Resources Radio

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Lara Aleluia Reis, a scientist at our sister institution, the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment. Reis and her coauthors have recently released a new study in “Lancet Planetary Health” about the connection between air pollution and climate change. The study explores how policymakers can most effectively accomplish two i...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Jennifer Haverkamp, director of the Graham Sustainability Institute at the University of Michigan, and Sarah Ladislaw, managing director of the US Program at RMI. This week is our annual year-in-review episode, in which we talk about what happened during the past year and what we’ll be watching for in the year to come. Haverkamp and Ladislaw highlight...

What’s a better strategy for incentivizing innovation: the existing patent system or flashy, high-dollar prizes? This year, Elon Musk (Person of the Year in 2021, according to “Time” magazine) inspired heated debate when he announced a $100-million prize for novel carbon removal technologies. Some environmentalists were enthusiastic, though Zorina Khan—a professor of economics at Bowdoin College a...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Paul Joskow, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the President’s Council at Resources for the Future. Joskow has had a long and distinguished career that spans a wide range of energy and environmental topics. In his conversation with Raimi, Joskow discusses his new working paper about the challenge...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Casey Wichman, an assistant professor in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech and an RFF university fellow. Wichman and several coauthors recently published a working paper that uses a field experiment to estimate how smart thermostats and time-varying electricity pricing can help reduce household utility bills and demands on the power sector...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Colin Jerolmack, a professor of sociology and environmental studies at New York University. Jerolmack recently published “Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town”—a book that Raimi insists is one of the best on the shale revolution that’s been written to date. Jerolmack lived for several months in a ru...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Kim Stanley Robinson, acclaimed author of many books, most recently “The Ministry for the Future.” Robinson’s books vividly illustrate some of the most devastating potential consequences of climate change, but that’s not all they do—the books also offer innovation and optimism, imagining the ways in which we can prevent some of the worst impacts...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Shelie Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. Miller describes her recent research, which investigates whether reusable products like straws and coffee cups are really more sustainable than their single-use counterparts. In part because manufacturing these products and then keeping them cle...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Billy Pizer, the Vice President for Research and Policy Engagement at Resources for the Future. The episode was recorded on the second-to-last day of COP26, closing out our three-part COP-focused podcast series. Pizer joins Resources Radio live from Glasgow, where he has been RFF’s eyes and ears, to discuss how this critical negotiating session...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Suzi Kerr, chief economist at Environmental Defense Fund. Kerr’s areas of expertise include emissions pricing, climate change policy, land use, and—most relevant for this podcast episode—international climate cooperation. Kerr originally hails from New Zealand, where she helped found Motu, an economics and public policy research institution tha...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Cleetus is an expert on the process used by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, and has been attending international climate negotiations since 2009. As this podcast episode airs, we are two days into this year’s ne...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Boma Brown-West, director of consumer health at Environmental Defense Fund. Brown-West works on a wide range of issues related to the safety of consumer products, and she discusses some of the risks associated with packaging. Along with the well-known environmental damages from plastic pollution, Brown-West and Raimi dig into the lesser-known risks to...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Char Miller, a professor at Pomona College and a senior fellow at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation. Miller recently published a book called “West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement.” It’s a fascinating look back at how decades of environmental discrimination led t...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Inês Azevedo, an associate professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy. Azevedo publishes on a very wide range of topics, but the conversation in this episode focuses on her work that examines the effects of particu...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Gilbert Michaud, an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. Michaud is an expert on the power sector and economic development, and he discusses a new state law in Illinois called the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. The bill aims to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by mid-century and includes other provisions to...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Arvind Ravikumar, an associate professor at the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Ravikumar is a leading researcher on the topic of methane emissions from oil and gas systems; he recently coauthored a paper demonstrating how the US Environmental Protection Agency can better accoun...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Afsaneh Beschloss, founder and CEO of RockCreek Group. Before founding RockCreek, Beschloss worked with the World Bank and other financial institutions to develop energy projects around the world. As pressure mounts on banks to move away from fossil fuels, Beschloss and Raimi discuss the special role of multilateral development banks in the tran...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Brian Flannery, a visiting fellow at Resources for the Future and an expert on international climate policy. Flannery describes how border carbon adjustments—essentially taxes imposed on goods from countries with relatively less ambitious climate standards—are gaining traction, with proposals circulating in the United States and the European Un...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Joseph E. Aldy about fossil fuel subsidies—an area that Aldy has researched extensively and a subject that has been rekindled in the policy dialogue after President Joe Biden suggested removing such subsidies when he released his American Jobs Plan in April this year. But this somewhat amorphous concept of fossil fuel subsidies has been notorio...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Eric Zou, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Oregon. Zou has published fascinating work on how air pollution monitors work—or don’t work, as the case may be—to detect harmful levels of air pollution in the United States. Using data from satellites and ground-based monitors, his work has uncovered how local actors, particularly loc...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Hannah Druckenmiller, a new fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). This is the second part of a two-part series that introduces new RFF fellows, and Druckenmiller is another welcome addition to RFF and to Resources Radio. Druckenmiller discusses her fascinating paper that estimates the value of forests—not just in the marketplace, but for society. S...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Penny Liao, a scholar of behavioral and market responses to environmental risk, who joined Resources for the Future as a fellow earlier this month. Liao elaborates on a new working paper she coauthored about how home equity shapes a household’s decision to purchase flood insurance. In the end, Liao finds that homeowners with more home equity ar...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Robert Godby, an associate professor of economics at the University of Wyoming. Wyoming is the subject of their conversation: It’s been a major energy-producing state for over a century and is the nation’s largest producer of coal by far. But energy production in Wyoming has declined substantially in recent years, raising major challenges for th...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with David Wear, a nonresident senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). As anyone knows who’s recently breathed the air in the northeastern or midwestern United States, wildfires increasingly are posing risks to human health, the environment, and the climate. In a recent RFF issue brief, Wear analyzes how scaling up wildfire management in fed...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes speaks to Veronique Bugnion, a scientist, entrepreneur, and energy industry leader. Bugnion—a climate physicist by training who spent years in the private sector, focusing on energy and carbon markets—cofounded and serves as the CEO of ClearlyEnergy, which provides innovative solutions that help reduce emissions from buildings. Hayes and Bugnion discuss f...