The panel is an independent advisory body that synthesizes scientific information on climate change. Members advise city policymakers on local resilience and adaptation strategies that protect against extreme heat, heavy rain, coastal storm surges, and other climate hazards. 

“Much of New York City comprises islands. We must be prepared for the fact that we’re at risk of future hurricane landfall, we’re going to lose land to sea-level rise, and there will also be drought and temperature increases,” said Conte.

“I’m very excited to contribute knowledge that can be put to good use for a panel like this.”

Conte is the first Fordham professor to join the panel, which was first formed in 2009 and renews its membership every three years, tapping experts from government, non-profits, and academia. This appointment is not the first time the government has called on Conte for his expertise;  his research on climate change was cited in a major report issued by the White House. 

Learning from Past Climate Disasters

Each new panel is tasked with issuing a report at the end of its three-year term. Conte said that past panels have analyzed global climate models that had been recently released, downscaling them to show how they might affect New York City.

No new models have been released recently, so he said he expects this panel will dig deeper into the challenges that are already known–particularly those highlighted by recent disasters. The group will hold a series of public meetings this year to gauge the public’s interest in specific areas. 

Conte said the panel will provide important guidance during a critical time. 

“Given the outcome of the recent election, we expect that federal leadership in this area is going to be greatly diminished,” he said. 

“New York City is a high profile area, so this kind of assessment is important to maintain the focus on the challenges we face and show what can happen at the local level to reduce the impacts of climate change.”

Recent examples of extreme weather worth re-examining are numerous. Conte said the panel may determine what will happen to water supplies if droughts like the one that lasted nearly a month continue. Or it might try to quantify the risks that New Yorkers will be exposed to as a result of extreme bad air days caused by Canadian wildfires or those posed by brush fires that have been on the rise in the New York City area. 

“We’re also thinking about when the next Superstorm Sandy is going to come through and how we’ll have to deal with it,” he said. 

Conte, who has published research on outdoor air pollution in New York City, the challenges of managing tropical cyclone risk, and the impact of climate change on natural capital, hopes the panel will explore each of these topics.

The Everyday Costs of Climate Change

He’s also hopeful that as an economist, he’ll be able to help the panel illustrate the societal costs of climate change and pollution that are poorly understood by the general public. 

“One of the big challenges is that, as we just saw in this election, everyone cares about the price of milk, but we don’t have a price for clean air or a price for not having to miss work because of asthma or because it’s too hot,” he said.

“I’m hoping to provide literature that shows what types of policy interventions are successful when facing these challenges and what the difficulties are for policymakers in putting them into action.”

Answering a call from Pope Francis, Fordham is indeed a place committed to taking “concrete actions in the care of our common home.”

Here are some updates from the first quarter of 2024, from student sustainability interns to “cool” foods to fun community events that make an impact.

Facilities

In January, 11 more undergraduate students joined Fordham’s Office of Facilities Management as sustainability interns to help the University in its efforts to reduce its carbon emissions. They’re working on projects connected to AI-enabled energy systems, non-tree-based substitutes for paper, and composting. The office is still looking for three more students to join; email Vincent Burke at [email protected] for more information.

Dining

Stroll into a dining facility at the Rose Hill or Lincoln Center campus, and you’ll find “Cool Food” dishes such as crispy chicken summer salad, California taco salad, and spicy shrimp and penne. 

The dishes, which are marked by a distinctive green icon at the serving station, have a higher percentage of vegetables, legumes, and grains, which generally have a lower carbon footprint than those with beef, lamb, and dairy. According to the World Resources Institute—which Fordham partnered with on the Cool Food project—more than one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse emissions come from food production.

In March, the University went one step further by signing onto the New York City Mayor’s Office Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge. The pledge commits Fordham and Aramark to reduce our food-supply carbon emissions by a minimum of 25% by the year 2030.

Academics

This semester, a new one-credit, university-wide experiential learning seminar titled Common Home: Introduction to Sustainability and Environmental Justice was taught by faculty and staff from the Gabelli School, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, the Department of Facilities, the Department of Biology, and the Department of Theology. 

Other sustainability-focused courses this semester include the City and Climate Change, the Physics of Climate Change, and You Are What You Eat: the Anthropology of Food (Arts and Sciences); Sustainable Reporting and Sustainable Fashion (Gabelli School of Business); and Energy Law and Climate Change Law and Policy (Law).

Students Take the Lead

At Fordham Law School, the student-run Environmental Law Review hosted a March 14 symposium that considered the impact of artificial intelligence on environmental law. Panels focused on how regulators and litigators can use AI and the challenge of addressing AI-generated climate misinformation.

In January, Fordham Law student Rachel Arone wrote The EPA Rejected Stricter Regulations for Factory Farm Water Pollution: What This Means, Where Things Stand, and What You Can Do for the Environmental Law Review. And the Law School’s student-faculty-staff collective Climate Law Equity Sustainability Initiative held a series of lunchtime discussions about climate change, law, and policy. 

Student groups LC Environmental Club and Fashion for Philanthropy teamed up on March 8 to create reusable tote bags on International Women’s Day. The bags were donated to Womankind, which works with survivors of domestic/sexual violence and trafficking.

The United Student Government Sustainability Committee continues to run the Fordham Flea, a student-run thrift shop that connects students interested in selling old clothes with those looking to buy sustainably. The next flea will take place on April 26 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. outside of the McShane Center.

Community Engagement

The Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) held an Urban Agriculture and Food Security Roundtable on Feb. 2. The gathering brought together community organizations and leaders from the Bronx to discuss urban agriculture and food security. Attended by Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres, the meeting was also an opportunity for groups to learn about resources available from the USDA and the New York City Mayor’s Office on Urban Agriculture.

CCEL Director of Campus and Community Engagement Surey Miranda-Alarcon served as a panelist at a March 9 climate justice workshop at SOMOS 2024 in Albany, along with Mirtha Colon, GSS ’98, and Murad Awawdeh, PCS ’19.

Faculty News

David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture, and Julie Gafney, Ph.D., director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning, attended “Laudato Si’: Protecting Our Common Home, Building Our Common Church” conference at the University of San Diego on Feb. 22 and 23.

