Reaching Out

RFF's researchers continue to bring their work to the world at large. The following is just a sampling of RFF outreach efforts over the past few months.

Ruth Greenspan Bell made presentations at the Foreign Service Institute to foreign service officers preparing to go to Poland, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on environmental public participation and the Aarhus Convention in Central Europe, and the Woodrow Wilson Center at a conference on "EU Enlargement and Environmental Quality in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond."

Jim Boyd was interviewed on NPR's "Morning Edition" for a report on water shortages caused by the continuing northeastern drought. He also was quoted in a Greenwire story on the need for statutory changes to encourage regulatory innovation and flexibility by discouraging lawsuits.

Howard Gruenspecht was interviewed on the PBS "Newshour with Jim Lehrer" as part of a report on the Senate energy bill. He was also interviewed on ABC News' "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings" and NPR's "All Things Considered" regarding U.S. reliance on foreign oil.

Alan Krupnick briefed a group of economists at the Department of Transportation on new approaches to estimating the value of a statistical life.

Ramanan Laxminarayan spoke on antibiotic resistance at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, and on tobacco at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He also participated in a panel discussion on future research directions for drug resistance at the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Institute of Health.

Work by Richard Morgenstern and several colleagues on reducing carbon emissions and limiting costs was called "a novel approach to tackling climate change [that] could satisfy economists and environmentalists alike" in The Economist. The article concludes, "The RFF approach seems best. It forces politicians to say what price society should be willing to pay to address global warming—and offers a pragmatic way to make that cost explicit"

Paul R. Portney debated John Felmy, the American Petroleum Institute's chief economist, over the role of fuel efficiency standards for cars and light-duty trucks. The event, which was held at Catholic University, was covered on C-SPAN.

The Bush administration's plan to shift the Superfund burden from industry to taxpayers generated many news stories that cited Kate Probst's report, Superfund's Future: What Will It Cost? which was published last year by RFF Press. News outlets included the New York Times, Associated Press (over three dozen placements), Chemical Week, the Chattanooga Free Press, and Seattle Times. She was also interviewed on NPR's "Living on Earth."

David Simpson and Heidi Albers have been asked to participate in the "Millennium Assessment," a very broad United Nations-sponsored review of the state of ecological resources and options for improved management.