Resources Radio

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Arvind Ravikumar, an associate professor at the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Ravikumar is a leading researcher on the topic of methane emissions from oil and gas systems; he recently coauthored a paper demonstrating how the US Environmental Protection Agency can better accoun...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Afsaneh Beschloss, founder and CEO of RockCreek Group. Before founding RockCreek, Beschloss worked with the World Bank and other financial institutions to develop energy projects around the world. As pressure mounts on banks to move away from fossil fuels, Beschloss and Raimi discuss the special role of multilateral development banks in the tran...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Brian Flannery, a visiting fellow at Resources for the Future and an expert on international climate policy. Flannery describes how border carbon adjustments—essentially taxes imposed on goods from countries with relatively less ambitious climate standards—are gaining traction, with proposals circulating in the United States and the European Un...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Joseph E. Aldy about fossil fuel subsidies—an area that Aldy has researched extensively and a subject that has been rekindled in the policy dialogue after President Joe Biden suggested removing such subsidies when he released his American Jobs Plan in April this year. But this somewhat amorphous concept of fossil fuel subsidies has been notorio...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Eric Zou, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Oregon. Zou has published fascinating work on how air pollution monitors work—or don’t work, as the case may be—to detect harmful levels of air pollution in the United States. Using data from satellites and ground-based monitors, his work has uncovered how local actors, particularly loc...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Hannah Druckenmiller, a new fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). This is the second part of a two-part series that introduces new RFF fellows, and Druckenmiller is another welcome addition to RFF and to Resources Radio. Druckenmiller discusses her fascinating paper that estimates the value of forests—not just in the marketplace, but for society. S...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Penny Liao, a scholar of behavioral and market responses to environmental risk, who joined Resources for the Future as a fellow earlier this month. Liao elaborates on a new working paper she coauthored about how home equity shapes a household’s decision to purchase flood insurance. In the end, Liao finds that homeowners with more home equity ar...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Robert Godby, an associate professor of economics at the University of Wyoming. Wyoming is the subject of their conversation: It’s been a major energy-producing state for over a century and is the nation’s largest producer of coal by far. But energy production in Wyoming has declined substantially in recent years, raising major challenges for th...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with David Wear, a nonresident senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). As anyone knows who’s recently breathed the air in the northeastern or midwestern United States, wildfires increasingly are posing risks to human health, the environment, and the climate. In a recent RFF issue brief, Wear analyzes how scaling up wildfire management in fed...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes speaks to Veronique Bugnion, a scientist, entrepreneur, and energy industry leader. Bugnion—a climate physicist by training who spent years in the private sector, focusing on energy and carbon markets—cofounded and serves as the CEO of ClearlyEnergy, which provides innovative solutions that help reduce emissions from buildings. Hayes and Bugnion discuss f...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Timiebi Aganaba, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation and Society. Aganaba has worked on a fascinating array of space issues on multiple continents, and she speaks about that work and its implications in this extremely wide-ranging conversation. Aganaba discusses the broad notions of space and...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Rebecca Epanchin-Niell, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF). Epanchin-Niell’s research focuses on ecosystem management—in particular, understanding how human behavior affects ecological resources and identifying strategies to improve ecosystem management. Much of her work has focused on invasive species, including strategies to co...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Noah Scovronick, an assistant professor at Emory University who coauthored a recent journal article that estimates the effects of climate change on heat-related human mortality over the past three decades. The research covers dozens of countries and assesses how increased moderate and extreme heat has affected human health on every populated con...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Wei Peng, an assistant professor at Penn State University. Peng recently coauthored a paper in the journal “Nature” that offers recommendations for how to make integrated assessment models more useful in the design of climate policy. Peng discusses how these climate policy models can better represent the real world—especially political dynamics—...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Gilbert Metcalf, who is a professor at Tufts University and a university fellow at Resources for the Future. Metcalf recently published a working paper with coauthor Alan Finkelstein Shapiro about the potential effects of a carbon tax on the US economy—specifically, a carbon tax that’s designed to meet the US climate target under the Paris Agree...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Resources for the Future (RFF) Fellow Daniel Shawhan about a new working paper that he and several RFF coauthors recently published, about the value of advanced energy funding. The study assesses how government funding for research, development, and demonstration of emerging clean energy technologies can reduce the costs of deploying those techn...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Kelsey Jack, associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; director of the Poverty Alleviation Group at UC Santa Barbara’s Environmental Market Solutions Lab; and codirector of the King Climate Action Initiative at the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jack works at the intersection of environ...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Meredith Fowlie, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas. Fowlie and coauthors recently published a working paper on the causes and implications of high electricity prices in the state of California. These hig...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Jeremy Firestone, a wind energy specialist, professor, and director of the Center for Research in Wind at the University of Delaware. For many years, Firestone has explored people’s attitudes and economic preferences related to wind power development. He and coauthors recently published new research about the intersection of offshore wind development...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Sheila Hollis, acting executive director of the United States Energy Association (USEA). USEA is an industry association that represents 150 members across the US energy sector, from the largest Fortune 500 companies to small energy consulting firms. The organization supports policy and technical discussions with the US Department of Energy to expand...

In February this year, we noticed at Resources for the Future that our explainer about carbon capture and storage—which provides an overview of the technology, along with its uses, benefits, and drawbacks—had suddenly skyrocketed in terms of page use on the website. When we investigated what had prompted this sudden expanded interest, we found Elon Musk’s announcement from the day prior: Musk had...

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Pilar Thomas, a partner at Quarles & Brady and a professor of the practice at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University. Thomas is an expert on energy development and environmental management on tribal lands and has served in the US Departments of Justice, Interior, and Energy. Raimi and Thomas discuss how different tribes are approaching...

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an associate professor of applied economics and policy at Cornell University and a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Much of Ortiz-Bobea’s research focuses on the links between climate change and agricultural productivity—which is the topic of this conversation. In particular, Ortiz-Bobea discusses a...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Neil Maher, professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark. Maher’s research focuses on the intersection of environmental and political history, and his scholarship includes a 2008 book called “Nature’s New Deal.” Maher and Hayes discuss the Civilian Conservation Corps’s successes, challenges, and l...

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize–Winning author Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.” The book is a fascinating and darkly funny exploration of how humanity is trying to manage the negative effects we’ve inflicted on the natural world. Using examples such as the Asian carp, endangered desert pupfish, t...