Rachel Elizabeth Kyte CMG is a British academic who served as the 14th dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University from October 2019 to June 2023, and the first woman to lead the oldest graduate-only school of international affairs in the United States. She was the former Chief Executive Officer of Sustainable Energy for All, and Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All.
Rachel Kyte at Spotlight Health Aspen Ideas Festival 2015For some time, I have felt a growing pull between the work I love of leading Fletcher and working with all of you and the opportunities to contribute to the vital and increasingly urgent work I feel compelled to be part of about our collective future,
Fletcher's academic offerings will need to be more flexible, more financially accessible, and more responsive to remain attractive and compelling for students who want programs that can more immediately impact their professional growth,. “The reforms we have made in our academic offerings are having an impact, but we know that there is more to do.”
A big part of this will lie in helping governments “pivot” away from the old energy provision models — based on centralized, fossil fuel-based utilities — toward newer decarbonized and decentralized models,
I hope this initiative can help … usher in a new generation of policymakers and policies that see that the provision of energy services is very different in the future than the way we have provided them in the past,” she said, adding that if ISEP can help overcome this “big stumbling block,” it will pave the way for “one of the greatest pivots of our time.”
Integration” of services will be critical to addressing this access gap
Energy efficiency offers governments the cheapest and easiest way to “bend the emission curve,” while also potentially creating skilled jobs at a time when the automation shift is challenging employment,
So how to make energy efficiency sexy again is a very important challenge for this new initiative,”
I don’t see a market now or in the future for capture or storage on its own, but for use, yes,
But big questions remain around who pays for carbon capture, storage, and use — government, companies, individuals, or development finance institutes — and these questions “need to be worked on now,”
We know how to help communities through transition … delaying debate on that or portraying it as anything else is delaying the job at hand,
“the international community [needs] to come together and offer better alternatives [and] not just analysis,” as well as presenting a “pathway forward with available finance for those alternatives.”
There’s an enormous fascination with the idea that there is all this trapped capital in pension funds … of the developed world and that … a couple of magic buttons … need to be pressed and all that capital will find its way into large-scale infrastructure projects in developing countries,”But that’s not going to happen now or any time soon,
“democratization of the way in which people achieve their energy needs.” This shift is both “exciting and terrifying” for regulators and institutional managers in the old energy system,
Focusing on those traditionally beyond the energy system is actually something which needs to be front of mind in policymaking,”
