Resources Radio

In this episode, Daniel Raimi talks with Susanna Berkouwer about their research on reducing the economic and environmental costs of energy access through a simple piece of technology: charcoal-burning cookstoves. Access to electricity is limited in low-income countries, which means that access to clean cooking in those countries is limited, too. Some areas of the world have shifted to using liquef...

In this episode, host Margaret Walls speaks to Dave Keiser and Joseph Shapiro about safe drinking water in the United States. Keiser is a professor at Yale University, and Shapiro is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Together with other coauthors, they put out a research paper on clean drinking water: how US residents have access to it, what types of policies help p...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Jesse Gourevitch, a new Resources for the Future fellow, about how flood-risk information affects US housing markets. Discussing an upcoming report, Gourevitch outlines changes in property sale prices and buyer characteristics following revisions to federal flood maps and updates to state requirements for disclosing flood risk to homebuyers. He and hi...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Andrea Furnaro and Patrick Heller from the Natural Resource Governance Institute. Drawing from a recent report, Furnaro and Heller lay out a five-step framework for how national oil companies (NOCs) can navigate an impending energy transition. Together, they contend that a business-as-usual approach is not a neutral option for these companies and their...

This week, host Margaret Walls investigates the world of weather forecasting with Jeffrey Shrader, an associate professor at Columbia University whose recent research examines inequalities in forecast accuracy among countries across the globe. While the accuracy of weather forecasts has improved steadily over the past few decades, low-income countries experience notably less reliability in their l...

In this episode of the podcast, host Kristin Hayes invites Zehra Khan and Lauren Sidner to discuss their work on the Electricity Price Hub, a collaboration that involves Heatmap News, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Clean Economy Project. The Hub visualizes national, state-level, and regional electricity prices—a feat that previously has been elusive due to the fragmentation of...

This week, host Daniel Raimi brings Gabrielle Wong-Parodi on the podcast to discuss how people connect climate change to their personal experiences with extreme weather events—and whether these experiences impact their willingness to take action. As a social scientist at Stanford University with a psychology background, Wong-Parodi offers a glimpse into the complicated, and often unpredictable, pa...

This week, host Daniel Raimi brings Ishan Sharma on the podcast to discuss the beginnings of the geologic hydrogen industry. Sharma, director and founder of a fund at Renaissance Philanthropy that seeks to grow hydrogen into a competitive energy provider, draws upon the trajectories of sectors such as oil and gas—and newer additions, like geothermal energy—to argue that with enough investment, the...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes invites Sara Baldwin-Griffin to give her perspective on Utah’s growing renewable energy sector—a product of the state’s abundant resources, increasing energy demand, and collaborative policy landscape. Baldwin-Griffin, as chief executive officer of Utah Clean Energy, is supporting the industry’s boom as solar, wind, geothermal, and battery power have grown from...

This week, host Daniel Raimi welcomes Shoshannah Lenski, executive director of the Ann Arbor Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU), a municipal energy utility that is fully powered by renewable sources, optional for residents, and supplemental to the existing electricity grid. Over the past few months, the SEU has been installing solar energy systems in households to scale back dependence on carbon-int...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls brings Mark Brown and Jason Brooks on the podcast to discuss their work facilitating fire-resilience efforts among the residents of Marin County, California. As the executive officer of the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority—the agency tasked with coordinating the county’s fire-prevention activities—Brown relies on data and strategies created by Fire As...

This week, host Kristin Hayes invites Liz Moyer on the podcast to break down the history of US energy use in commemoration of the country’s 250th year of independence. Moyer is an associate professor at the University of Chicago, and along with research collaborators, she created an animated Sankey diagram—a chart that quantifies and depicts the flow of volume from one stage or category (in this c...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi invites podcast guest Amy Townsend-Small, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, to illuminate the history, environmental impact, and cultural significance of gas-powered streetlights. These functional fixtures lend old-time ambiance to historic districts in cities like Boston and Cincinnati, but their aesthetic comes at a cost: gas lamps leak methane at a...

This week, host Margaret Walls welcomes Celso Ferreira and Elizabeth Van Dolah on the podcast to talk about building resilience in coastal communities that are vulnerable to sea level rise. Ferreira, a professor at George Mason University, and Van Dolah, an environmental anthropologist and community engagement expert, were members of an interdisciplinary research team that aimed to construct natur...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi brings in Margaret Walls and Yanjun (Penny) Liao to discuss why homeowners insurance prices and nonrenewals are increasing in the United States—and how insurers, homeowners, and state and federal governments are responding. Walls is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF), director of RFF’s Climate Risk and Resilience Program, and co-host of Reso...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls welcomes to the podcast Nick Bratton, who works as a program manager in King County, Washington State, coordinating and promoting market-based conservation through the voluntary transfer of development rights. As an incentive-based approach to land use, transfer of development rights (TDR) programs enable property owners to sell the development rights on...

For this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi is joined by Lauren Dunlap, a project manager at the University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin Center for Innovation—and a former staff member at Resources for the Future. Dunlap describes exciting developments in electrification policy in California, where heat, pollution, and energy costs make the issue as topical as ever. A piece of legislation in...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes is joined by University of Michigan Associate Professor Johanna Mathieu, who researches the efficiency and environmental impacts of the electric power sector. By breaking down how electricity is supplied in the power system, Mathieu demonstrates how understanding the potential areas of flexibility in power consumption can point to system-level improvement...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Deborah Gordon, a senior principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute and senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Together, they discuss the hit television show “Landman,” which exposes an up-close view of working and living in the oil and gas industry. “Landman” portrays some of the major risks and comp...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes is joined by podcast-host-turned-guest Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF) and director of RFF’s Communities in the Energy Transition initiative, to discuss Raimi’s research on energy communities and his work establishing a highly collaborative ongoing project: the Resilient Energy Economies initiative. Though all communities depend o...

In this episode, Sarah Armitage, an assistant professor at Boston University, sits with host Daniel Raimi to share findings from a working paper she wrote with coauthors about the transfer sales of oil and gas wells and why this practice of oil and gas companies selling wells to each other can lead to negative consequences of “unplugged,” or “orphaned,” or abandoned wells. Armitage explains why un...

In this episode, host Margaret Walls talks with Jade Stevens, founder and executive director of 40 Acre Conservation League, a Black-led nonprofit land trust in California. The organization, named after the historic promise of “40 acres and a mule” given to formerly enslaved Black Americans after the Civil War, honors the legacy of the promise by expanding land stewardship and outdoor recreation t...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes is joined by Beia Spiller, a fellow and director of the transportation program at Resources for the Future (RFF), to explore new RFF research findings on critical minerals. (Note that this podcast episode is a sneak preview of a forthcoming report! We will add a link to the report in the show notes once the research has been released on the RFF website. Stay tun...

For this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi is joined by David M. Hart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and professor emeritus at George Mason University, to discuss the making and findings of CFR’s Global Energy Innovation Index. According to Hart, energy innovation—and policy that supports it—is crucial to addressing climate change. Through comprehensive data synthesis,...

In this episode, host Margaret Walls talks with Kevin Stiroh, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future and a former senior advisor at the Federal Reserve. Pulling from his extensive career in the financial sector, Stiroh expounds on how financial institutions evaluate climate-related risks and the analysis necessary to address risks across loans, insurance, and investment portfolios. Stiroh emp...