Marc Conte, Ph.D., professor of economics, and Steve Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, presented their research around air quality, STEM education, and education outcomes on March 11 at the first night of Bronx Appreciation Week, which the Fordham Diversity Action Coalition organized.

Alumni

On March 14, Tara Clerkin, GSAS ’13, director of climate research and innovation at the International Rescue Committee, delivered a lecture at the Rose Hill campus titled “The Epicenter of Crisis: Climate and Conflict Driving Humanitarian Need and Displacement.”

In Case You Missed It

Here are some sustainability-related stories that you may have missed: In January, economics professor Marc Conte published the findings of a study that examined whether people living in areas with more air pollution suffer more from the coronavirus. The Gabelli School of Business partnered with Net Impact, a nonprofit organization for students and professionals interested in using business skills in support of social and environmental causes.  A group of the Gabelli School Ignite Scholars traveled to the Carolina Textile District in Morgantown, North Carolina, to learn the benefits of sustainable and ethical manufacturing.

Upcoming Events

April 12 and 19
Poe Park Clean-up
In celebration of Earth Day on April 22, the Center for Community Engaged Learning is organizing visits to the park, where volunteers can help pull weeds and spread mulch. 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., 2640 Grand Concourse, the Bronx. Sign up here.

April 13
Bird Watching in Central Park
Law professor Howard Erichson will lead students on a birdwatching tour of Central Park, where they hope to spot and identify a few of the hundreds of species that pass through Fordham’s backyard on their annual migration routes. Meet at the Law School lobby at 9:30 a.m. Contact [email protected] to reserve a spot.

April 13
Ignatian Day of Service
Students and alumni will meet at the Lincoln Center campus and walk over to nearby Harborview Terrace, where they will build a community garden with residents. Lunch and a conversation about Ignatian leadership will follow. 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Click here to RSVP.

April 15
ASHRAE NY Climate Crisis Meeting
The theme of this meeting of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers is “Challenge Accepted: Tackling the Climate Crisis.” All are welcome.
7 a.m.- 1 p.m., Lincoln Center Campus. Contact Nelida LaBate at [email protected] for more information or register here using code FordhamStudent2024.

We’d Love to Hear From You!

Do you have a sustainability-related event, development, or news item you’d like to share? Contact Patrick Verel at [email protected].

But was that air pollution actually causing those symptoms?

In a new study published this month, Marc Conte, Ph.D., professor of economics at Fordham, says no.

“There’s no question that air pollution is a public health threat, but measuring the impacts of air pollution on humans, whether it’s cognitive ability, physical health, or mental health, is pretty challenging,” said Conte.

Correlation vs. Cause

The challenge, he said, is overcoming the temptation to put more weight behind observational studies than they deserve. A researcher might collect data and determine that a large number of people with dementia have bad teeth. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that bad teeth cause dementia.

“The public health researchers who are conducting this work know that they’re studying correlations, but when the media reports on these studies, the layperson who consumes that information might not necessarily know that it’s a correlation and not causal,” he said.

For the study, “Observational studies generate misleading results about the health effects of air pollution: Evidence from chronic air pollution and COVID-19 outcomes,” which was published in the journal PLOS ONE, Conte and his research partners paired data from two different sources that were collected between March and September 2020.

The first source was health data gathered from U.S. Census tracts in New York City, whose geographic centers are less than 500 meters from a highway. That narrowed the number of tracts studied down to about 800 out of a total of 2,168 in New York City. The researchers then compared that to data collected from the New York City Community Air Survey, a network of 100 air quality monitors maintained around the five boroughs.

That extensive network, which augments a much smaller number of monitors in New York City maintained by the federal government, allowed researchers to compare communities that are downwind from highways with those that are upwind. If poor air quality were responsible for more severe COVID symptoms, communities downwind would be expected to fare worse than their upwind neighbors.

Findings

Conte said that across the 800 census tracts, there was no statistically significant difference between those who were downwind and thus had poorer air quality and those who were upwind and therefore had better air quality. Other factors, such as income differences, access to health care, and the ability to work remotely during the pandemic, are more likely culprits for severe symptoms, he said.

In addition, many residents in these areas were unable to leave New York City at the height of the pandemic, either because they lacked the means to do so, or their jobs required that they work in person. The inability to engage in this kind of “defensive behavior,” resulted in higher exposure to those infected with the virus.

“That fact suggests this issue of environmental justice extends beyond the fact that certain communities are located near more pollution sources,” he said.

“It’s actually a more systemic problem that lower-income people are employed in positions that could not accommodate remote work, with many designated ‘frontline’ workers,” he said, or simply didn’t have the resources to leave the city.

None of this means that researchers should cease conducting observational studies, especially during health emergencies like the pandemic, Conte said.  Rather, he hopes the study will further elevate the notion that “correlation does not equal causation” in the public consciousness.

More Data = Better Outcomes

A second takeaway from the study is the importance of maintaining a large network of air quality monitors, which together are able to generate finely detailed data. In fact, Conte’s team also conducted a second experiment on the same topic using only data collected by the seven monitors maintained around New York City by the Environmental Protection Agency, without any input from the New York City Community Air Survey.

The results were much closer to the observational studies that had been done and might have led readers to believe that air pollution and severe COVID symptoms are explicitly linked to each other.

“As we think about things like wildfires and other sources of air pollution, these problems are becoming more and more intense,” said Conte.

“For us to be able to take measures that can reduce the public health outcomes and the threats to public health, we need to have more information. We need to invest more.”

The document set forth an ambitious seven-year plan for the University that touches on everything from facilities and curriculum to student involvement, all with the ultimate goal of combating climate change.

Just this month, Fordham received a $50 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency that the University will use to team up with community partners to address the issue.

Below are a few of the sustainability-related efforts, developments, and accomplishments that took place in the final quarter of 2023. Look for more updates in 2024!

