 years investigating what happened at MIT, not just to me but to MIT more specifically, and everyone influenced by MIT. If I said Scientists defeated Engineers, no one would take me seriously. If I said Evil defeated Good because good did nothing, again, no one would believe me.

So let me frame this as Success vs. Failure. Over the course of my 27-year career at MIT, I worked for two Institute Professors: Biological Oceanographer Penny Chisholm, and Nobel laureate Mario Molina, an atmospheric chemist who had written the equation that explains the ozone hole.

Extraordinary people and scientists, both of whom had failed at the single thing they most wanted to achieve: for Penny, the launch of an Environmental Initiative, and for Mario, to address the crisis of Air Pollution in Megacities.

But each was defeated by someone I am sure neither ever gave a single thought to: former CIA director John M. Deutch, who returned to MIT in January 2000, reborn as an energy expert. In 2006 Deutch and Moniz launched the MIT Energy Initiative and we have been trapped on their bridge to hell ever since.

Both Penny and Mario would be baffled by the idea that John Deutch had any impact on their work. And this is why their dreams failed. This is why the world is losing the climate fight.

The Mother Hen

Intending to be a writer, I worked most of my adult career part-time as a Communications Manager, and I was truly terrible at it. I never, ever met deadline, and you had to pry work from my clenched fist.

But in December 2016, Penny and other faculty I’d known for more than twenty-five years asked me to be the Building Manager at the Parsons Lab for Environmental Sciences & Engineering, and I was a man reborn. The previous Lab director, Dara Entekhabi, told me I need to be a “Mother Hen” to the Lab. And I was born for the role… [in prep].