Oct 02, 2024

Jesse Jenkins

TIME Staff

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Jesse Jenkins

Jesse JenkinsGabriela Bhaskar

Climate change is in some ways a math problem, and Jesse Jenkins is among the wonkiest and most effective of the number crunchers trying to work out a solution. From his perch as an engineering professor at Princeton, he’s emerged as the scorekeeper for American efforts to transition to clean energy: his analyses gave environmentalists confidence that President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was indeed a good deal that would dramatically cut carbon. Now he helps monitor the build-out, and keep track of the obstacles slowing the necessary change toward drawing power from sun, wind, and batteries. Jesse understood from the start that there’s no way to do this work from within an academic cone of silence—instead he’s been a regular on social media, mixing it up with all comers as he explains the sometimes abstract and difficult algebra of carbon reduction to a broader audience.

McKibben is an author and an environmentalist