Facilities

Going Hybrid
On Oct. 23, three hybrid minivans, including a wheelchair-accessible minivan, joined the fleet of Fordham’s Ram Vans. They replace gas-powered minivans previously used for wheelchair-accessible requests, trips to the Calder Center, and charter trip services. The vans use less gas, produce less CO₂, and can run up to 560 miles on one tank of gas.

Dining

Micro Farms
This fall, Aramark installed vertical hydroponic units called Babylon Micro Farms at dining halls on the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses. They grow fresh greens and herbs in a water-based solution (instead of soil, which requires frequent watering.) The greens are harvested for use in dining hall dishes and special student events.

Compared to traditional methods, each micro farm uses 96% less water, zero pesticides, 65% less fertilizer, and zero miles to transport. As a result, between January and June 2023, using them allowed Fordham to save 19,247 gallons of water, prevent 2.5 pounds of nitrogen from entering waterways, and reduce 32 pounds of food waste.

Academics

In the Classroom
Six undergraduate community-engaged learning classes offered in the Fall 2023 semester featured elements promoting sustainability: Anthropology of Food (Anthropology), Economics and Ecology of Food Systems (Economics), Thinking Visually (Visual Arts), Human Physiology (Biology), Consumer Behavior (Gabelli School of Business), and Leadership Integrated Project (Gabelli School of Business). At Fordham Law School, environmental law courses offered this semester included Environmental Law and Energy Law.

Fordham Law students wrote blog posts for the school’s Environmental Law Review on the Flint and Jackson water crises, NYC Local Law 97, the environmental damage caused by the fashion industry, and cell-cultivated meats.

Reading Laudato Si’
The Curran Center for American Catholic Studies held three seminars on Zoom this semester dedicated to reading Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ and the 2023 follow-up, Laudate Deum. Visit the center’s website for more information on future seminars.

A Systems Approach
This semester, the Social Innovation Collaboratory and Career Center hosted a collaborative workshop on systems thinking, focused mainly on sustainability. The workshops, which were open to all undergraduate students, allowed them to explore the practice and application of systems thinking, which is rooted in a holistic approach to society’s more complex issues. The process is attractive to companies since it’s rooted in the idea of looking at complex problems with a new perspective. Contact Sadibou Sylla at the Collaborary for information on future workshops.

Students Take the Lead

Green Week: United Student Government sponsored Fordham College at Rose Hill’s Sustainability Week in November. It featured the Fordham Flea Pop-Up as well as a seminar on composting basics.

The Lincoln Center Environmental Club held a clean makeup tabling event on Nov. 30 to showcase the benefits of cruelty-free and clean makeup.

Community Engagement

As part of the Reimagine the Cross Bronx campaign, Fordham staff conducted weekend “walkshops” in the neighborhoods surrounding the highway. Funding came from a $25,000 grant from the New York City Department (DOT) that the Center for Community Engaged Learning received in October.

Fordham staff and students also held special Halloween and Thanksgiving-themed events at the Highbridge Farmers Market and community space, which was recently expanded thanks to an AARP grant.

Faculty News

Marc Conte, Ph.D., professor of economics, published “Unequal Climate Impacts on Global Values of Natural Capital” in the journal Nature.

Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, published “Education for Environmental Justice: The Fordham Regional Environmental Sensor for Healthy Air,” in the journal Social Sciences.

David Gibson, director of the Center for Religion and Culture (CRC), received $84,840 from the Porticus Foundation for the annual conference The Way Forward: Laudato Si’, Protecting Our Common Home, Building Our Common Church. The conference will take place in February at the University of San Diego.

Isaie Dougnon, Ph.D., associate professor of French and Francophone Studies and International Humanitarian Affairs, received $24,790 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for research based on a local perspective on water and migration in West Africa.

Alumni

Giselle Schmitz, GSAS ’22, spent this fall working with the Coral Triangle Center in Bali, Indonesia—a nonprofit that connects governments, corporations, and local groups to help strengthen marine resources in the region.

In Case You Missed It

It was a busy fall in terms of sustainability efforts! Here are some stories Fordham News covered that you may have missed: In October, the annual Fordham Women’s Summit focused on sustainability.  In our theology department, a lecture for first-year students featuring Union Theological Seminary professor John J. Thatamanil connected religious supremacy to the destruction of the natural world. Four students have joined the Office of Facilities Management’s newly created internship program, while alumni are helping protect New York City’s birds and helping farmers adapt to climate change. The Gabelli School of Business hosted two Nobel Laureates at a conference on ESG.  At the Law School, more than 20 students gathered in Central Park for a clean-up event for the annual Public Service Day, while alumna Melinda Baglio was honored for being a changemaker in the clean energy field.

Upcoming Events

Faculty Happy Hour: Sustainability and Environmental Justice
Open to all faculty interested in sharing ideas about sustainability.
Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024. RSVP: Julie Gafney, [email protected]

STEM Career Fair, Thursday, Feb. 15, Great Hall, Rose Hill Campus. Visit the Fordham Career Center next month for details.

Women of Color in STEM Career Panel, Wednesday, Feb. 28, Virtual. Visit the Fordham Career Center next month for details.

Social Impact and Non-Profit Micro-Fair, Thursday, March 14, 12th Floor Lounge, Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center campus. Visit the Fordham Career Center next month for details.

Save the Date:
Climate Action Summit with President Tetlow: April 8, Rose Hill Campus

We’d Love to Hear From You!

Do you have a sustainability-related event, development, or news item you’d like to share? Contact Patrick Verel at [email protected].

Fordham hosted a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary conference on May 1 and 2 at the Lincoln Center campus that addressed the sources of environmental degradation, racism, ableism, and rising inequality with regard to access to resources and information around the world.

In her welcoming remarks at the International Conference on Social and Environmental Justice, Fordham President Tania Tetlow noted that the conference’s goals were perfectly in sync with the four apostolic preferences of the Society of Jesus.

They are “walking with the excluded,” “caring for our common home,” “journeying with youth,” and committing to discernment, or “doing it all with openness and humility by listening and learning,” she said.

“My hope is that you will energize and inspire each other, that we will come up with the sorts of solutions that lie in the complexity, ” she said.

“And that we do it in a way that models that for our students because that is all about where we can locate the hope.”

