Resources Radio

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...

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...