2024 Year in Review on Environmental Economics, with Karen Palmer, Kevin Rennert, and Margaret Walls

Notable Quotes

• US Supreme Court limits action on climate change from the executive branch: “The Environmental Protection Agency is really heavily constrained in what it can do by the Supreme Court. As we think about climate policy writ large moving forward, we have less of that counterfactual of a [presidential] administration that wants to use its own tools. I think it’s clearly going to shift the emphasis back to Congress to take action to do what we need to do to move to a lower-carbon economy.” —Kevin Rennert (16:15)
• State court decision reinstates Virginia in regional carbon pricing program: “Virginia increases the size of the program by one-third, and I think it’s important more broadly, because the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative has always been a model and a leader on how cap and trade works, and they’ve introduced new innovations that have been adopted across the globe. As we look forward to an administration where we’re unlikely to be pricing or capping carbon, this progression of state programs may be the way that we’re going to go.” —Karen Palmer (17:34)
• Private insurers are leaving areas that increasingly are vulnerable to extreme weather: “Increasingly, in these high-hazard states like California (when it comes to wildfire) or Louisiana and Florida, there’s a lot of problems in insurance markets. Insurers are walking away from these markets to a certain extent. That’s happened in California. They drop homeowners policies and don’t allow them to be renewed. They limit the coverage they provide. In some cases, we’ve heard some horror stories about people filing claims after events and not getting payments that match the damages and so forth. There are a lot of things going on in insurance markets that are creating problems.” —Margaret Walls (25:53)

Top of the Stack

• Storm Watch Series: Weather Volatility in the United States
• Brave the Wild River by Melissa L. Sevigny
• Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky edited by Melissa Helton
• Shift Key podcast
• Alone on the Ice by David Roberts
• Landman television series
• Boomtown podcast

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. This week is our special end-of-the-year episode. As we do each year, I'm going to ask some experts to reflect on what happened this year and what might happen next year in the world of energy, climate, and environmental policy.

To do this, we've got three fantastic guests all from Resources for the Future (RFF). I'm so happy to be joined by my colleagues, Karen Palmer, Kevin Rennert, and Margaret Walls. In today's episode, we'll talk a lot about the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC; the Inflation Reduction Act, or the IRA; the National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP; and so much more. Stay with us.

Karen Palmer, Kevin Rennert, Margaret Walls—welcome back to the special episode of Resources Radio. It's so fun to have you here.

Kevin Rennert: So fun to be here.

Karen Palmer: Yeah.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, thank you, Daniel.

Daniel Raimi: We're all talking in person at RFF. We've got some mimosas, because it's the morning. Some of us are having mimosas. Others are just having orange juice.

We're going to talk today about what happened this year. We're going to look back at 2024, and we're going to look ahead to 2025. I'm not going to ask you to introduce yourselves, because we've done that plenty of times. Let's just get right into it. We're going to talk about the 2024 elections, of course, and their implications in a few minutes.

But first, if you exclude the elections, when you look back at 2024, what was one thing that happened related to energy and the environment that you think was really important and really interesting? It could be a policy, a technology, or a piece of media—anything, really. It's up to you. Let's start with Karen.

Karen Palmer: Great, Daniel. It's great to be here with my colleagues. The thing I want to highlight is FERC Order 1920. That's weedy, but that's a rule that FERC issued that requires transmission owners to do long-term planning going forward. The rule is many hundreds of pages long, and it has lots of elements to it. I want to highlight three of them.

One is the requirement that transmission owners do planning looking into the future. The reason this is important is transmission lines take a long time to site, build, and actually get operational on the ground, and we anticipate a lot of changes in the electricity sector going forward. To get the benefits both of deliverability and of power from remote locations like wind located in the plains, that's far from where people live. To get other benefits like reliability and benefits from having more transmission, this planning is really important.

The second thing that's really important is that the rule specifies something about cost allocation. One of the barriers to getting transmission built has been the question, Who's going to pay for these lines? FERC has stressed the fact that people who pay for transmission lines should be the folks that benefit from those transmission lines. They emphasize that again in this rule, but they get really specific about seven categories of benefits and add more specific thinking about that.