The conference, which was organized by Fordham’s Office of the Provost, Office of Research, and Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, was supported by Fordham, Columbia University, Georgetown University, and New York University. Additional funding was provided by Fordham’s Office of the Chief Diversity Officer.

Ten-panel discussions followed two keynote addresses by Molly Doane, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Alex Gil, Ph.D., senior lecturer II and associate research faculty at Yale University.

Community Gardens and Food Justice

Doane shared stories of working with three community gardens on the west, north, and south sides of Chicago, in a lecture titled “Climate Stories: Gardening at the City’s Edge in Chicago.” Far from simply being spots for food production, she said the gardens are beacons of hope for marginalized communities, including refugees from Iraq.

The Hello Howard Community Garden, where she is a member, contributes produce to a local food bank, even though yields can be uncertain.

“We gardeners donate to refugee programs for the same reason we flew to Lesbos to sort donated clothing in a warehouse after seeing a picture of that sweet little boy washed up on the shore there, the same reason we hang the ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ signs and the reason we flocked to O’Hare after refugees were detained after Trump signed the Muslim ban,” she said.

“I work in food not because it’s the be-all, end-all. It’s because it’s a tool to dismantle racism and create some racial equity and create living, thriving economies that people can control and have some sovereignty”

Minimal Computing and Access to Technology

In “Minimal Computing and Environmental Justice: A Humble Offering,” Gil shared the ways in which digital projects such as Open Syllabus, which has collected and analyzed 7.2 million college syllabi, and WAX, which helps researchers create digital archives, are making it easier to empower people who don’t have the same access to technology that is common in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Minimal computing, which is a way of developing technology that can be used in the absence of hardware, software, network capacity, technical education, or even a reliable power grid, is one option.

“How do we do design if we don’t take for granted that everyone has fast, free internet, no censorship, and electricity all the time?” he said.

“Minimal computing tries to imagine constraints all over the world and designs for it.”

Environmental Economics, Justice, and Policy

In the panel Environmental Economics, Justice, and Policy, R. Jisung Park, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, showed how the increase in 90-degree days presents a greater risk of heat-related injuries than previously thought to those who work in jobs outside, as well as some who work in manufacturing.

Beia Spiller, director of the Transportation Program at Resources for the Future, made the case for greater public funding for electric vehicle charge stations in the Bronx.

And Marc N. Conte, Ph.D., a professor of economics at Fordham, shared the findings of a forthcoming paper, “Observational studies generate misleading results about health effects of air pollution: evidence from chronic air quality conditions and COVID-19 outcomes”. His study aimed to address the fact that in New York City, Black residents succumbed to COVID-19 in greater numbers than white residents.

Since the areas of the city where they live feature high ambient concentrations of air pollution, Conte wanted to see whether the two facts were connected. He concluded they are not, in part by analyzing phone data that showed that white, wealthy residents of the Upper East Side, which has similar levels of air pollution, may have been spared because they simply left the city during the pandemic.

“I’m not saying that Black and brown communities were not adversely affected by COVID. What I’m saying is, it wasn’t because they lived necessarily in areas with worse air quality,” he said.

“[P]eople in these communities had jobs that forced them to work in person. So they were actually here and present and exposed to this virus in a way that people in wealthier, whiter communities were not. I think that’s actually a larger systemic racism problem than an air quality issue.”

In the closing session, George Hong, Ph.D., Chief Research Officer and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fordham, hailed the gathering for bringing together perspectives from 13 different countries, representing nonprofit government organizations, academia, community groups, and private industry. Fordham has also been invited to publish the research presented in an upcoming issue of the academic journal Social Sciences.

The final session also featured remarks from Fordham professors Steven Franks, Ph.D., Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., Aseel Sawalha, Ph.D., and Sophie Mitra, Ph.D.

Franks highlighted the fact that so many participants conducted research in partnership with community organizations.

“This is getting out of the colonialist, or post-colonial mindset of sort of sweeping in to solve the problems of those people, and really just working with local communities to find out how we can all benefit from each other and solve problems together,” he said.

The 513-page 2023 Economic Report of the President, which was issued on March 23 by the Executive Office of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, cited two papers by Conte and his coauthors in the report’s ninth chapter, “Opportunities for Better Managing Weather Risk in the Changing Climate.”

The papers were An Imperfect Storm: Fat-Tailed Tropical Cyclone Damages, Insurance, and Climate Policy, which was published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 2018, and Noah’s Ark in a Warming World: Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, and Public Adaptation Costs in the United States, which was published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists in 2022.

The presidential report, which is transmitted to Congress no later than 10 days after the submission of the budget each year, presents an overview of the nation’s economic progress and outlines plans for the future.

Climate change was first addressed in the report in 2010 and was included intermittently up until 2018 when it was not addressed. It was reintroduced in last year’s report, and this year, it included the weather risk chapter, which addresses the ways that market failures prevent societies from adapting to the increased risk associated with climate change.

Threats No Longer in the Distant Future

The common thread connecting Conte’s two papers is that threats from climate change that were once thought to be distant are in fact present today. The first is cataclysmic “once in a 1,000 years” storms like Hurricane Harvey, he said, that have become stronger in part because of warmer ocean temperatures. The second is the ongoing rapid loss of flora and fauna that the United Nations has estimated will result in the loss of a million species within decades.

“Our research shows that if we want to be able to adapt to these threats from a changing climate, we need to have a better understanding of the full scope of their impacts,” said Conte.

Reluctant Insurers

“The imperfect storm paper shows how challenging it is to adapt to tropical cyclones because they’re infrequent events that can vary dramatically in the magnitude of their impacts. That variability in the impacts of extreme (tail) events makes it difficult for insurers and policy makers to motivate adaptation,” he said.

Recognizing the Value of Biodiversity

“In ‘Noah’s Ark in A Warming World,’ we looked at the impacts of climate change on the species that are listed under the Endangered Species Act in the U.S., and found that there are going to be big increases in expenses that have to be made to try to protect those species.”

