Resources Radio

In this episode, host Daniel Raimi speaks to Max Harleman, an assistant professor at Villanova University, about research on the positive economic impacts of environmental remediation. Half a million mining operations have been abandoned throughout the United States, and the tailings and runoff from those mines compromise waterways—from the small scale of creeks nearby to regional impacts on watersheds. Water that drains from mines acidifies surrounding waterways, killing organisms in the ecosystem and making the waters unattractive for fishing, boating, and swimming. Harleman’s recent research with colleagues combines interviews with locals and careful comparisons of stream conditions and communities; their findings qualitatively and quantitatively illustrate the value of environmental remediation and restoration, yielding actionable advice for policymakers. Evidence shows that dollars spent on remediation efficiently produce positive outcomes for communities in terms of population growth, property values, and even profits on short-term rentals. Hear more details by listening in.

References and recommendations:

“Waterway Restoration Helps Revitalize Mined Areas” by Jeremy G. Weber, Max Harleman, Aidan Semanco, Shawn McCoy, and Katie Jo Black; https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65f9f863036e7bbd0fc012f9/6a2040e263892ddd3e08ee27_REE%20Policy%20Brief%20-%20Weber%20et%20al.pdf

“Reversing Signals of Neglect: Legacy Pollution, Adaptive Governance, and Resilience in Historic Coal Communities” by Max Harleman, Jeremy G. Weber, Aidan Semanco, Katie Jo Black, and Shawn J. McCoy; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378026000828

“Environmental Hazards and Local Investment: A Half-Century of Evidence from Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells” by Max Harleman, Jeremy G. Weber, and Daniel Berkowitz; https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/719383

“Gravity” by Jeremy Ledbetter Trio; https://www.jeremyledbetter.com/product-page/gravity-cd

“Yamaha” by Fazer; https://squamarecordings.com/release/yamaha

“Fasten Up” by Yellowjackets; https://www.yellowjackets.com/store-page/p/fasten-up-cd-yellowjackets-2025

Kermit Ruffins; https://www.basinstreetrecords.com/artists/kermit-ruffins/

Rebirth Brass Band; https://rebirthbrassband.com/

Jon Batiste; https://www.jonbatiste.com/

Subscribe to stay up to date on podcast episodes, news, and research from Resources for the Future: https://www.rff.org/subscribe/

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Dan Baer, a senior vice president at the Washington, DC–based think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His role offers a vantage point for unique insights on how artificial intelligence (AI) may affect the think tank world and its research contributions. Baer elaborates on some “emergent intuitions” that he articulates in a recent article published by Carnegie, in which he reckons with an AI world that’s newly emerging but nonetheless demands deep consideration of old philosophical foundations. Baer describes how AI may change the approach that research institutions take—and may need to take—moving forward.

References and recommendations:

“Mission over Model: What Might AI Mean for an Organization Like Carnegie?” by Dan Baer; https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/08/artificial-intelligence-ai-technology-research-think-tanks

“The End of History and the Last Man” by Francis Fukuyama; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

“The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek” by Andrew Durbin; https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374609559/thewonderfulworldthatalmostwas/

“Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World” by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Patrick Norrick; https://www.nber.org/papers/w35809

Subscribe to stay up to date on podcast episodes, news, and research from Resources for the Future: https://www.rff.org/subscribe/

In this episode, Daniel Raimi talks with Susanna Berkouwer about their research on reducing the economic and environmental costs of energy access through a simple piece of technology: charcoal-burning cookstoves. Access to electricity is limited in low-income countries, which means that access to clean cooking in those countries is limited, too. Some areas of the world have shifted to using liquefied petroleum gas for their cooking, but Sub-Saharan Africa is trending toward higher use of biomass-burning cookstoves, which produce emissions that can harm human health and lead to local or regional deforestation. An assistant professor in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Berkouwer and their colleagues applied a randomized experimental design with 1,000 households in Sub-Saharan Africa, aiming to see whether alternatives to charcoal-intensive cookstoves can reduce both the cost of energy and the negative environmental impacts. The conclusions are strong and striking: Corroborating results show that improvements in cookstove efficiency come with more efficient biomass use and cost savings, and the fiscal cost of subsidizing cookstoves is hundreds of times more efficient than other means of decarbonization. Berkouwer’s randomized study quantifies these gains in cost-efficiency, reductions in environmental pollution, and potential policy redundancies, opening up space for new climate solutions.

References and recommendations:

“The Cost-Effectiveness of Clean Cookstove Carbon Mitigation After Adjusting for Additionality and Impact” by Susanna B. Berkouwer and Joshua T. Dean; https://doi.org/10.1142/S2010007826500089

Subscribe to stay up to date on podcast episodes, news, and research from Resources for the Future: https://www.rff.org/subscribe/

In this episode, host Margaret Walls speaks to Dave Keiser and Joseph Shapiro about safe drinking water in the United States. Keiser is a professor at the Yale School of the Environment, and Shapiro is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Together with other coauthors, they put out a research paper on clean drinking water: how US residents have access to it, what types of policies help preserve it, and the degree to which it benefits people’s health. Their paper incorporates more than 250 million readings on 1,250 different water pollutants across 48 states over several decades, links those data to maps of public water systems across the country, and connects all this information to health outcomes via Medicare data. The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 authorizes the US Environmental Protection Agency to set limits on contaminants in water supplied by public water systems, and the act provides financial loans to local municipalities for constructing and upgrading water-treatment plants; this law led to major improvements in providing clean drinking water to US residents. Some of the questions Keiser and Shapiro address in this episode: What exactly are the benefits of access to clean water—and do those benefits justify the costs? What level of government is most effective for managing drinking water? Find out more by listening to the episode.

References and recommendations:

“Water Works: Causes and Consequences of Safe Drinking Water in America” by David A. Keiser, Bhashkar Mazumder, David Molitor, and Joseph S. Shapiro; https://www.nber.org/papers/w35288

“National trends in drinking water quality violations” by Maura Allaire, Haowei Wu, and Upmanu Lall; https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1719805115

“The Evolution of Water Pollution Control in the United States” by William L. Andreen; https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/fac_articles/10/

“The Lost City of the Monkey God” by Douglas Preston; https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/douglas-preston/the-lost-city-of-the-monkey-god/9781455540020/

Subscribe to stay up to date on podcast episodes, news, and research from Resources for the Future: https://www.rff.org/subscribe/

In this episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Jesse Gourevitch, a new Resources for the Future fellow, about how flood-risk information affects US housing markets. Discussing an upcoming report, Gourevitch outlines changes in property sale prices and buyer characteristics following revisions to federal flood maps and updates to state requirements for disclosing flood risk to homebuyers. He and his coauthor have found that property sale prices are lower when properties are mapped into a designated flood zone or become subject to disclosure requirements. For lower-income homeowners, the declines in property value are larger than high-income homeowners relative to annual income. Following these changes to flood maps, homebuyers in flood-prone areas tend to have higher incomes and are less likely to be Black or Hispanic. Gourevitch discusses what these findings could mean for disparities in flood exposure across different socioeconomic groups.

References and recommendations:

“Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service” edited by Michael Lewis; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/788713/who-is-government-by-edited-by-michael-lewis/

Subscribe to stay up to date on podcast episodes, news, and research from Resources for the Future: https://www.rff.org/subscribe/