The third thing is that the rule requires these transmission plans to consider really cost-effective approaches to enhancing the ability of the grid to deliver power across long distances.

The ways that can happen that we haven't really exploited a lot are something known as grid-enhancing technologies, which is, basically, using information, software, and operational procedures to put more power through the existing grid that we have. There's also something known as “reconductoring,” which would essentially be stringing new lines with more capacity across existing towers and rights of way, so it avoids a lot. Those two approaches avoid a lot of the costs associated with building things, and that could happen fairly quickly. It's good to have an emphasis on that, so that's what I'm celebrating with my orange juice.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. I have a really trivial question as a follow-up.

Karen Palmer: Okay.

Daniel Raimi: How does FERC number their orders? Is it sequential? Or do they have special numbers for special orders? What's the deal?

Karen Palmer: No, the chair gets to pick the numbers. I was visiting FERC when they issued Order 888, and that's the address of the building, but that was a long time ago.

Daniel Raimi: Order 1000 was like a special order, and they knew it, and they used a special number for that special order.

Karen Palmer: Yeah.

Daniel Raimi: Okay. Funny. Let's go to Margaret next.

Margaret Walls: Thank you, Daniel. It's great to be here.

Karen’s answer was in the weeds, and I'm not going to be in the weeds. I lead RFF’s Climate Risk and Resilience Program, so most of my work is on disasters, climate impacts, adaptation, and resilience.

The two big hurricanes we had in the fall loom large for me, and I want to talk about those for a minute. I'm sure everybody's quite familiar with those. Hurricane Helene hit at the end of September, and it hit the northern Gulf Coast of Florida and then made its way very quickly up through the Appalachian Mountains and through Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Then, very shortly thereafter—less than a couple weeks later—Hurricane Milton hit almost the same area of Florida. It did not go up through the Appalachians; it went across Florida.

Both of these were really big storms, and Helene did horrific damage. More lives were lost in Helene than any other hurricane to hit the continental United States [since Hurricane Katrina]: about 240. Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and caused a lot of damages and a lot of deaths.

Then, property damages were really big from both of those storms [Helene and Milton], and I think a couple of things about this. First, on Helene, what was interesting was that many news stories wrote about how it did a lot of damage in an area that you wouldn't think would be hurricane-related. That's very far from the coast—400 miles from the coast in the Appalachians, especially North Carolina. The city of Asheville and those surrounding areas were just decimated.

We had done some work—my colleague Yanjun (Penny) Liao and I—on looking at extreme weather events and their costs over a long period of time and summarizing some of this data, and we wrote a series of blog posts. One of the things that came out for us from that is, over this period that went back to 1995, we discovered that a particular county might be very high on the list of highest damages ever from a single event. It was very unusual for those counties that got hit to experience that, but now they've experienced it, and basically the message is that no place is really immune from these kinds of events and these kinds of costs.

We can talk more about this when we get to your follow-up questions, but this brings up a lot of issues about our disaster policy in this country. Now, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ran out of money, and they're trying to get additional appropriations for their disaster-recovery fund, and there is a lot of politics around that.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Let me follow up with a really quick question, Margaret, and I know this isn't your main area of focus, but did you look at how much of the hurricane damage had a climate-change fingerprint on it? I know there are all these attribution studies now that are trying to assess, "Did climate change make this storm 5 percent worse, 10 percent worse?" Is that something you looked into?

Margaret Walls: It's not something I looked into. I think there are studies by Climate Central that have identified how much of it was. I can't remember the numbers, but there has been some work on that already. It's a little soon for that, especially on the damage-cost side, because we don't even really have the damage-cost estimates yet. We have some ballpark estimates, but not official ones—not for Helene, we don't. But there's been some of that work, and there's something attributable to it.

I would just make two points. At the beginning of the hurricane season in the spring, there are organizations every year that predict the number of hurricanes we're going to have. They predicted a high number this season, and we didn't really have a high number, but we did have very intense ones. I think the ocean was warmer than normal, and that's part of the reason for that. Some of that is an El Niño thing, but some of it is climate-related, and that's what came out in the Climate Central thing—that the ocean is warmer, and that is attributed.

