A new study led by @marshallburke.bsky.social estimates that wildfire smoke emissions caused 41,380 excess deaths per year from 2011 to 2020, and rising temperatures could increase U.S. deaths from wildfire smoke more than 70% by 2050. ow.ly/RAp050WYWia

This is startling. The number of deaths every year tied to wildfire smoke now outnumber traffic fatalities, according to @washingtonpost.com coverage of a new @nature.com study from @marshallburke.bsky.social and others.

Important new paper from @marshallburke.bsky.social on the devastating toll of wildfire smoke in @nature.com "climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the US" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excellent coverage of our study out today on climate impacts on wildfire smoke and related health impacts.

An extraordinary new tool from @marshallburke.bsky.social, SIEPR senior fellow @stanforddoerr.bsky.social, and Andrew Wilson. If you've got the evidence they're looking for, they want to hear from you. 👇

We are excited to announce the release of the Environmental Hazard Adaptation Atlas, an effort to map ongoing and future environmental hazards and their impacts on society, and to provide up to date evidence on what policies and interventions work to reduce impacts: adaptationatlas.org. Quick thread

We at @stanforddoerr.bsky.social are excited to announce a new PhD program in Global Environmental Policy, accepting applications this fall for Sept 2026 start. We're looking for folks with interest in social sciences, data science, and enviro science and who have strong quant training 1/

Wildfire smoke is spreading pollutants more widely than ever before. @marshallburke.bsky.social spoke with @emilypont.bsky.social of @heatmap.news about what’s driving the increase, and what can be done to prevent and mitigate the risks: ow.ly/5ILx50WIv7w

"Nothing else compares in the U.S." @marshallburke.bsky.social explains exactly why wildfires have made the East Coast's air quality so much worse to @emilypont.bsky.social. Full interview below.

Stanford Doerr School is hiring at assistant prof level in Global Environmental Policy. Search is broadly scoped and aimed at anyone in quantitative social sciences or related fields, including econ, polisci, env policy, or data science as applied to env policy. Plz share, RT! tinyurl.com/3enzuubc

I read EPA’s 302-page proposal to nuke the endangered endangerment finding so that you don’t have to, and wrote about what the insanity all means for @climateconnections.bsky.social. Thanks to @gregdotson.bsky.social, @hausfath.bsky.social, @michaelemann.bsky.social for the input. Article & 🧵(1/14):

All famines are man-made, all famines are political. Historians of empire and humanitarianism have known this forever. Gaza is not starving, Gaza is being starved, by Israel, and this starvation is enabled by our government and by every other government that does not step in to force food and aid.

I am sickened by what we’re seeing in Gaza right now. The IDF has blocked aid while shooting people waiting in food lines for what little aid is actually coming from the sham Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israel needs to lift its blockade and the U.S. needs to stop sending bombs.

Gaza faces a severe humanitarian crisis as Israeli restrictions on aid lead to widespread malnutrition and starvation, with hospitals overwhelmed by malnourished children.

Does planting trees reduce the health impacts of extreme heat? As part of a review/meta-analysis we're writing, I think the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is "we don't actually know". Blog and short thread below: www.stanfordecholab.com/blog/does-pl...

Excited to announce a new funding opportunity for research on "what works" in climate adaptation. We are specifically looking for strong causal designs that tell us what interventions work (or don't) to reduce impacts of a changing climate. Plz share + apply! seedfunding.stanford.edu/apply/U5N4

In February, the US gov shut down the Demographic & Health Surveys. It was the only data source on maternal & child health, births, household structure in many countries – making it crucial for research. In a new article I explain why it should be rescued. ourworldindata.org/demographic-...

Does prescribed burning reduce overall smoke from wildfire? We have 2 new papers that try to quantify. Answer: each acre Rx burned yields ≥3x more reduction in future wildfire smoke than is emitted in the Rx burn. But can take years to realize benefits. www.stanfordecholab.com/blog/prescri...

Nice WaPo article on air quality in National Parks, showing improvements in many parks followed by wildfire-driven reversals. Among the many impacts of wildfires, incl. directly loss of infrastructure as in Grand Canyon fires right now, smoke will make them way less enjoyable.

Wildfire season really picking up (again, for east coast + midwest). NorCal and Canadian fires sending smoke south.

Has anyone had recent luck getting LLMs to *not* hallucinate academic papers? Simple literature search ("Find academic papers conducting RCTs of air conditioning on health outcomes") using GPT4o, Gemini Pro, Claude etc all just completely make up stuff. Anyone have luck?

