In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Nafisa Lohawala, a fellow at Resources for the Future, about sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs). Lohawala discusses the climate impact of the aviation industry, different types of SAFs, and the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that SAFs can help achieve. Lohawala also discusses policies that support the adoption of SAFs, including international agreements and financial incentives in the United States. References and...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls talks with Seanicaa Edwards Herron, founder and executive director of the Freedmen Heirs Foundation, about challenges facing Black farmers in the United States. Herron discusses historical and systemic barriers that Black farmers have encountered, and continue to encounter, in the US agricultural industry. Their conversation covers access to land, capital, and markets; the importance of government programs that are tailored to support Black farmers;...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Pat Layton, director of the Wood Utilization + Design Institute at Clemson University, about the resurgence in constructing buildings with wood and, in particular, with mass timber. Layton discusses the development and adoption of mass timber in the United States, along with the environmental and architectural benefits of integrating mass timber into construction projects. Layton also discusses the manufacturing process for mass timber and...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Stephen Jarvis, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, about local opposition—often called “NIMBYism,” or Not In My Backyard—to renewable energy projects in the United Kingdom and the cost this opposition adds to the clean energy transition. Jarvis discusses the permitting process for renewable energy projects in the United Kingdom, how the local impacts of these projects often outweigh broader societal benefits in the...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Maura Allaire, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, about access to wastewater infrastructure in the United States. Allaire discusses the widespread lack of access to centralized wastewater services; the high failure rates of septic systems, which often serve as substitutes for centralized wastewater systems; and the public health risks that are associated with inadequate wastewater treatment. Allaire also discusses how...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Jesse Buchsbaum, a new research fellow at Resources for the Future, about how consumers respond to changes in electricity prices. Buchsbaum discusses the responsiveness of electricity consumers to prices in the short and long term, the role of pricing in driving long-term changes in consumption habits and investments in electric appliances, the importance of pricing for effective policymaking, and differences in the sensitivity of...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Jon Krosnick, a professor at Stanford University and a university fellow at Resources for the Future, about the views held by Americans on climate change and climate policies. Krosnick discusses the latest results from the Climate Insights project, which has gauged American public opinion on climate change since 1997; the preferences of Americans for specific climate policies; the views held by Americans about environmental justice; and...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Holly Caggiano, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, and Sara Constantino, an assistant professor at Stanford University, about the preferences of local residents and elected officials for large-scale energy projects in Pennsylvania. Caggiano and Constantino discuss factors that influence public support for renewable energy projects and the occasional misalignment between the perceived preferences and actual...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Andrew Waxman, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), a technology that involves the capture and storage or reuse of carbon dioxide. Waxman discusses the application of CCUS technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and industrial facilities; the importance of the technology for achieving emissions-reduction goals; and the potential...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Amanda Giang, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, about considering equity in computational models of systems that are at the interface of people and the environment. Giang discusses the steps involved in adapting the models; weighing the benefits of granular, individualized data against considerations of personal privacy; the limitations of modeling and quantitative analysis; and the challenges of communicating...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Catherine Hausman, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, about the costs of not building new electricity transmission lines, particularly in the Midwestern United States. Hausman discusses the benefits of additional electricity transmission for consumer electricity prices, emissions reductions, and electrification of the economy; the companies that may gain or lose revenue if more transmission is built; and how companies...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Daniel Farber, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, about Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a Supreme Court case decided earlier this summer that overturned decades of precedent set under a 1984 case that itself led to a legal principle, or doctrine, that people call the Chevron deference. The Chevron deference is a long-standing legal precedent that required courts to defer to the application of laws as...

This week, we’re rebroadcasting an episode from the Resources Radio archive while the team is on a break through the rest of August. We’ll be back in September with new episodes; in the meantime, enjoy this throwback and poke around the archive at Resources.org for more topics you might be interested in. In this week’s episode rerun, host Margaret Walls talks with John D. Leshy, an emeritus professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, about the history of...

This week, we’re rebroadcasting an episode from the Resources Radio archive while the team is on a break through the rest of August. We’ll be back in September with new episodes; in the meantime, enjoy this throwback and poke around the archive at Resources.org for more topics you might be interested in. In this week’s episode rerun, host Kristin Hayes talks with Jason Samenow, weather editor for the Washington Post and one of the leaders of the Post’s Capital Weather Gang. They discuss the...

This week, we’re rebroadcasting an episode from the Resources Radio archive while the team is on a break through the rest of August. We’ll be back in September with new episodes; in the meantime, enjoy this throwback and poke around the archive at Resources.org for more topics you might be interested in. In this week’s episode rerun, host Daniel Raimi talks with Kelly T. Sanders, an associate professor at the University of Southern California. With her coauthors, Sanders published a series...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with David Spence, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about Spence’s new book, “Climate of Contempt: How to Rescue the US Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship,” which was released today. Spence discusses reasons that climate and energy have become such divisive topics in US politics, including the partisan state of Congress and the modern media environment, and strategies to help build support among voters for climate...

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Caroline Noblet, an associate professor at the University of Maine, about the risks and negative impacts of forever chemicals on the environment and human health. “Forever chemicals” refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are a group of synthetic chemicals with extremely durable chemical bonds that have become dangerously common in water systems, consumer goods, agricultural production, and manufacturing facilities....

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls talks with Amy Bowers Cordalis, cofounder and principal of Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group, about efforts to remove four dams on the Klamath River in California and Oregon. Cordalis discusses her experience growing up on the Klamath River as a member of the Yurok Tribe, the ecological damage to the Klamath River Basin and the Yurok Tribe that has been caused by the dams and nearby agricultural production, and the process that led to...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Chiara Lo Prete, an associate professor of energy economics at Penn State University, about the design of electricity markets in the United States. Lo Prete discusses the differences among electricity markets in different regions of the country; efforts to ensure that electric utilities can meet demand for electricity under adverse conditions, such as extreme weather events; and new designs of electricity markets that aim to accommodate...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls talks with Casey Wichman, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and university fellow at Resources for the Future, about the influence of social media on the popularity of national parks. Wichman estimates in a recent study that more exposure of a national park on social media increases visits to that park. He discusses people’s relationships with national parks in a digital age; the effects of increased visitation on...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls sits in on the annual conference of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists to talk with Jill Caviglia-Harris, a professor at Salisbury University, about her work teaching and mentoring early-career scholars in the field of environmental economics. Caviglia-Harris discusses her approach to teaching and mentorship, efforts to facilitate diverse perspectives in environmental economics by building diverse cohorts of scholars, and the...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls sits in on the annual conference of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists to talk with Daniel Phaneuf, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, about Phaneuf’s work on estimating the value of outdoor spaces for recreation. Phaneuf discusses methods for estimating the value of nonmarket goods (e.g., outdoor recreation sites) and the influence of environmental conditions, like water quality, on people’s choices regarding...

In this week’s episode, host Kristin Hayes sits in on the annual conference of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists to talk with Sandra Aguilar-Gomez, an assistant professor of economics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, about Aguilar-Gomez’s work on heat-induced overcrowding in hospitals in Mexico. They discuss the effect of heat on human health, the stress that high temperatures exert on the Mexican public health-care system, and the impact of...

In this week’s episode, host Margaret Walls talks with economists Maximilian Auffhammer, Paul J. Ferraro, and John Whitehead. All three guests are recent recipients of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) Fellows Award. The AERE Fellows Program recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of environmental and resource economics, including research, mentorship, service in the AERE community, and policy advising. Auffhammer, Ferraro, and...