Both problems stem from failures of the market, he said, but they manifest themselves very differently. In the first problem, population centers in the United States continue to grow even in areas that are vulnerable to catastrophic storms, as prices in key markets do not reflect the risk of storm damages, meaning that it is still economically advantageous to do so. In the second, there are no markets to provide clear signals of the value of biodiversity, even though diverse flora and fauna are key to supporting human life.

It’s important for the government to address climate change in a report about economic progress, he said, because the market alone is not equipped to solve the problem.

“A well-designed regulatory policy is going to be critical to deal with the challenge of climate change, so the fact that these policymakers are aware of this type of work sends a signal that they are starting to take these risks seriously,” he said.

Selwin Hart, special adviser to the secretary-general on climate action and assistant secretary-general for the Climate Action Team at the United Nations, addressed students and staff about the recent developments in climate negotiations at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) held in Glasgow from Oct. 31 to Nov. 12 of this year.

Hart, a 2000 graduate of the Fordham IPED program, offered his thoughts on how the world must act in the face of the pandemic recovery and worsening climate crisis.

“Geopolitical tensions point to confrontation, competition, and potential conflict at a time when collaboration, cooperation, and solidarity are needed more than ever to ensure an inclusive recovery and to address the climate crisis,” he said.

Hart was the Cassamarca Lecturer at the “Climate Change and UN Call to Action” event delivered in Tognino Hall. The event was hosted by Fordham’s Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development (IPED) and co-sponsored by Fordham Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice.

Hart said that at the Glasgow climate negotiations—the most consequential climate negotiations since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015—efforts were made to create multilateral agreements focused on addressing key issues concerning climate change.

The first goal from the conference was to keep the 1.5°C of warming goal within reach, which is the warming threshold agreed upon by most climate experts needed to avoid catastrophic damages from climate change. In other words, the world needs to limit greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide—the cause of rising temperatures—in order to limit the rise in Earth’s temperature to only 1.5 °C.

“The 1.5 °C goal is alive, but it is on life support, it will depend on what happens this decade, and more importantly in the next two to three years,” he said,

The second goal was to have developed countries deliver on their commitment to supporting emerging economies with $100 billion in climate financing, which Hart said should be completed by 2023. The third and final goal was to develop support for countries that are already facing climate impacts. An agreement was made on this front to double climate adaptation funding by 2025.

Hart said that the U.S. and China issued a joint statement at the conference committing to work together on climate-related actions, which he noted is substantial given the current geopolitical tensions.

Hart remains optimistic about the progress made at the negotiations, but he knows that challenges lie ahead.

“Multilateralism is at a crossroads; for multilateralism to be effective it needs the support and leadership of the largest players like the U.S. and China, but the voices of the smallest players in the international community also must be heard. It is imperative that they are heard and not sacrificed.”

Coming from the small island nation of Barbados, Hart has a unique perspective on these issues. He explained the triumph of the small island states, who, with the U.N., were part of initial the coalition to push for the 1.5 °C warming goal, and through the tools and levers of multilateralism, were able to successfully advocate and advance it.

Hart gave his warm appreciation to IPED Director Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., who, over 20 years ago, offered Hart a fellowship to study at Fordham, which he says launched his career. Since then, Hart has been a chief climate change negotiator for Barbados as well as the ambassador of Barbados to the United States, prior to being appointed to his current U.N. position.

To bring the discussion closer to home, Marc Conte, Ph.D., of the Fordham Department of Economics delivered remarks on climate and climate action within the United States. He highlighted the importance of information in future actions and argued that if we do not have the correct information, or if real estate and other commodities are not indicative of perfect information, we will not be able to treat the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves. He pointed to the example of multimillion-dollar properties still being sold on Florida waterfronts, even with the threat of sea-level rise.

He also connected the issue to health.

“If we had more information about these benefits and costs to society of adverse health outcomes, we might be more willing to contribute and collaborate,” he said, adding that the U.S. can and should be a global leader in climate, as it has been the biggest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases throughout history.

In closing, Hart connected the discussion on multilateralism with climate action by saying we should “try hard at all times to understand, in the true Fordham style, the perspectives and views of those that are across the table. There is always hope for finding common ground.” He emphasized that while progress is incremental, he still believes we can solve the climate crisis.

–Kevin Strohm

But if an animal or plant goes extinct because its habitat is destroyed as a result of climate change, there is no way to assign an “existence value” to it.

Thanks to a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Marc Conte, Ph.D., an associate professor of economics, is embarking on an ambitious five-year-long project to rectify that.

“Understanding the Coupling Between Climate Policy and Ecosystem Change,” a collaboration with Frances C. Moore, Ph.D., and Xiaoli Dong, Ph.D., both assistant professors in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis, seeks to update and expand the current estimates of the cost of carbon on society.

Helping Leaders Make Better Decisions

Conte, a co-principal investigator, said the goal of the study is to give government leaders better tools as they debate policies such as carbon taxes.

“We’re trying to motivate climate change policy through an understanding of the benefits and costs of those policies, acknowledging that when we suggest reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we’re going to be imposing costs on certain industries that will then be passed on to different households,” he said.

“Because of that, we want to make sure we are creating a policy with benefits that exceed its costs. The way we can do that is by understanding the full damage of each additional unit of greenhouse gas that we emit into the atmosphere.”

Recent findings by the scientific community have made apparent the need for a better understanding of the economic benefits of say, a white rhinoceros or American pika.

Last year, the United Nations predicted in a report that the world is on track for an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. A separate report found that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.

Building On Previous Research

Conte said reports such as these have made plain the need to expand upon the foundational integrated assessment models (IAMs) that economists have used for nearly 30 years to link economic activity and climate outcomes. The best known example is the Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy (DICE) model, for which William D. Nordhaus, Ph.D., of Yale University was a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics and which is described in Managing the Global Commons: The Economics of Climate Change.

When Nordhaus initially calculated how high a tax should be to offset the damages caused by carbon emissions, there was greater uncertainty about the timing and impacts of climate change, and the ecological effects of climate change were omitted from the model, due to both the uncertainty about the magnitude of these effects and the challenge of valuing these impacts in dollar terms, Conte said.

