Resources Radio

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Chris Bataille, associate researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris. Steel accounts for almost 10 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and Bataille considers the potential for reducing and perhaps eliminating carbon dioxide emissions from the steelmaking process. Bataille also discusses how the i...

This is the third episode in an ongoing webinar series, which is providing Resources Radio listeners the chance to listen to a podcast recording live and ask guests their own questions about pressing energy, environment, and economics issues. In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Abel Brodeur about how the coronavirus lockdown orders have affected the transportation sector. Brodeur, an as...

In this episode, Annalise Blum fills us in on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Blum, a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement Science, has worked for years on the technical and geopolitical aspects of hydropower. Host Daniel Raimi talks with Blum about the controversial dam project on the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia, whose reservoir could begin filling as soon as this...

This is the second episode in an ongoing webinar series, which is providing Resources Radio listeners the chance to listen to a podcast recording live and ask guests their own questions about pressing energy issues. In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Valentina Bosetti, a Bocconi University professor and a senior scientist at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environm...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Kelly T. Sanders, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California. With her coauthors, Sanders has recently published a series of studies on air conditioning use in southern California, with a focus on who does—and does not—have access to cooling on hot days. This work, which touches on issues of energy and environ...

This is the first episode in an ongoing webinar series, which is providing Resources Radio listeners the chance to listen to a podcast recording live and ask guests their own questions about pressing energy issues. In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Professor Steve Cicala of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy (soon to be moving to Tufts University’s Department o...

These past few weeks, people across the United States have been horrified by the continuing violence against people of color. Resources for the Future has been working toward contributing energy and thoughtful work—not just words and statements—to support and incorporate diversity in our environmental mission. Toward that end, we are rebroadcasting this Resources Radio episode from last July with...

This week, host Kristin Hayes talks with Michael Toman, lead economist on climate change for the World Bank’s Development Research Group. Toman worked at Resources for the Future (RFF) for many years, during which he collaborated with former RFF Vice President for Research Molly Macauley in her pioneering effort to develop the economics of outer space as a topic for research and policy analysis. H...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Todd Moss, executive director of the Energy for Growth Hub and a nonresident fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute. Moss has years of experience expanding access to energy around the world, particularly in Africa. Here, Raimi and Moss discuss the current strategies that countries, companies, and international organizations are implementing to expand ac...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University. Raimi and Burns discuss the approaches and technologies that might be helpful in removing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, what governments and companies are doing to encourage the deployment of these options, and some of the risks and...

This week, host Kristin Hayes talks with Jeffrey Rissman, the industry program director and head of modeling at Energy Innovation, a research firm focused on accelerating clean energy. He leads modeling efforts for the firm’s energy policy solutions focus area, to determine the policies that most effectively help meet climate and energy goals. Rissman is the lead author on a new paper released rec...

Along with several co-authors, Resources for the Future (RFF) Senior Fellow Dick Morgenstern has recently released an RFF working paper on China’s new emissions trading program: a “tradable performance standard,” which sets a ratio of emissions to output that individual firms have to meet. Host Daniel Raimi talks with Morgenstern in this episode about the goals of the trading program, how it's des...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Harvard University Professor David Keith about solar geoengineering. Keith describes the variety of ways that solar geoengineering could work; some of its risks at local, regional, and global scales; recent small-scale experiments; and what might be needed to deploy a larger-scale research program. Raimi and Keith also discuss public policies related to pote...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks about carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS) with Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Friedmann gives an overview of the status of CCUS deployment worldwide, describes the costs of CCUS relative to other approaches for reducing emissions, and notes some emerging federal policies that aim to increase...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Ellen Gilinsky about Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, which refers to the 2015 Clean Water Rule that defined the scope of federal water protection, particularly for streams and wetlands that share a hydrologic system with "navigable waters." Gilinsky was the associate deputy assistant administrator for water at the US Environmental Protection Agency (E...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Maureen Cropper, an economics professor at the University of Maryland and senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). Raimi asks Maureen about a paper she recently coauthored, which takes a retrospective look at the Clean Air Act, as this year we mark the 50th anniversary of its 1970 amendments. With more than 50 years of data since the original Clean A...

In this week's episode, Kristin Hayes talks with Mary Evans and Matthew Kotchen, two of the authors on a new study published in the journal "Science" last week, which takes a critical look at how the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently updated the benefit-cost analysis of its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS. At the risk of skipping to the punchline, the paper's authors sugg...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with RFF Senior Fellow Alan Krupnick about the value of a statistical life, or VSL. As we all try to stay safe during the coronavirus pandemic, some analysts have started to ask the question, How much economic pain is appropriate to withstand to protect public health? The question is studded with ethical and moral land mines that, to some extent, VSL helps to add...

This week, Daniel Raimi talks with Stephanie La Hoz Theuer, a senior project manager at adelphi, an environmental think tank, as well as a member of the International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) Secretariat. Each year, ICAP releases a valuable report on the status of emissions trading around the world, and the 2020 report was released just last week. In this episode, La Hoz Theuer provides up...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with RFF senior fellow Margaret Walls. Along with coauthors Patrick Lee and Matthew Ashenfarb, Walls published a study last week on the economic impacts that result from the establishment of national monuments. The study looks at how the designation of a national monument affects businesses and employment in the surrounding area. While some have argued that monum...

This week, host Kristin Hayes talks with Amy Myers Jaffe about what has been unfolding in world oil markets over the past week, as the coronavirus, or COVID-19, continues to spread and radically impact human lives and the global economy. Jaffe is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment and director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Council on For...

This week, host Kristin Hayes talks with Carolyn Kousky, the executive director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Kousky is a university fellow at Resources for a future and was a fellow at RFF for a number of years. Kousky's research has examined multiple aspects of disaster insurance markets, the National Flood Insurance Program, fede...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Catherine Hausman and Samuel Stolper of the University of Michigan about a new working paper they’ve coauthored, called "Inequality, Information Failures, and Air Pollution." Catie and Sam take an economics lens to the problem of environmental justice and identify a new and important channel through which these problems can arise: the role of information. Re...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute. Hausfather discusses the past, present, and future of global greenhouse gas emissions, the emissions trajectory that the world is currently on, how that pathway looks different from some of the worst-case scenarios that researchers have used in the past, and the crucial uncertaint...

This week, host Kristin Hayes talks with Julia Nesheiwat, the first chief resilience officer for the state of Florida. Nesheiwat elaborates on how she’s helping support Florida’s climate resiliency efforts by coordinating across communities and organizations across the state and cutting the red tape that tends to stall environmental efforts related to climate change response. Nesheiwat has served...