Student Voices | Leading Through Complexity: The Climate WILL Snap Back

Graduate | May 22, 2026 | Gabelli School of Business

Each year, the Responsible Business Center sends a group of MBA students to attend the annual ClimateCAP Summit, an immersive experience that brings together future business leaders committed to addressing climate change. The summit offers our students the opportunity to explore the evolving relationship between climate and business through conversations with industry leaders and collaboration with peers from top MBA programs around the world. As part of our ongoing ClimateCAP reflections series, students share their personal insights and key takeaways from the experience, highlighting the ideas and conversations that shaped their understanding of responsible business leadership.

The diversity of backgrounds, interests, and experiences made this all-MBA climate change conference fascinating. Despite shared topics, each attendee had worked in a different industry, region, or country. One such conversation included a professor of climate and finance at Tuck University with extensive experience in capital markets and an MBA student at Kellogg’s who had previously worked in mining. I posed a question to the table: “Usually, laws look to the past and regulate to prevent things that have already happened. Since climate change isn’t being taken seriously in investor circles, will affecting the bottom-line trigger lawmakers to make sustainability a core part of every business, rather than just voluntary?” The professor paused, then said: “Eventually the climate will snap back, and at that point, both lawmakers and corporate leaders will have to act, but by then it’s already going to be too late. The problem is, no one cares because Wall Street analysts aren’t incentivized to look further than a year or two out. That’s not enough of a time frame to notice a difference.”

That short-termism was challenged immediately in the dynamic first session, ‘The Current Climate Landscape,’ where an academic, a venture capitalist, a journalist, and a corporate leader walked into a room full of students eager to make their mark on sustainability. As you can imagine, conversations spanned the US-China technological race, nuclear fusion (called the power source for the next 100 years), quantum computing (labeled AI on steroids), the Iran War and its global effects – particularly in South and Southeast Asia and the resulting electrification of economies to increase energy security. The most memorable takeaway came from venture capitalist Michael Kearney (General Partner at Engine Ventures), who argued that anyone working in sustainability must operate with a 10-15 year horizon: technology has rapidly progressed, but the technical foundation for renewable energy and climate tech has largely remained the same. He also stressed the need to redefine climate change as a health risk, not just a business risk, a reframing that stayed with me throughout the day.

The second impactful session, ‘Breaking through the Gridlock: Navigating Tensions in Climate Leadership,’ took a more personal turn. Guided by Jason Jay, Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Katy O’Brien, Head of Sustainable Innovation at New Balance, we were encouraged to develop our own “origin stories,” the moment sustainability became personal, much like a superhero’s turning point. We then engaged with peers to practice navigating climate conversations, with the goal not of changing minds, but of building enough common ground for action. The session emphasized active listening, personal reflection, and finding shared stakes rather than imposing beliefs. A separate session on corporate climate leadership stressed the value of benchmarking which emerged as one such tool, when companies publicly track and share their sustainability actions, peers can point to those results to make the case to their own leadership, turning individual progress into collective permission.

Between the morning and afternoon breakout sessions was the Climate Tech Startup Showcase, featuring companies out of MIT’s incubator working on various aspects of sustainability. One that stood out was Powerhouse VPP, an Independent Power Producer that partners with utilities to install home batteries and aggregate them into a Virtual Power Plant to supplement the grid, a compelling business model backed by an impressive team.

The bookending breakout sessions ‘Balancing Act: Aligning Climate Mitigation and Adaptation’ in the morning and ‘Carbon Markets: Credits, Credibility & Complexity’ in the afternoon – both converged on a central thesis: policy and capital markets must work in tandem. The carbon credit market, currently fragmented and ranging wildly from $2 to $300 per tonne against a far higher social cost of carbon, illustrated exactly how misaligned incentives can undermine progress. The math, however, is hard to ignore: every dollar invested in mitigation or adaptation yields roughly 10x in return – making the case for scaled investment not just moral, but financial. David Wilson, Investment Principal at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, captured the stakes with a sharp joke that “if you want a million dollars, go to a philanthropy. If you want a hundred million, go to the government. If you want a billion, go to the capital markets” – making the case for unlocking public capital more vividly than any slide could.

The closing session opened with Professor John Sterman, MIT management professor and moderator, running the EN-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator to model AI’s impact on global temperature. The most powerful lever available, it showed, was pricing carbon emissions. Keynote speaker Tom Taylor, President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, followed with a broader perspective on systemic change. During Q&A, when asked about individual impact, he pointed to diet as one of the most underestimated levers. I had the pleasure of having my own question answered by both panelists, where I asked what technology or project each of them was most excited about in the climate tech space. Mr. Taylor named carbon capture systems while Professor Sterman chose efficiency, for its outsized role in reducing carbon footprints across every sector.

Walking out, the professor’s words from the morning lingered: the climate will snap back. The conference made clear that the question isn’t whether action is necessary, it’s whether the people in that room, and others like us, can move fast enough for it to matter.

Written by: Shaswat Thapa, Full-time MBA ‘27