In subsequent years, technological advances have reduced the costs of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, so economists have adjusted the cost functions in climate IAMs accordingly. Additionally, progress has been made in valuing nonmarket environmental amenities, which can include the existence of various plant and animal species as well as the benefits that accrue to humans from functioning ecosystems.

“The intent of this project is to provide policymakers with a more comprehensive understanding of the tradeoffs associated with greenhouse gas emissions, which we will attempt to do by incorporating the ecological damages of climate change into the damage functions used by climate IAMs,” said Conte.

A Challenge Both Daunting and Necessary

If the idea that assigning a dollar amount to all the flora and fauna that might be affected by climate change sounds like an impossibly complicated task, Conte does not disagree.

“These values are controversial and difficult to measure, but we plan to utilize the best-available methods, and to introduce some novel approaches to generate credible estimates,” he said.

To do that, the team is assembling a large database of existing studies, to get a sense of how much value people attach to environmental amenities, including wild animals. Many studies have been conducted by researchers, government agencies, and conservation groups to inquire about the dollar value that people attach to these amenities, including so-called “charismatic mega fauna” like grizzly bears, tigers, and whales.

“These studies attempt to answer several questions, including: What is the value that you assign to either the existence of elephants in general, or maintaining the elephant population at its current level? What is it worth to you to prevent a decrease of some amount, or to achieve a population increase?”  Conte said.

“There are numerous ways to pose these questions, and we’re going to do our best using a large database of these studies to try to come up with a credible means of assigning value to as many different species and environmental amenities as we can.”

A Global Perspective

A big challenge inherent in this approach is that most of this kind of data has been collected in North America or Europe. Climate change, however, affects every corner of the globe.

“If we are interested in valuing changes in the function of wetlands in Vietnam or Bangladesh but lack existing estimates in these regions, how should we proceed?” he said.

“Can we modify the estimated value of wetlands in Indonesia in a way to make it relevant to conditions in Vietnam and Bangladesh? What about estimates from wetlands in New Jersey? Is there a point at which the differences between the study sites and the places impacted by climate change are sufficiently large that we are not comfortable transferring values across sites?”

And of course, Conte noted, there are still species on the planet that haven’t even been discovered yet, making it impossible to be comprehensive.

“Our estimated values will be lower-bound estimates, based on the information that we have available. The emphasis will be to highlight the implications of presenting a more comprehensive and accurate accounting of the impacts of climate change to policymakers,” he said.

“We hope to offer some methodological contributions that might be of use as we continue to improve our understanding of the complexities and interdependencies in our world and their implications for climate policy.”

This was the stark conclusion of a landmark report issued in October by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. To avoid such dire consequences, activists have proposed that the United States embark on what they’re calling a Green New Deal. Most recently, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey introduced congressional resolutions calling for the implementation of one.

To make sense of it all, we recently sat down with Assistant Professor of Economics Marc N. Conte, Ph.D., whose expertise includes the economics of climate change.

Complete transcription below:

Marc Conte: This is a daunting challenge that will require a substantial modification of the way we conduct our everyday lives. And I think this first step in setting out such an aggressive target could be a useful negotiating strategy.

Patrick Verel: If greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the earth’s atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2040 leading to flooded coastlines, intensifying droughts and increased human suffering and poverty. This was the stark conclusion of a landmark report issued in October by the United Nations’ intergovernmental panel on climate change. To avoid such dire circumstances, activists have proposed that the United States embark on what they’re calling a Green New Deal.

And most recently New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey introduced a congressional resolution calling for the implementation of one. To make sense of all this, we recently sat down with Marc N. Conte who studies the economics of climate change. I’m Patrick Verel and this is Fordham News.

Why was the United Nations’ October reports so significant?

MC: One of the aspects of climate change that makes it so difficult for policymakers to successfully address is the fact that responding to this threat involves engaging in costly behavioral change today with the probable expectation of incurring benefits in the distant future. What the report showed was that the future in which this climate change, this catastrophic climate change might occur is actually much closer than we had previously thought. So it brought a sense of urgency to the problem, which makes it more difficult, but also by understanding that these changes and the implications of these changes will occur in our lifetimes, we now avoid the ethical hurdle of making policy decisions without a key constituency, future generations having a voice.

PV: Wow. So in a weird way, it sort of does us a favor because we’re not having to imagine this is something we have to do for people we were never going to meet. This is something that we are going to deal with ourselves.

MC: Yeah, that’s a positive spin on the news. The negative spin would be, well the report could be interpreted as making catastrophic climate change and inevitability, which would then remove all incentives from trying to prevent it. And so this is the challenge that climate scientists and activists and policymakers need to balance.

PV: How does this Green New deal address the concerns on the report?

MC: The resolution provides a sweeping vision of relatively substantial changes to the way Americans would live our lives in order to address this challenge of climate change, but also to try to address several other issues relating to inequality in the country. So there are several provisions in the resolution that are related to this challenge, one of which is for the US to be targeted to be carbon, a net zero nation, so zero emissions by 2030 which is a very ambitious goal.

They also in the resolution try to address the issue of wage inequality, income inequality, and just a lack of opportunity, economic opportunity for many portions of our population by proposing a sweeping investment in infrastructure which will be necessary to achieve the ambitious carbon zero goal by 2030.

PV: American businesses are going to need to be a big part of this effort. What do you think is going to be the biggest challenge to getting them on board?

MC: What we’ve seen in the failed history of climate change policy in the United States is the intensity with which members of the fossil fuel industry, comprising the coal industry, natural gas industry, and petroleum industries, defend the profitability of their corporations by resisting regulations that increase their costs and support transition away from their goods and services. So the challenge becomes, in this case, can we get enough businesses to realize that their incentives align with the broader social incentives?

We’ve seen an uptake of language and some action from companies across an array of industries such as Starbucks and Nestle getting involved in climate change mitigation because their products, cacao trees, and coffee trees, are at dire risk of extinction from catastrophic climate change. So I think there are certain industries that will be supportive of this idea.

We put a lot of attention in the media on the impacts of the clean power plan and other government initiatives on the coal industry, but the coal industry only employs 50,000 people in the United States. And those people could easily be retrained to have gainful employment in industries that have fewer external costs associated with them.