The other point I would make is, in the Appalachians, they had a lot of rainfall before the hurricane itself came through, so the ground was saturated. The Appalachian Mountains are a particularly vulnerable location for flooding because of the topography, and I think those extreme precipitation events … People are just starting to learn more and more about how much climate change is contributing—it's a little more complicated how much that's contributing.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Let's turn now to Kevin. Kevin, as our resident climate scientist, you're welcome to chime in on that last question I asked Margaret. Feel free to or not. But, big picture, what was the big thing from this year for you?

Kevin Rennert: Well, first, let me just say that it's an honor to be here. Again, I've been on Resources Radio before, but to be here in the presence of Karen, Margaret, and Daniel is sort of a dream come true.

In terms of what I was thinking about in answering this question—I was looking for things that I felt like really demonstrated a change in the narrative in some sense. One of the things that I saw changing a lot over the previous Congress, and this Congress and administration, has been about trade and its role in climate and climate policy.

If I was to take us back to a specific event that might highlight this, it would be back in May. President Biden used Section 301 to raise the tariffs on many different kinds of clean energy goods coming from China: a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, and a 50 percent tariffs on batteries, I want to say. I'm going to get some of the numbers wrong, but Biden was definitely increasing these tariffs.

That just kind of capped a big long arc of this narrative that for a long time we were talking about addressing climate change through deploying lots of clean energy and putting big policies in place that would drive the deployment at a big scale of these clean energy technologies. There was always a piece of that that was saying it's important for America to be a leader in these technologies, and it would certainly be important strategically and competitively for us to do so, but there wasn't always a lot of teeth behind that, aside from certain initiatives. What we saw through Congress in the Inflation Reduction Act, and even to a certain extent in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was emphasis on that, where you had bonuses for using domestic content or in some cases even requirements to use domestic content to be eligible for some of these tax credits.

When I think about this relatively recent action by the Biden administration, it was a clear decision to say, "It's not just that we need to move forward on clean energy, we actually need to move forward on domestic clean energy manufacturing for strategic purposes, for the climate long term, and also for national security." I think that's something that you're going to see continuing to be emphasized in the coming administration. Obviously, Trump is big on trade. You have Senator Cassidy (R-LA) and Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) have obviously been putting forward bills looking at climate and trade, and I think it's just here to stay.

Daniel Raimi: Such a good point. And it's also not just a US phenomenon, right?

Kevin Rennert: Right.

Daniel Raimi: Europe, China—everybody's involved here. It's a huge global issue, and I know it was a big deal at the Conference of the Parties in Azerbaijan, as well. A lot of discussions on trade and tariffs.

Let's move on now to another question, which is something that maybe is under the radar for people. For people who didn't have FERC Order 1920, the hurricanes, or climate and trade at the top of their list, what's an interesting thing that happened this year that you think folks might not have noticed, but that you think is interesting and important? Let's start with Margaret.

Margaret Walls: Okay. This is a little bit self-serving, but I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway. In late November 2024—under the radar, for sure—Congress passed a couple of coastal bills. One we've had our eye on here at RFF for a while—because we did research on it—is they added just under 300,000 acres of land to the Coastal Barrier Resources System. These are lands along the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf Coast and some on the Great Lakes, but mainly on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, where you cannot get flood insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program. There's no infrastructure spending by the federal government, and you cannot get disaster aid after a disaster.

It's a very, very interesting law that was passed in the '80s. It's about 3.5 million acres, and they added, like, 10 percent. They added a lot of land to the system, and we've been watching this because we did some research on this program to see what its effects have been. It's been a very successful program in reducing damage costs, disaster costs, flood insurance, and claim payments. It's reduced development on these lands, and it's provided some benefits to neighboring lands. It's really interesting that they snuck this in. This bill's been floating around for a couple of years, and it got passed.

Daniel Raimi: Can you talk a little bit about the political dynamics that led to it getting passed this time around? I could imagine whoever represents those districts probably does not want them to be put on that. Talk about that.

Margaret Walls: It's a mix, actually. One of the sponsors is a representative from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. They have a lot of lands there in the system. Jen Kiggans (R-VA) was a sponsor of the House version of the bill. It's called the Beach Act, and there's others—some North Carolina communities don't like it—so it's a mix of things. When the bill originally passed in the '80s, it was a bipartisan bill, and there's bipartisan support. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was a sponsor of the Senate version of the bill from South Carolina. I think it's a mix. There's people who recognize some of the benefits of it.

