Maxwell School News and Commentary

“At several different levels, this is just a pure pipe dream,” Osamah Khalil, professor of history, says of handing Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. Khalil says the Biden administration is facing mounting pressure over its support for Israel, due to the atrocities it is accused of committing in Gaza.

"President Biden promised a 'whole of government' approach to the climate crisis after taking office. But his absence at the COP28 meeting signals a lack of interest in the dangers of the ongoing climate crisis. Given that the United States is the world's largest emitter, this should be an international scandal," says Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment.

“Some of these polls are really in a way approval ratings of President Biden, which we know are not great,” says Grant Reeher, director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. “So it’s not so much people saying I’d rather have Donald Trump than Joe Biden, it’s people saying I’m not happy with where the country is going, and I want an alternative.”

Limiting supply of the drug alone will not solve the crisis, says Alexandra Punch, director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health. "What we're looking to solve is the mortality issue," she says. "I don't think we're going to solve the demand issue, because people are just going to find something different to use."

“Carbon inequality is effectively a colonisation of the atmosphere by the capitalist elite of the planet through hyper-consumption and pollution, while the cost of that climate coloniality is borne disproportionately by the marginalised and vulnerable communities in developing countries,” says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment.

"It's a tough balancing act," says Vice Adm. Robert Murrett (Ret.), professor of practice of public administration and international affairs. "The big issue is responding to attacks that are being done by Iranian surrogates in a measured way that has a deterrent effect but does not cause the tension that exists in the area in the conflict to expand to the next level."

Jenn M. Jackson, assistant professor of political science, says that this episode reveals a mismatch between what funders in 2020 said they wanted to do, which was to end racist policies in the U.S., and the way they went about it, which was to give millions to a new research center at a university.

California, the world’s fifth largest economy, “just leapfrogged over everyone” through legislation that became law last month that requires companies to start reporting carbon emissions from the energy used for operations and outputs beginning in 2026, says Jay Golden, Pontarelli Professor of Environmental Sustainability and Finance.

In the glory days of the American labor movement, when unions were strong and wages rose alongside productivity, “organized workers could cash that out as more free time,” says Aaron Benanav, assistant professor of sociology. “But for decades, workers haven’t even been getting that choice because, for the most part, productivity growth has ended up as higher profits and more inequality.”

David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs, notes that while new factories will be needed to build electric vehicle batteries, the vehicles will require fewer suppliers producing parts. Many assembly workers will also need to be retrained. “We may also need fewer workers,” Popp says. But, he says, “there doesn’t seem to be a consensus yet on whether that is the case.”