While many college students collaborate during study groups or work together on class projects, a group of eight Tufts students teamed up last month to discuss the world's future.
These eight students are members of the Tufts Energy Security Initiative (ESI) that traveled to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates for ten days to take part in the inaugural World Future Energy Summit (WFES).
The summit, which is the largest in the world of its kind, is aimed at bringing global leaders together to discuss sustainable and alternative energy solutions in a country whose energy practices are being called into question by many critics.
Mingling with leaders in energy technology and presenting their own comparisons of approaches to energy policy in the United Arab Emirates and United States, the Tufts students worked to establish a relationship with several Abu Dhabi organizations - Masdar, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and the Masdar Institute for Science and Technology (MIST) - in the hopes of paving the way for future Tufts students to network with scholars from the United Arab Emirates.
These organizations are part of an effort by the United Arab Emirates government to find alternative energy sources. The organizations have worked to plan a city that relies strictly on solar energy. Senior and ESI Co-Director Jesse Gossett, who attended the conference and initially researched the group's opportunity to take part in it, discussed the critical importance of the United Arab Emirates in energy development.
"[The United Arab Emirates is] the energy capital of the world," he said.
According to Alex Wright, the ESI's founder and co-director, while the United Arab Emirates "consider themselves as experts in energy" and have poured billions of dollars into renewable energy research, the country has come under widespread criticism in regards to many of its practices.
Junior and ESI member Renee Birenbaum explained that the human energy that provides the labor for the solar-powered city comes from South Asian immigrant workers who are often falsely promised higher wages and bussed to and from the city's 24-hour construction sites every 48 hours.
Wright also emphasized that, although the country is investing money in these energy endeavors, it is not yet under extreme pressure to find an alternative energy source because so much of its wealth comes from oil.
"I think they don't want to find the magic bullet because they are making a lot of money by oil being so expensive," Wright said. "I don't think they will make [an energy breakthough] public until they have to ... Business-wise, this makes sense.
"But they want to have their finger on global energy so they will be on top of it as it shifts."
In presenting their own ideas at the summit, the eight students focused on the economics of oil and drew comparisons between the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
Asked to define the effects that will result from oil becoming more scarce and expensive, Wright said that the effects on the two respective countries would be very different based on their different policies regarding energy.
"[The world is in a] period of huge change in terms of where we get our energy from and where we can get it from in the future," Wright said.
At the summit, Gossett and Wright discussed the role of Tufts in terms of sustainable energy.
They articulated that the university was created in order to put a light on the hill - and is now serving as a beacon of light for the world in terms of the roles universities should play in the future of energy.
Wright emphasized Tufts' importance in alternative energy progression.
He explained that though the government does not have a comprehensive plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, Tufts was the first university that said it would follow the Kyoto protocol even if the United States does not.
This approach, Wright said, is typical of grassroots movements in the United States, compared to a more government-led approach in the United Arab Emirates.
Because the price of oil has reached $100 per barrel, Wright said that the United States is at a tipping point.
"People have always watched this marker as the day where everything is going to change what is viable in terms of energy sources," she said.
