Maxwell School News and Commentary

Edwin Ackerman, Marc Garcia, Timur Hammond and Alex Rothenberg have been promoted to associate professor.

Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment, highlights the infrastructural advantage France has to promote sustainability. “France is known for having one of the most decarbonized electric grids in the world because they have about 70% of their electricity coming from nuclear power, which is zero carbon energy,” Huber says.

“The Trump organization is a family business, but once he took office the first time, and then you could really see that he brought that into the political realm and into the White House,” says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment.

Such hero worship benefits both the mythologized leader and followers, says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment. “By building up that cult and joining that and being part of that, they get a sense of community.”

“If we can’t find a way to do decarbonization and climate policy, in addition to materially improving working people’s lives…I really do fear that a lot of working people aren’t going to be that sympathetic to the climate agenda,” says Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment.

“There is a quite substantial lag between addition of atmospheric carbon due to wildfire and the eventual removal of at least some of it by the regrowing forest. So, over the course of those decades, the net impact of the fires is a contribution to climate warming,” says Jacob Bendix, professor emeritus of geography and the environment. 

Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment, says the Saudi monarch-in-waiting “is more concerned about selling these projects to his people than he is in selling them to the West. So, all of these big sports investments have to be carefully positioned as somehow contributing to Saudi national interests.”

Though this fire is nearly contained, in general, fire burns hotter when the weather is hotter, says Jacob Bendix, professor emeritus of geography and the environment. He adds that drought contributes to dangerous fire seasons, but paradoxically, wetter years can too.

“Now this is where we reached this impasse where if we really want to totally restructure the grid, totally grow it in ways that can serve decarbonization, and AI...then perhaps this sort of more integrated, more central planning, more coordinated and socialized investment model could be more useful than this very scattered and sort of fragmented system we have now,” says Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment.

“The turn to a ‘politics of building’ is a welcome change in environmental thinking, but the green Left is still at odds in important ways with the labor movement, which better understands what is needed for deep decarbonization and, most importantly, has the power to help bring it about,” writes Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment.