🚨 Call for papers: Environment week at LSE will be Sept 22-25th. Submissions are due soon (July 14)! www.lse-environment-week.com/environment-...

There’s so much happening right now, I thought I’d put together a running thread on the dismantling of #climate and research and knowledge infrastructure in the United States 🧵

Tariffs & ICE raids are connected insofar as they are attempts to blame economic & social conditions entirely on the actions of foreigners while attempting to paint domestic enemies as a traitorous fifth column working with the foreigners to undermine the country

I'm a health reporter at The Washington Post looking to talk to people who do not qualify under these narrowed criteria about why coronavirus vaccination matters to you If you're comfortable sharing your experiences for an article, please email me at [email protected]

🚨 New paper alert, with @johnjhorton.bsky.social! Using an experiment run on a large online labor market, we provide evidence that providing employers access to an AI-written first draft of a job post harms the efficiency of the market. emmawiles.github.io/storage/jobo...

Today I tried to protect our democracy by donating to the ACLU. You can join me: action.aclu.org/give/now

Overheard on Northeast Regional Acela: “I wish I could ride Amtrak every day… I ride it in my dreams” I think I found your #1 fan @amtrak.com !

Big issue with these kinds of bills is how do you know that the work has actually been done and is maintained - esp if it involves gardening. Inspecting costs ~$200. Too high for most insurance policies to handle. And of course, it matters what your neighbor (who is insured by somebody else) does...

Glad to see Cambridge end single-family zoning www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/11/b...

Colorado wants to force insurance companies to help homeowners understand, mitigate wildfire risk

To anyone else hitting this snag, IPUMS NHGIS has TIGER/Line shapefiles you can download manually. And it’s always best practice to download your data! (@ past me)

Time it took for the new administration to directly impact my work: 15 days (Grateful at this point to not have NSF funding up in the air… hang in there, everyone)

The best building code in the world won't help you if you don't use it to build any houses. Wildfire resilience is also very different from something like hurricane. Put on a good metal roof, doesn't much matter what your neighbor does, your risk goes down. Not so with wildfire:

California has a very strong anti-wildfire “home hardening” law on the books, but it’s never been enforced because insurance models can’t account for it — and because people *hate* what it tells them to do. Fascinating @emilypont.bsky.social story: heatmap.news/climate/los-...

This seems like a big deal for insurance in California. I wonder what the experts on here think of the new rules? @kellyhereid.bsky.social @michaelwara.bsky.social @stevebowen.bsky.social @jacobgellman.com www.latimes.com/business/sto...

What a shortage of IV bags tells us about the impact of #climaterisk on supply chains, by @scrawford.bsky.social A plant producing most of the US's IV bags was wiped out by Hurricane Helene. It's another warning of financial risk... open.substack.com/pub/susanpcr...

Agree very much with this from @davekarpf.bsky.social davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-the-f...

My group at the Illinois Gies College of Business--which includes @tderyugina.bsky.social, David Molitor, Riley League, Mackenzie Alston, and Nolan Miller--is seeking a public/environmental economist! Here's our job posting: #EconSky www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing....

Column | As buyers and sellers wake up to risks on a hotter planet, Cape Coral might be a preview of what millions of homeowners throughout the country could face: a slow and almost imperceptible re-pricing of many people’s biggest asset.

📢Please retweet📢 Profs Van Benthem, Lockwood, Low, Rees-Jones, Kessler and I are hiring 3 predoctoral researchers (in environmental, behavioral, and public econ) to start July 2025. Prior RAs got into Berkeley, Princeton and Brown (econ PhDs). Rolling review: sberkouwer.github.io/BEPPhiring.pdf

BU Questrom is hiring-- 2 slots! Open to various fields, including macroeconomics, applied micro, industrial economics, innovation economics, labor economics, organizational economics, law and economics... academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/28774

"Hurricanes are hundreds of times deadlier than anyone has realized." @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social on the new study that could radically shift how we think about hurricane deaths:

Wow. California's insurer of last resort now has $393 billion in total risk exposure—up 38% from last year. Insurers are pulling out of the state en masse.