Daniel Raimi: Super interesting. Let's go to Kevin next. Kevin, what was under the radar but important from your perspective this year?

Kevin Rennert: I'm not sure if this is actually under the radar, but I'm going to say it anyway: the recent decision by the US Supreme Court not to stay the US Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas regulations on existing sources and power plants. The reason that I feel like this is important and maybe went a little bit under the radar is, again, for this broader narrative that they declined to stay the regulation, but at the same time, many of the things that were written by the justices at the time would indicate that, were it to come before them, it is pretty likely not to survive that challenge.

On the one hand, it's a good news story. On the other hand, It's a pretty clear signal, and that, to me, just speaks volumes about the broader narrative that we have been operating under, which is that, for a long time, people have thought either Congress will act and do something about climate change or an administration that wanted to be proactive and use its own tools would use those tools to address climate change. That feels less and less like that. It's actually a tenable argument—that second piece of this—because the Environmental Protection Agency is really heavily constrained in what it can do by the Supreme Court. As we think about climate policy writ large moving forward, we have just less of that counterfactual of an administration that wants to use its own tools. I think it's really just clearly going to shift the emphasis back to Congress to take action to do what we need to do to move to a lower-carbon economy.

Daniel Raimi: Great point, and we're going to come back to that question of what Congress might do next year in a couple minutes, but let's go first to Karen. Karen, what's your under-the-radar story?

Karen Palmer: I want to go from Congress down to the states and talk about a development in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) program, which was a decision in November by a circuit court in Virginia. Basically, a little background: the RGGI program regulates carbon emissions from electricity generators in 10 states. Virginia and Pennsylvania are two states that have been in or out, but the court decision was that Governor Youngkin (R-VA) withdrew Virginia from the bill and didn't really have authority to do that. A commission that he set up did that.

That's important to RGGI, because Virginia increases the size of the program by one-third, and I think it's important more broadly, because RGGI has always been a model and a leader on how cap and trade works, and they've introduced new innovations that have been adopted across the globe. As we look forward to an administration where we're unlikely to be pricing or capping carbon, this progression of state programs may be the way that we're going to go.

So, positive developments. There’s still a little bit of uncertainty, because the governor has appealed this decision to the Supreme Court of Virginia, but it is a step in the direction of keeping Virginia in and expanding that RGGI footprint.

Daniel Raimi: Great. I'm curious about RGGI. It's such an interesting program and a model, as you say. What are the prices like in RGGI this year? Do you know off the top of your head?

Karen Palmer: They've been up and down. They're definitely above the floor. I think they're down a little bit in the most recent auction. I think they were down by like 10 percent. I know they would definitely be influenced by, for example, what people think are going to happen under the Inflation Reduction Act to the cost of renewables and things.

Daniel Raimi: And I could imagine the price being affected by that court decision, too, right?

Karen Palmer: Yeah, definitely. Virginia was thought to be a supplier of allowances perhaps to other places, but demand growth there is big, and data centers are another element of this whole calculus about how to regulate emissions.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, northern Virginia has been an epicenter for data-center load growth, I think.

Karen Palmer: Yes.

Daniel Raimi: All right, let's change gears a little bit and talk about the future. Obviously, we'll be speculating about what's going to happen. We're recording on December 12, so, listener, you are listening to this episode about a month after we've recorded it. It's possible that you'll have information that we don't, so apologies in advance. We'll do our best.

We had federal elections this year. They had surprising results in some cases, maybe predictable results in others, but the balance of power in Congress and the executive branch have changed in the United States, and there are obviously really big implications for energy and climate and environmental policy of all sorts. As you think about 2025, what issue are you going to be watching most carefully? I'll just kind of leave it broad and open that way. Let's start with Kevin.

Kevin Rennert: One clear issue that I'll be watching is what happens with the IRA. Obviously, Congress is talking a lot about the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and extending many of those tax cuts, and if that were to happen under a budget reconciliation process, this would be a process that would be able to go with just Republican votes. There is a line of thought that they will need offsets—effectively, revenue to pay for these continued tax cuts—and one place that they could go to get revenue would be some of these tax credits and other provisions that are in the IRA.

