Resources Radio

This week, host Margaret Walls talks with Benji Backer about attracting nonpartisan support for environmental conservation. Backer is the founder and CEO of Nature Is Nonpartisan—a nonprofit organization focused on redefining environmental issues as nonpartisan—and serves on the board of the American Conservation Coalition. In this episode, Backer discusses his approach to environmental issues by...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with research colleagues at Resources for the Future—Senior Fellow Karen Palmer, Fellow Kevin Rennert, and Senior Fellow Margaret Walls—about the top 10 issues of 2025 they’ve been tracking in energy and environmental news from the past year. Among the topics they’ve chosen for conversation: public land sales, electricity load growth and affordabilit...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Kate Gordon about California’s recent raft of climate policies. Gordon, the CEO of California Forward who also has held senior policy positions in California and the US Department of Energy, discusses the various Senate bills that have been proposed and passed recently in the state. She talks about the importance of considering energy affordabil...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Neha Khanna and Ruohao Zhang about how government shutdowns prevent active air-pollution monitoring—and end up leading to more air pollution from coal-fired power plants while monitoring is on hiatus. Professor Khanna from Binghamton University and Assistant Professor Zhang from Pennsylvania State University published a related study, with anoth...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Kaitlin Raimi about public perceptions of solar geoengineering. Raimi, a social psychologist and associate professor at the University of Michigan, describes how only around 15 or 25 percent of people know what solar geoengineering is, and those who are aware tend to be wary of the concept. She discusses techniques to inform the public about th...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Vivek Srikrishnan about factors that contribute to sea level rise. Srikrishnan, an assistant professor at Cornell University, describes the difficulties involved in analyzing the impact of the complex factors related to climate and climate change, which in turn lead to uncertainties in projecting the extent of future sea level rise. In a new pub...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Dave Foster, a distinguished associate at the Energy Futures Initiative, about the story of how labor unions and environmental organizations have found ways to work together on issues that affect both contingents. As a former director of United Steelworkers District 11, Foster recalls the “Donora incident” as the main catalyst for the union’s in...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi and guest Severin Borenstein discuss regulatory punishments for “energy hogs.” Borenstein is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; faculty director of Berkeley’s Energy Institute in the Haas School of Business; and chair of the board of governors for the California Independent System Operator. These “energy hogs”—households perceived as co...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Arvind Ravikumar, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about recent federal deregulation of methane emissions in the United States; specifically, the effects on methane emissions from the production of natural gas and liquefied natural gas. Ravikumar highlights some of his recent research, which explores how all steps in...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi discusses carbon removal with Jennifer Wilcox, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who recently coauthored a paper titled, “Elevating Carbon Management: A Policy Decision-Making Framework and Rubric for the 21st Century.” Wilcox discusses the existing gaps in current policies related to carbon removal and important considerations when amending an...

This week’s episode features a discussion of the recent US federal investment in a privately held mine—the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine in California—with host Daniel Raimi and podcast guest Tom Moerenhout, a professor at Columbia University and leader of a critical minerals initiative at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Moere...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi discusses subsidies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) with Sheila Olmstead, a professor at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and a senior faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Olmstead evaluates the complicated nature of the 45Q policy, a federal subsidy available to firms that implement CCS. While CCS subsidy...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi discusses fossil fuel subsidies with Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor and cofounder of the 2035 Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They talk about how subsidies on goods such as gasoline and diesel lead to lower prices for consumers. However, because these subsidies encourage the use of fossil fuels, reforming such policies is...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls talks with Dominic Parker, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, about the first US government–run environmental management agencies and how they’ve influenced the survival of wildlife in the United States. Parker’s new coauthored journal article discusses the economic, political, and social forces that led to the founding of state wildlife...

In n this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Kristen McCormack, Resources for the Future’s newest research fellow, about McCormack’s scholarly work on the impact of extreme temperatures on student absences, disciplinary infractions, and later-life outcomes. McCormack explains how she combined student data from a large urban school district in the United States, information about the pre...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Rami talks with Heather Zichal, global head of sustainability at JPMorganChase, about the role of financial institutions in the energy transition. Zichal explains how she has advanced climate policy goals from positions in the United States Congress, the executive branch, nonprofits, and the financial sector. From these diverse perspectives, Zichal outlines the...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Diana Hernández, an associate professor and codirector of the Energy Opportunity Lab at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, about the struggles that ordinary Americans face in accessing affordable and reliable energy. In her recently released book, Powerless: The People’s Struggle for Energy, Hernández documents how energy...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Danny Richter, director of the Pricing Carbon Initiative, about the existing suite of carbon pricing policies, a set of climate policy tools designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by requiring companies and other entities to pay for each ton of carbon dioxide they release into the atmosphere. Richter evaluates the international and domesti...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of a research team at Wood Mackenzie that investigates the connections between energy consumers and the electric grid, about how the increasing energy demand from artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping electricity markets in the United States. In a recent report for Wood Mackenzie, Hertz-Shargel investigates la...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls talks with Megan Lawson, an economist and researcher at Headwaters Economics, about how outdoor recreation economies support communities throughout the United States despite creating unique challenges for their residents. Many US communities that border public lands and scenic natural areas have recreation-dependent economies, meaning a majority of the l...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Varun Sivaram, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and founder and CEO of Emerald AI, about how “climate realism” could shape the future of US climate policy. In a recent article for the Council on Foreign Relations, Sivaram lays out the case for climate realism—an approach to US climate policy that both realistically prepares for...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Madeline Yozwiak, a PhD candidate at Indiana University Bloomington, about the potential of residential rooftop solar technology to address the growing problem of household energy insecurity in the United States. Energy insecurity—the inability to access or afford sufficient energy to meet basic household needs—affects about one in four US house...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with McKenna Peplinski, a senior research associate at Resources for the Future, about delays in building up the infrastructure that delivers electricity to the United States. Many electric power projects, such as bids for new generators and transmission lines, are waiting in long queues to connect to the grid. In a recent study she coauthored, Pepli...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Sandeep Pai, director of climate and energy policy at Swaniti Global. Pai grew up in India’s coal belt; he has spent his career examining the coal and energy sectors in India, first as a journalist and now as a researcher and advisor focused on justice in the clean energy transition. He joins the podcast to discuss India’s energy and power secto...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Robert D. Metcalfe, a professor at Columbia University. Metcalfe recently coauthored a study of the levels of invisible particulate matter released in the air during everyday household activities like cooking and cleaning, exposure to which has been linked to health problems. He shares key findings on trends in indoor air quality, how people cha...