Resources Radio

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...

In this week's episode, guest host Sue Tierney talks with Jody Freeman and Jeffrey Holmstead. Freeman is a professor who specializes in administrative law and environmental law at Harvard, founded their Environmental and Energy Law Program, and established the Harvard Law School’s first environmental law clinic. Holmstead is an attorney at the Houston-based law firm Bracewell LLP and a former assi...

In this week's episode, guest host Richard G. Newell talks with Amy Harder, a reporter at Axios who covers energy, the environment, and climate change issues. Previously, Amy covered similar topics for the Wall Street Journal and the National Journal; she also was the inaugural journalism fellow for the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute in 2018. Harder and Newell discuss the likeliho...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Dawn Carr, executive director of the Canadian Parks Council, a network of national, provincial, and territorial parks across Canada. Raimi and Carr discuss why connecting with nature is important, how the Canadian Parks Council works to enhance access to the natural world, how climate change is affecting the ways that governments need to manage their parks i...

This week, host Daniel Raimi learns more about space mining with Alex Gilbert, a fellow at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. In their discussion of the fundamentals of space mining, Gilbert and Raimi address key questions like the following: What resources are people interested in mining? What technologies are necessary to extract resources? How is the ownershi...

This week, host Kristin Hayes talks with George Kamiya, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA) and an expert on the emissions of information and communications technology. Kamiya leads the IEA's analysis on the energy impact of digital technologies and coordinates cross-agency efforts on tracking clean energy progress, digitalization, and automated and shared mobility. Kamiya and Haye...

This week, Daniel Raimi talks with Tim Latimer, cofounder and CEO of Fervo Energy, a geothermal energy developer. Geothermal is a relatively small source of energy in the United States, but it has the potential to grow substantially. Latimer and Raimi discuss how the technology works, where it’s deployed in the United States and around the world, how it might grow in the years ahead, and its envir...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Resources for the Future Fellow Matthew Wibbenmeyer. Wibbenmeyer provides an update on the recent spread of wildfires in California. He and Raimi discuss the severity of the fires; the impacts of the fires on people and places; and the causes of these fires, including the role of climate change. They also talk about how public policies can help reduce the ri...

This week, host Kristin Hayes talks with Jon Krosnick, a university fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF) and professor in humanities and social sciences, communication, and political science at Stanford University, where he directs the Political Psychology Research Group. In his spare time, Krosnick is a professional jazz drummer who tours a third of the year with his band, the Charged Particl...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Eva Lyubich, a PhD student in the Economics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Energy Institute at Haas. Lyubich recently released a fascinating working paper on the gap in household energy spending between white and black households. Lyubich and Raimi discuss this new working paper: how big that race gap is, whether it’s change...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Varun Sivaram, a visiting senior fellow at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Sivaram is an expert on all things energy and recently spent two years working in India on solar energy. Sivaram and Raimi discuss the evolution of India’s power grid, including its rapid expansion of energy access and its historical dependence on coal; the rise of solar, w...