There are a lot of embedded questions about how that process plays out and on what timeframe. One of them will be just a test of whether or not the theory of change in putting some of these tax credits in place has been, "Well, let's actually bring all these technologies together in sort of a technology-neutral basket." You don't have solar with its own tax credit and wind with its tax credit. You really have just geothermal and wind and solar and nuclear—all of them lumped together as a low-carbon credit. As a force to be reckoned with in terms of the policy conversation, they're a little stronger. I'll just be interested to see how that whole conversation plays out, because that'll have real strong implications for what happens with the clean energy sector moving forward.

Daniel Raimi: I'm going to ask you to really speculate. If you had to pick a couple provisions or technologies that are supported through the IRA, which are one or two that you think are most likely to endure this Congress, and which are one or two that you think might be most likely to get the axe?

Kevin Rennert: I would say the 45Q tax credit, for example, which is for carbon capture and storage, has pretty broad bipartisan support. That one seems pretty safe. The purchase credits for electric vehicles has really been a target. That one certainly seems to have a target on it. The wild card to me will be what happens with these electricity incentives in terms of clean energy, whether or not those have a mix of support over years.

Daniel Raimi: Really interesting. Karen, what are you going to be watching?

Karen Palmer: You stole a little bit of what I wanted to talk about, because the IRA is so important to the electricity sector. I think another thing that I mentioned earlier on is demand growth in the electricity sector being really important, and there … I hate to go back to the FERC; it's so techy.

Daniel Raimi: Bring it.

Karen Palmer: The FERC has signaled that they're going to be doing something on colocation of generation and big pieces of demand. Why that's important for the general public is the extent to which there's subtleties in how those things are treated or technicalities that will have implications for the costs that spill over to the rest of us when new, big data centers—gigawatt-sized loads—are added to the grid; in particular, if they also add a nuclear plant or something to power that, the extent to which that requires services from the grid is going to depend upon rulemaking that the FERC is going to do.

The thing about the FERC is that it's an independent agency, so there may be some stability there. Just recently, we added three new members—two Democrats and one Republican—in June. The terms of the existing FERC commissioners go pretty far out into the future, including the current chair. It'll be interesting to see if the Trump administration replaces the current chair, who is a Democrat, or if they just allow that term to play out. That's important because of agenda-setting for the group and whether they stay the course or whether things change. There are parts of Project 2025 that really want to modify what happens at the FERC and important policies there.

Daniel Raimi: I wanted to ask you about the politics of the independence of the FERC.

(I'm also curious why some people say “FERC” and some people say “the FERC,” but I'll table that question.)

Some positions in the federal government that historically have been nonpolitical—director of the FBI, Federal Reserve chair—there's rumblings about those appointments being more political this time around. Do you think that's something that might be happening with FERC (or the FERC)?

Karen Palmer: I think what to watch to get a sense of that is Commissioner Christie, who is one of the longest-serving Republicans—his term is up at the end of June—and to see who is going to replace him. It wouldn't be that unusual for a new president to pick a new chair, and there's only one other Republican on the commission now, those two things, but if somebody … Whoever comes in to take that seat will matter.

Daniel Raimi: Okay. Interesting. Margaret, what are you going to be watching?

Margaret Walls: I'm going to be watching insurance. Our listeners might know, and some have faced personally, a lot of the things that are going on in insurance markets, so people may understand this, but I'll just explain.

If you have damage from—and I'm talking about disaster insurance here or disaster-relevant things—if you have damage from a flood, you have to have flood insurance, and most flood insurance comes from the NFIP, which the federal government runs through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But you also have homeowners insurance. If your home is damaged in a hurricane and has wind damage—your roof flies off—that's generally covered by your homeowners insurance. If you are living in a wildfire-prone area, and you have damage from a fire, that's covered by your homeowners insurance. But increasingly, in these high-hazard states like California (when it comes to wildfire) or Louisiana and Florida, there's a lot of problems in insurance markets.

