Toly Rinberg is an Applied Physics Ph.D. Student at Harvard University, working on the science and governance of atmospheric carbon dioxide removal. Toly’s work bridges climate change, transparency and accountability, and social justice.
Toly is a co-founder of the Web Integrity Project (WIP), launched at the Sunlight Foundation, and currently supports the project as a BKC affiliate. As WIP’s director, Toly led investigations into changes to federal government websites pertaining to health, civil rights, immigration, and criminal justice under the Trump administration. Prior to launching WIP, Toly co-founded and helped lead the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative’s Website Monitoring Team, which revealed systematic censorship of climate change information on federal websites between 2017 and 2019.
After documenting and witnessing the dismantling of public climate change information, Toly changed his Ph.D. direction to research climate stabilization approaches. He is specifically working on new technical ways to remove carbon dioxide from the air, as well as exploring governance models for large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal that promotes environmental and social justice, while safeguarding against for-profit and fossil fuel industry capture. He is also developing frameworks to transparently evaluate a broad range of carbon dioxide removal approaches to facilitate an open and evidence-based policy discussion.