PV: Now any plan that mitigates climate change is going to have to tackle carbon emission. And I know that carbon taxes are one of the ideas being floated. Can you explain how they might work and what the biggest criticism of them is?

MC: Right now America receives 37% of its energy from carbon-neutral sources and so we have a big shift. We need to get rid of that other 63% that’s generated by coal and natural gas. There are several different types of mechanisms we could put in place. We could cap emissions with an emissions quota or we could try to have companies who are responsible for these emissions incorporate the damages caused by those emissions into their profit-making decisions. And the way we would do that would be with something called a carbon tax.

The idea there is that we understand the damages caused by the emissions of these greenhouse gases. We’re able to fully audit and calculate those, categorize those, and then value them to come up with a dollar value per unit, per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted. And recently there was a coalition of very prominent economists who suggested that we use the revenues generated by the carbon tax to give back in lump sum transfers to households.

The pros are that it’s not a prescriptive policy. We’re not telling firms how to run their business. What we’re doing is including a price signal about the damages of these emissions, and then we’re allowing firms to adjust to that price. So they can decide, is the price high enough for them to change or is the cost of changing their production process so great that they’d rather just pay the tax? There’s a concern that we’re making our firms less competitive. So if we’re increasing the cost of doing business for firms located in the US, firms outside of the US will have an advantage. So to address this issue, you have to implement essentially import tariffs to make sure that regardless of where the goods are manufactured, every good has associated with it the price of its carbon impact.

The main concern about a carbon tax is that it’s going to be a regressive policy. When we think about the percentage of income that households spend on goods associated with the production of greenhouse gases, that percentage is greater for low-income houses, which is why in the proposal promoted by the prominent economists, they were calling for a carbon dividend. So we’d implement the tax, but then we’d give these lump-sum transfers to households so they’d be made better off.

The other concern is ideally we’d be setting the tax level with full understanding of the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions and the damages, the dollar value of those damages. In reality, we’re still learning about what these impacts may be and when we are uncertain about the damages about emissions and we don’t know exactly what the cost of reducing emissions or abating for firms is, the tax may not be the best approach. We might want to use an emissions cap.

PV: It’s funny, I’m trying to think of a good metaphor for this as you’re talking about it and it almost sounds like the metaphor would be as if you are trying to assemble an airplane in mid-flight while blind.

MC: In theory for an engineer, a physicist or an economist, it’s an easy problem to solve. But in practice, I think it is more complex because politically there are going to be winners and losers from this policy. That’s why if we look closely at the Green New Deal and the resolution, it might be a little underwhelming because it has these broad goals without many details. But if we think about the way policies are implemented, it’s not the first thing on the page that becomes law. This is a daunting challenge that will require a substantial modification of the way we conduct our everyday lives.

And I think this first step in setting out such an aggressive target could be a useful negotiating strategy in achieving something that will help us avoid the catastrophic damages that we were warned about.

PV: Now, according to activist groups like Climate Mobilization, the only precedent for the kind of plan needed to deal with climate change is the reorganization that the country underwent in preparation for World War II. But do you think it’s possible to rally Americans behind this cause the same way we came together to defeat the Nazis?

MC: Yeah, I think the challenge is we don’t have a mandatory draft to solve this problem. There is no uncertainty in the academic community over the fact that climate change is caused by human behavior. And yet when we talk about this issue, we see a split screen with one person arguing that point and another person arguing the point that this is all natural and part of larger systematic fluctuations.

I think we need to do a better job as researchers to identify what the implications of these changes will be and to address the uncertainty around those potential implications, which will then lead to communication with the media and policymakers to get us to hopefully become more willing to address these costs. And as you said, rally together.

We just saw, unfortunately, maybe a foreshadowing that this is going to be a more difficult chance with the protests in France. Macron was just about to implement an increase in the gasoline tax, which was quite a small increase. And as a result, there were violent protests around the country. And so we have to understand that given the economic inequality in lots of these nations, certain segments of the population will feel extremely put upon.

PV: For more interviews like this, check out Fordham.edu/podcast or look for Fordham News wherever you find podcasts. I’m Patrick Verel; thanks for listening.

The University Research Council presented the Outstanding Externally Funded Research Awards (OEFRA) to recognize the high quality and impact of sponsored research within the last three years and its enhancement of Fordham’s reputation—both nationally and globally.

Honorees in five separate categories included:

Sciences: Silvia C. Finnemann, Ph.D., professor of biology

Since joining Fordham University in 2008, Finnemann has secured over $3.65 million in grants from the National Institute of Health, the Beckman Initiative for Macular Research and the Retinal Stem Cell Consortium of New York State for her research on healthy eye function and age-related changes to eye cell function. These grants enable her to support a thriving laboratory where she has a team of graduate and undergraduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

Social Sciences: Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D., The Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics and professor of psychology

Fisher has earned 12 major research awards and over $11 million from federal agencies over the past 20 years for her work in HIV and substance abuse prevention and research ethics. Recent awards have come from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Humanities: Stephen R. Grimm, Ph.D., professor of philosophy

Grimm was awarded $4.5 million by the John Templeton Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation to lead a three-year interdisciplinary initiative called “Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology.” His grant is the largest externally funded research award in the humanities in Fordham’s history.

Interdisciplinary Research: Jennifer L. Gordon, professor of law

With grants from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, Gordon pursued a three-year initiative to combat abuse and trafficking of Mexican migrant workers recruited to work in the United States. Partnering with the Mexican human rights organization ProDESC, she has developed a transnational pilot program set to launch this year to implement recommendations that have arisen from her research.

Junior Faculty Research: Marc N. Conte, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics

Conte received nearly $500,000 from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. In collaboration with a researcher from the University of Nebraska, he is using the grant to study how behavioral economics can improve auctions that induce farmers to set aside land for conservation and biodiversity.

In opening the ceremony, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, lauded the honorees for the fearless inquiry of their academic research, particularly at a time when truth and wisdom are being devalued in our society.