Insurers are walking away from these markets to a certain extent. That's happened in California. They drop homeowners policies and don't allow them to be renewed. They limit the coverage they provide. In some cases, we've heard some horror stories about people filing claims after events and not getting payments that match the damages and so forth. There are a lot of things going on in insurance markets that are creating problems. Insurance is heavily regulated at the state level. It's a state-policy thing, and regulations do vary from state to state quite a bit. California has some pretty strict rate regulations, so every year, there's a cap on how much you can raise your rates and things like that.

I'm really curious to watch what happens here. There's been some action in Congress. Certainly, Congress is very aware of this, especially in these states that I mentioned, where there's a lot of problems. There's been a proposed bill that is an all-perils bill, so it would replace the NFIP with an insurance that covers all catastrophic perils. That would be a very big change, but there's people talking about this kind of thing, so I'm really watching what happens in markets and what happens in Congress with the change in congressional leadership. It's just going to be interesting to see how this plays out, because, again, a lot of these issues have strong bipartisan elements to them. They're mainly coastal states versus inland states, to just draw a little bit of a stark contrast. It's not completely that, but that's a big part of it.

The last thing I'll say about that is that I'm not sure what the Trump administration is thinking along these lines. But Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint, does recommend privatizing the NFIP. I don't think that's going to happen. We've been waiting for reauthorization of the program. There are always a lot of issues around the NFIP, and it will be interesting. I will definitely be watching what happens there.

Daniel Raimi: Really interesting. If the federal government were to get more involved in insurance markets, is there a significant potential price tag there just in terms of the federal budget? Would that increase debt in some ways? You could imagine in 10 years or 20 years, the federal government being more heavily involved, and if private insurers are walking away, because it's just not profitable, and the federal government's stepping in, I imagine it would be a loss-making enterprise for the government. Is that something you've thought about?

Margaret Walls: It probably would be. We have thought about this. The NFIP could be restructured. It has a debt to the Treasury right now of about $20 billion, I think. What happens is they don't collect enough claims to cover when a big catastrophe happens, and so then they go into debt, because we're going to pay the claims. You got insurance, you're going to get payment from the National Flood Insurance Department. I want to say something good about the NFIP. They can't turn anybody down. If you want a policy, you will get a policy. Also, if you file a claim, you're going to get a payment, and you can get up to $250,000 for structured damage and $100,000 for contents.

It's a problem. They've been working on the structure of the program. Rates have gone up to reflect the risks a little bit better, and then that's controversial. There are affordability challenges for people of lower income, and so people are proposing some solutions to that problem. The short answer to your question is yes, but everybody's very aware of this and trying to figure out how to structure the NFIP, which is already a federal program. How do we structure that in such a way that we don't have this big of a problem? It's challenging.

Daniel Raimi: Well, I want to ask one more trivial question before we go to Top of the Stack, and it's going back to Karen. Karen, can you give us the definitive answer, is it “FERC” or “the FERC”?

Karen Palmer: Depends on the context.

Daniel Raimi: Oh, okay.

Karen Palmer: I don't know! It depends on the context.

Margaret Walls: Well, what do you say, Karen?

Daniel Raimi: When do you say “FERC” and when do you say “the FERC”?

Karen Palmer: I don't know!

Daniel Raimi: Okay.

Karen Palmer: I think mostly, I say “FERC.”

Daniel Raimi: Today, mostly you said “the FERC.”

Karen Palmer: Did I? It’s unconscious.

Daniel Raimi: All right, so we'll have to leave that unsettled.

Karen Palmer: Yeah.

Daniel Raimi: Let's go to our last question now. What's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack? Karen, let's start with you.

Karen Palmer: I want to recommend a book that one of the book groups I was in read this summer, and the title of it is Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny. She's a science journalist with a public radio station out in the West somewhere, but the book is a story of two women, and they're botanists. Their names are Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, and they take a boat trip together with four men, who captain the boat and do other things, down the Colorado River in the late 1930s. Their mission is sort of to catalog and collect samples of all the plants in the base of the Grand Canyon. It's just a really cool story. It's a harrowing trip, and one of the fascinating things about it is they bring real dishes and the two women scientists who are the reason they're taking this trip also do all the cooking and all the dishes, so there you go.