This seems, um, important.

The energy provisions in the Republicans' One Big Horrible Bill are truly so bad! Who wants this? The country's automakers don't want it. Electric utilities don't want it. Data center developers don't want it. Manufacturers in energy intensive industries don't want it. 🔌💡

Killing a half million people by continuing to use coal for electricity is bad, imo www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our new paper shows how recent prescribed (Rx) burns in the western US impacted later wildfires. We find that Rx fires reduced wildfire severity + net smoke emissions, even when factoring in smoke from Rx fires. But, we find that these Rx fires were less effective in the wildland-urban interface.

Great article on what is being learned about wildfire smoke threats to health: www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

De-horning rhinos dramatically reduces rhino poaching, for cheap. Other stuff does not. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, @marshallburke.bsky.social and colleagues outline a new framework for how to better incorporate data about climate-induced wildfire smoke into estimates of the societal and economic costs of climate change.

Introducing acquaint, an R package that turns your R sessions into a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. This allows MCP-enabled tools like Claude Desktop and Claude Code to run #rstats code _in your active R sessions_ to explore objects, read documentation, etc. posit-dev.github.io/acquaint/

Really top notch content from The Crimson here - very well done www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.

America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain  economist.com/science-and-...

The Big Beautiful Bill isn’t just targeting Medicaid, it’s an attack on the entire US health care system. $792 billion cut from Medicaid. $490 billion cut from Medicare. $194 billion cut from the ACA. 10 million will lose insurance and the broader damage will touch us all.

Wherever you fall on the liberal/conservative spectrum, if you believe in checks and balances, you should be outraged at House Republicans who allowed this provision to sneak into the spending bill or didn't speak out against it. www.justsecurity.org/113529/terri...

Medicaid has saved thousands of lives of low-income adults. Repealing Medicaid will likely kill thousands of low-income adults. www.nber.org/papers/w33719

What happens to science under autocracy? The rise of the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany provides an (admittedly extreme) example. Prior to the early 1930s, scientists at German institutions won a third of Nobels. 10 years later, that number was 5%, and has never recovered.

Let's be real: if Republicans pass the House budget bill as is, it will murder the US nuclear industry, ruin our chances of winning the AI race (by constraining power supply), concede the global auto sector to China, and vaporize about half a trillion dollars of US manufacturing investment...

Do you like paying more for energy while also getting sick from pollution while also being at risk from climate change and extreme weather? Then repeal the IRA.

“That’s the choice these lawmakers have to make: ideology or pragmatism,” says @douglewin.bsky.social. “Do you hate renewables so much that you’re willing to take out the Texas economy with it?” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/u...

RFK Jr. said multiple times during his house and senate hearings today that no scientists have been fired from federal agencies. Our reporting has shown that hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists have been let go from NIH/CDC/FDA

“The American public needs to understand that you can’t just turn a science switch off and then turn it back on again,” said Rick Spinrad. Great reporting by @sachimulkey.bsky.social on the current dismantling of US scientific research capacity: what it means for now--and for future generations.

A 🧵 of takeaways, and my lingering questions, from last Thursday's excellent SIEPR program on The Economics of Wildfires. (This is from recollection and my recollection may be faulty, so I've tagged sources where possible.) siepr.stanford.edu/events/polic... 1/24

Nearly half of Americans are breathing unhealthy air. An American Lung Association report shows a sharp decline in U.S. air quality. Research by @marshallburke.bsky.social (2023) found that increased wildfire smoke has reversed some of the progress made under the #CleanAirAct. 🔗 bit.ly/3GnnI7r

It’s time to comment! Grant opportunities should be motivated by scientific need and grants should be reviewed by scientists with the knowledge to evaluate them. Please repost!

The Trump administration is set to cancel tens of millions of dollars in grants to scientists studying environmental hazards faced by children in rural America, among other health issues, according to internal emails written by senior officials at the EPA.

The Trump administration abruptly laid off the entire staff running a $4.1 billion program to help low-income households across the U.S. pay their heating and cooling bills.

Here’s how Trump betrays his voters: 🧵 1. Tariffs add thousands of dollars in added costs to families every year — north of 3 grand already, before more retaliatory tariffs.

Man I'd hate to be someone who purchases goods

The Department of Government Efficiency, for example

Donald Trump and Elon Musk have frozen funding for federal programs that provide support and sustenance to dozens of millions of older adults and people with disabilities, including Meals on Wheels.