“Research is at the center of the academic enterprise,” he said, “enriching not only the Fordham community, but the community of the United States and of the world.”

Organized by the Office of Research and the University Research Council and sponsored by the Bronx Science Consortium, the daylong event also included grant education workshops, a forum of university researchers, and a keynote address by Dr. Walter L. Goldschmidts, Ph.D., vice president and executive director of the Office of Sponsored Programs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

-Nina Heidig

Football injuries have forced athletics departments to reconsider the dangers of the sport. How will schools adjust and what is the future of football?

According to USA Football, there has been a 27.7 percent drop in tackle football participation from 2010 to 2015 among children ages 6 to 14. This trend has led to a change of strategy among high school and college programs. For 2017, expect to see less hitting drills in practice, and less “honing of their craft” so that players can avoid injuries such as concussions.
Players who sustain concussions will also be out of active play longer due to new concussion protocols. This could impact financials, especially if a star player is injured. This is a scenario that can lead to less football and entertainment value, and possible drops in fan interest. Gate receipts, concession revenue, viewership, and social media activity may all be affected.
Expect to see a stronger kicking game in 2017, thanks to the fact that kickers now are not only former soccer players but former gaelic football and rugby players as well.

–Frances Petit, Ph.D., director, Gabelli School EMBA program and professor of business with concentration in sports marketing

Following the recent election, what you think the prospects are for start-ups and for small businesses?

Since Trump is a businessperson and an entrepreneur himself, I think he’s going to do a lot for small business. He’s going to focus on minimizing the tax and healthcare burdens on startups, which will give small business owners some breathing room (financially speaking). Another thing the Trump administration can (and likely will) do is vastly update the space where education and entrepreneurship collide. This would involve collaboration between the Department of Education and the Small Business Administration. Hopefully they will be able to do away with costly, outdated systems/processes and hone in on providing future-forward resources, support, and education for startups, the lifeblood of our economy. I am not only hopeful for the future of startups and small business under the Trump administration, I am excited that we will see some major restructuring that will benefit all of the innovators in this country.

Christine Janssen-Selvadurai, Ph.D., director of the entrepreneurship program in the Gabelli School of Business

Identity politics turned out to be polarizing in 2016. Are we facing more of the same?

In 2016, people on both right and left used code words which erased the complexity of people’s experiences. On the left, one can see this with the term “white privilege,” which has been used to dismiss the complaints of working class whites who have experienced downward mobility, and whose communities have been hit by drug epidemics. On the right, we see it with the term “illegals” as applied to undocumented immigrants. This erases the very real courage and sacrifice that many of the undocumented displayed in coming to America, and display every day in putting food on the table for their families. I would like to say that we will see less polarizing discourse in 2017, but I see no signs we have learned our lesson. I expect many more years of polarization and division before we come to our senses and recognize one another’s common humanity across lines of race, religion, and politics.

Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African and African-American studies

Has Hamilton inspired a new era of Broadway theater?

With 11 Tony Awards from a record 16 nominations, Hamilton has influenced everything from nontraditional casting in the way it embraced black and Hispanic actors to play historically white figures to presidential politics, using the stage as a modern day soapbox (in a message to Vice-President-elect Pence during a post-election performance). Theatrical ventures in the future are also sure to take note of Hamilton’s fierce social media outreach: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s final curtain call was streamed live on Facebook and his avid use of twitter connected famously with the show’s super fan contingency. Also influential are its inventive offshoots–the Hamilton Mixtape (in which the show’s songs are re-vamped by some of today’s brightest stars) and the Ham4Ham stage door outings–so popular they brought traffic to a screeching halt near the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Hamilton has inevitably become the gold standard in its triumphant ability to connect with theater goers on stage and on line.

–Stefanie Bubnis, associate director of Fordham’s theatre program

What will a U.S. shift in relations with Taiwan mean?

There are two possibilities. First, if president-elect Trump simply got caught violating a longstanding diplomatic principle and is not serious about this–if Beijing is clear-eyed, it will keep its responses pretty minimal, let the storm die down, and business will go on as usual.
If Trump is serious, then he’s possibly using Taiwan (and even Russia) to build leverage against the Chinese, hoping to extract a better long-term “deal.” If that is the case, this could be the the beginning of a chain of confrontational stances that draw in greater American military and economic power.
Expect a test of China within the first 100 days of the new administration, or the reverse.  Both sides will have an interest in escalation to demonstrate commitment, resulting in increased conflict–especially in places like the South China Sea, Taiwan, and perhaps the Koreas–but probably not war.

Raymond Kuo, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science

Is fake news a fad, or here to stay?

Sadly, I don’t think “fake news” is going away anytime soon. Juicy and provocative headlines meant to induce “clicks” are often too good for readers to pass up.  But there will be some new initiatives to fight it in 2017. For instance, Facebook users will have the ability to flag fake news content, so that others will be able to see quickly that some posts may not be truthful.  But that’s only addressing part of the problem.  Another issue is that Americans are not as media literate as one might hope. People don’t always look closely at who is creating the content they enjoy, to see if the source is legitimate–and they should. This is why we focus on critical thinking skills and analysis from the very first class in all our communication and media studies majors–to create the well-trained, ethical, truth-seeking journalists that our democracy needs to serve its citizens.

Beth Knobel, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies

With a new administration more open to fossil fuels, where do you see green energy going in 2017?

It is unlikely that U.S. coal production, consumption, and employment will reverse their downward trends in 2017. Both the market-driven replacement of coal by natural gas and an increased focus on the environmental and human health concerns associated with fossil-fuel combustion in the wake of the Paris Climate Agreement make it likely that coal has peaked in the U.S. Technological advances in batteries for electric vehicles, spurred by federal funding, may lead to increased market penetration for these products, as well as the potential for greater reliance on renewable energy in coming decades.

The incoming administration seems intent on relaxing existing federal pollution regulations and eager to promote increased extraction of natural resources from federally-owned lands in the West. Without counterbalancing action at the state level, this myopic perspective would increase the environmental and health risks from economic activity and energy production, and remove the United States from a position of leadership on the issue of climate change.

— Marc Conte, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics

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