Margaret Walls: I don't know how I feel about that.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Inequities on the river. Margaret, how about you?

Margaret Walls: I'm going to recommend a book I haven't finished, because I just got it. My sister sent it to me for my birthday, which was yesterday.

Daniel Raimi: Happy Birthday, Margaret!

Margaret Walls: Thank you. It's called Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky, and it's an edited volume by somebody called Melissa Helton. In 2022, eastern Kentucky, the Appalachian part of the state, experienced really devastating floods. Very similar to what we saw in North Carolina this year. This book is when the Appalachian Writers Workshop was going on, and this is a pretty prominent and interesting place that writers gather who write about Appalachia for a workshop every year.

This flood hit when they were there, so a lot of these essays in this book—there's some poems, there's some essays—are by the people that participated in that. I want to recommend it, because I feel like when we work on especially the things that I work on—when you work on disasters and climate risks and so forth—you get geeky. We're economists, we work with data, we do analysis. These are very human stories, very personal stories, things that happened that are horrific, and so it's important to keep that in mind, I feel like. And it's a good read, too.

Daniel Raimi: Excellent. Thank you, Margaret. And Margaret is from Kentucky, if folks don't know.

Margaret Walls: I am from Kentucky, yes.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Which part of Kentucky?

Margaret Walls: Not quite eastern Kentucky. Near a town called Maysville on the Ohio River. It's close to these areas, but it's about 50 miles east of Cincinnati.

Daniel Raimi: Okay. Kevin?

Kevin Rennert: Karen gave kind of an exploration book, so I was going to give a recommendation of another podcast, which is allowed—thank you. In terms of Resources Radio being my number-one podcast, I often will also listen to Shift Key, which is Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins, which is just a sort of delightful romp down.

Karen Palmer: I like that, too.

Kevin Rennert: It's really good, and if you like Resources Radio, you'll probably like that, as well. But the book that I've been reading is actually also about exploration. It's called Alone on the Ice, and it is the story of Douglas Mawson and his Antarctic expedition in the early 1900s. It is a harrowing, harrowing tale, and to me, thinking about Earth from a climate-science perspective, just the reality of humans back in the early 1900s walking around in Antarctica and the things that they were going through is just an absolutely remarkable, thrilling tale, so I'll recommend that, too. It’s by David Roberts.

Daniel Raimi: Sounds amazing. Of course, we'll have links to all of these resources in the show notes. I'm going to recommend something really briefly, as well, which is a brand new television show on Paramount+ called Landman.

Margaret Walls: I saw that.

Daniel Raimi: A landman in the oil and gas industry is someone who goes and acquires leases from landowners so that oil and gas companies can drill on their land. This show follows Billy Bob Thornton, who is not really a landman. He's more of a fixer for a theoretical oil company in west Texas, and the show is completely over the top. It's made by the same person who made Yellowstone, so it's got that vibe. There's lot of murder, there's lots of explosions; lots of drugs; lots of oil. I've only watched the first episode, but I think it did enough to hook me, and we might actually try to get Christian Wallace, who made a podcast upon which the TV show is based, on the podcast to talk about it a little bit, so that could be fun. If you feel like something silly about oil, check out Landman.

Kevin Rennert: Is that a potential destination for Resources Radio—to become a TV series, as well? Is that on your roadmap?

Daniel Raimi: We've been approached many times by many Hollywood studios, and we are not willing to sell our name for the highest bidder, so that's unlikely to happen, Kevin.

All right, Kevin Rennert, Karen Palmer, Margaret Walls—thank you so much for joining us today on Resources Radio. It's been really fun.

Kevin Rennert: Absolutely.

Karen Palmer: Thanks.

Kevin Rennert: Thanks for having us.

Karen Palmer: Great to be here.

Daniel Raimi: You’ve been listening to Resources Radio, a podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). If you have a minute, we’d really appreciate you leaving us a rating or comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes.

This podcast is made possible with the generous financial support of our listeners. You can help us continue producing these kinds of discussions on the topics that you care about by making a donation to Resources for the Future online at rff.org/donate.

RFF is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Our mission is to improve our environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the podcast guests and may differ from those of RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. RFF does not take positions on specific legislative proposals.

Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason, with music by me, Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.