Research and News

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.”

In his two-part essay on the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), Professor of Geography and the Environment Matthew Huber examines the labor question and assesses dubious campaign claims that BPRA is a climate victory.

Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment, calls the outcome of the strike a huge victory for the United Auto Workers and its workers. “It shows that when workers harness their collective power through strikes, they can force employers to give in to workers’ ambitious demands,” he says.

“Unlike people, climate change doesn’t take a holiday,” says Robert Wilson, associate professor of geography and the environment. “In coming years, tourists will need to prepare to evacuate from vacation spots, often with little notice.” 

"We're getting lots of intense rain in short periods of time. And that just means that a lot of the drainage systems in cities, especially with old sort of infrastructure, can't handle that amount of runoff in that quick of a time," says Sarah Pralle, associate professor of political science.

"Rather than tackling the problem of who owns and controls fossil-fuel based production (a relative minority of society), carbon behaviouralism aims its sights on the “irresponsible” choices of millions of consumers of all classes," writes Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment.

“The UAW…strike action is ultimately trying to realize one of the Biden Administration’s core policy goals and political selling points: you can have good, family-sustaining union jobs alongside climate action. The problem is the automakers see EV production as a way to trim labor costs and shift production to non-union plants,” says Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment.

Jacob Bendix, professor emeritus of geography and the environment, says the grasses provided “fine fuels that ignite easily” due to their high surface area-to-volume ratio, dense growth patterns and height.

"Does Community-Based Adaptation Enhance Social Capital? Evidence from Senegal and Mali," co-authored by Hannah Patnaik, managing director of the Maxwell X Lab, and John McPeak, professor of public administration and international affairs, was published in the Journal of Development Studies.

“This is a perfect sweet spot for a public power entity to take on some of that risk, to try to really get a technology that we need off the ground,” Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment, says of TVA’s small modular reactor program. ​“They have the resources and the social mission to do that, where private capital wouldn’t.”

"Research in a Closed Political Context, COVID, and Across Languages: Methodological Lessons, Messages, and Ideas," co-authored by Darzhan Kazbekova, graduate research associate in the Center for Policy Design and Governance, and Rebecca Schewe, associate professor of sociology, was published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods.

What is clear is that the Canadian wildfires are a product of man-produced climate change and climate disasters are going to become more commonplace, says Jacob Bendix, professor emeritus of geography and the environment.

"Before this week, it was easy for those of us in the East to think that suffocating wildfire smoke was solely a West Coast problem. But no longer. The smoke clouding our skies, scratching our throats and watering our eyes shows we’re all Westerners now," writes Robert Wilson, associate professor of geography and the environment.

"So if we can pair climate decarbonization with more increased secure access to people's basic material needs, you could start to build a much broader popular base," says Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment. 

“It’s a generational thing,” says Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment. “A lot of younger generations are really fixated on climate and understand that nuclear is one our best options to deal with climate, so we gotta keep it on the table.”

The professor of geography and the environment will spend part of the summer researching peatlands and helping develop a doctoral program in Chile. 

“In coming decades, winter—as most people understand it—will get shorter and warmer, with less snow and more rain,” says Robert Wilson, associate professor of geography and the environment. “This poses a serious threat to winter recreation: snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, and downhill skiing.”

"Powering the next wave of green energy innovation," co-authored by David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs, was published in PLOS Climate.

Rather than generating heat, these devices transfer heat from the cool outdoors into the warm indoors and vice versa during warm weather. Heat pumps rely on electricity instead of natural gas or propane, both of which have a higher carbon emission than renewable electricity such as wind or solar, says Jay S. Golden, Pontarelli Professor of Environmental Sustainability and Finance.