Resources Radio

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Wesley Look and Daniel Raimi, Resources for the Future (RFF) colleagues who have led RFF's research on enabling fairness for energy workers and communities in transition. Look is a senior research associate and Raimi is a fellow at RFF, and the work they describe in this episode has been carried out over the past year in partnership with Environmental...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with William Acworth, Head of Secretariat at the International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP). ICAP recently released its 2021 status report on global emissions trading, and we're highlighting the group's status report for the second year in a row. This time, Acworth gets us up to speed on China's recently launched national emissions trading scheme, along...

In this week's episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Danielle Wood, assistant professor and director of the Space Enabled research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Wood uses her expertise in aerospace engineering, aeronautics and astronautics, and technology policy to enhance societal development, bringing together tools not just from space and engineering, but also fr...

In this week’s episode, Daniel Raimi talks with Erin Mayfield, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. Mayfield is part of a team of researchers that recently released a report titled “Net-Zero America,” which lays out a variety of pathways for the United States to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In the conversation, Mayfield discusses key findings from the report, includin...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Karen Palmer, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF) and director of RFF’s Future of Power Initiative. Palmer has deep expertise in the US power sector and has authored numerous publications on electricity policy drivers and options in power market design and electrification of various sectors of the economy. This episode features tw...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Kevin Rennert, a fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF) and director of RFF’s Social Cost of Carbon Initiative. Rennert has prior experience as deputy associate administrator for the Office of Policy at the US Environmental Protection Agency, senior advisor on energy for the US Senate Committee on Finance, and senior professional staff for th...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Severin Borenstein, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas, and member of the Board of Governors of the California Independent System Operator. As the state of Texas struggles to keep the lights on due to extreme cold, Raimi asks Borenstein about lessons learne...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Francisco X. Aguilar, a professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and leader of the Team of Specialists on Wood Energy of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Aguilar and coauthors recently published a study on the environmental effects of the rapid growth of the wood pellet industry. Because wood pellets are viewed as...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with David Miller, former mayor of the city of Toronto and author of the book, “Solved: How the World’s Great Cities are Fixing the Climate Crisis.” The book came out in late 2020 and argues that cities are, in many ways, uniquely central to climate change action—and are, in fact, some of the best-equipped jurisdictions to take on the climate challenge. Mi...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Tisha Schuller, principal of Adamantine Energy and author of a new book, “The Gamechanger’s Playbook.” The book is a provocative and insightful look at how oil and gas companies can play a leading role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Schuller lays out the case for why these companies need to change, how companies can approach the climate challeng...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with David Hawkins, director of climate policy in the Climate & Clean Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of the board of directors at Resources for the Future. Hawkins has decades of experience working on energy and climate policy issues in NGOs and government. He walks us through the past 60 years of federal climate policy...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Tony Reames, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, and a leading scholar on the closely related topics of energy justice and energy poverty. In his conversation with Raimi, Reames describes what energy poverty is, how the federal government currently addresses energy poverty, and how quantifying the...

In this episode, we get the details on a friendly wager between Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, and Ted Nordhaus, founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute. Caldeira also is a senior advisor to Gates Ventures, but is not speaking on their behalf. Nordhaus is betting that global CO₂ emissions peaked in 2019, but Caldeira disagrees. Host Daniel Raimi...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Neil Lewis Jr., an assistant professor of communication and social behavior at Cornell University, about how different socioeconomic groups define what is—and what is not—an “environmental” issue. Lewis’s research touches on a variety of policy issues, from industrial pollution and housing policy to climate change and unemployment. In this episode, Lewis des...

In this episode, we say, "So Long, 2020!" and look ahead to 2021. To do so, host Daniel Raimi talks with two of the smartest energy and environmental thinkers around: Sarah Ladislaw, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Barry Rabe, from the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Ladislaw and Rabe reflect on the crazy year that was 2020—in particular, by...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Jordy Lee, a senior research associate at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. Lee discusses rare earth minerals, which are used widely in clean energy technologies, including wind, solar, and energy storage. Raimi and Lee talk about what rare earth minerals are, whether they're literally “rare,” how they’re mined and proces...

This week, host Kristin Hayes talks with Sheila Olmstead, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a university fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF) and a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. She spent time at the Council of Economic Advisers during the transition from the Obama to Trump administrations, and she has coauthored a recent rep...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Nyeema Harris, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan. Harris has coauthored a recent study that shows how communities of lions are distributed across national parks and hunting concessions in West Africa. Harris and Raimi discuss how these different environments affects patterns in lion movement and distribu...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Mahmoud Taha, a professor and chair of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Taha is an expert on many things related to materials science; in this episode, he talks about cement, which he calls the “magic glue” of construction. Taha and Raimi discuss the greenhouse gas footprint of cement, options for reducing that footprint,...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Apala Mukherjee, circular economy leader and sustainability director at BASF Corporation. BASF is one of the largest chemical companies in the world and has been considering how best to reduce waste—for both sustainability and cost-reduction reasons. As noted on the BASF website, the concept of a circular economy isn't just about waste reduction; Mukh...

In this week's episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with the coauthors of the new book “Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health," Michael A. Livermore and Richard Revesz. Livermore was the founding executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University (NYU) and now serves as one of its senior advisors. He is a profess...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Mark Tercek, longtime investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a former CEO of The Nature Conservancy, and a current member of the President's Council at Resources for the Future (RFF). Tercek talks about his current work advising private companies on how to take more ambitious steps to address environmental problems—particularly climate change. He and Raimi disc...

In this week's episode, guest hosts Richard Newell and Sue Tierney talk with each other about the difference it makes for policymakers to have access to sound economic and policy analysis, economic and climate policy in the near and longer term, the best ways to deploy resources to achieve ambitious policy outcomes, and highlights from prior episodes in the "Big Decisions" series they've spearhead...

In this week's episode, guest host Sue Tierney talks with Paula Glover, president and CEO of the American Association of Blacks in Energy and incoming president of the Alliance to Save Energy. Glover and Tierney discuss policy priorities for Black professionals in the energy industry; creating coalitions to make progress with good policy; support systems and professional pipelines that help divers...

In this week's episode, guest host Richard G. Newell talks with Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board and an environmental lawyer with prior experience at the US Environmental Protection Agency and in the California state government. Nichols and Newell discuss what comes next when a new law is "ready to be interpreted" and what it's like for a lawyer to bring some of the first...