Love that the official term for this restoration process is “re-wiggling”. Very British, very cutesy

Politico E&E on the challenges of implementing resilience through insurance premiums for wildfire (along with some success stories for wind)

When I’m biking towards an intersection and a car turning right stops to let me go through and all 3 cars behind him immediately lay on their horns

Biodiversity is declining, yet we have limited knowledge about how that affects human well-being. My work linking bats, insecticide use, and human infant health is out today in Science (science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344), and tells a complex story about how those are connected.

When it’s your first semester teaching and your lecture materials for the semester look like this (For one lecture at the end the sum total of the content so far is “machine learning????”)

A few weeks ago, I spoke on a panel about publishing at the CSWEP’s CeMENT workshop. I wanted to briefly share some of that advice here.

"Manufacturers even let elevator and escalator mechanics take some components apart and put them back together on site to preserve work for union members, since it’s easier than making separate, less-assembled versions just for the U.S." www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/o...

I have a few questions about methodology ($200 per person in pre hurricane spending produces $15k risk reduction?) But this paper is a nice one for met friends. It argues that cost saved from forecast improvements since 2007 "exceeds the annual budget for all federal weather forecasting"

Nightmare fuel. And I'm a climate scientist who works on disasters in insurance, so it takes a lot.

New rule: no one gets to write a "climate change and the Florida hurricane market" story without reading and understanding Carolyn Kousky's new primer on the history and structure of public/private market in the state: www.edf.org//floridainsu... Correlated runs to debt markets anyone?

Took my boots in to get the soles replaced before the heels started getting destroyed and the guy told me I came just in time and was the perfect customer. Normal to want and possible to achieve

Swiss Re Institute published a report that calculates “that natural disasters resulted in insured losses of $108B in 2023, marking the 4th consecutive year of losses exceeding $100B.” Event frequency (142 insured-loss catastrophes out of 218 events) was the major driver of losses. #climate

I believe everyone has a superpower. Unfortunately today I realized mine is procrastinating on writing for exactly as long as needed to get into a rhythm 30 minutes before I have to stop

I love this Verge story about how the NYC Housing Authority challenged manufacturers to make a cheap window heat pump unit, and the barriers to rolling it out in city public housing www.theverge.com/23951214/hea...

Los Angeles showed how spongy a city can be during the atmospheric river storms this winter. The city’s “sponge” infrastructures helped absorb >25 KAF (~3800 hectares-m) of water — enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year. grist.org/extreme-weat...

The 2024 Call for Papers for SITE at Stanford is up! economics.stanford.edu/site/paper-s...

Grim prophesy: “Health insurers for now don’t seem to think profitability is going to be hit, because the groups most likely to be affected by climate change aren’t covered by insurance.”

😬

Sea walls get the headlines, but climate change is making clear that sewers and drainage systems are also in dire need of an upgrade. I wrote about California's flooding and urban drainage issues for @tnr.bsky.social:

Gift link so everybody has access to the WSJ article about insurers quietly exiting high climate risk markets without an announcement www.wsj.com/business/ins...

found out today a good grade in doctor’s visit is both normal to want and possible to achieve (my post-visit notes described me as a “very pleasant female”) 💥 killing it

Otherwise for academic models for tropical cyclone, Chia-Ying Lee's CHAZ model and Nadia Bloemendaal's STORM are the main ones. But public/open/global is a tough combo. CHAZ: sites.google.com/view/chia-yi... STORM: data.4tu.nl/articles/dat...

#envirosky I’m looking for some open-access maps (could be fairly coarse) with global estimates of both current and future hurricane/flooding risk. I get that this modeling is super challenging but would be happy even with large confidence intervals and not looking very far into the future!

I’m becoming increasingly interested in storm water management systems, curious to hear about any studies on how they are funded and how successful they are

An additional struggle for these local governments: new residents mean higher property tax revenues now, more flood damage later. Is this affecting new development?

Banger here from @harrisalexc.bsky.social with quotes from @bmcnoldy.bsky.social There are some places where you literally just can't engineer your way out of sea level rise, even if you dump a ton of money into them. www.miamiherald.com/news/local/e...