Maxwell School News and Commentary

While there is an unavoidable conflict in a petrostate hosting a climate summit, it may also be fitting: The country that was home to the oil industry’s beginnings may also host negotiations that could one day bring the petroleum era to an end. “It is possible to frame it as something of a closure,” says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment.

Vice Adm. Robert Murrett (Ret.), professor of practice of public administration and international affairs, warns that the attacks in the Red Sea could easily drag on for the whole of 2024. “In the mind of the Houthi, this is all connected to what’s happening in Gaza,” says Murrett. “And the operations in Gaza could last for the rest of this calendar year.”

"One of the challenges that's coming out of the COP is a focus on language rather than actual politics," says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment. "So we can talk about abated/unabated [fossil fuels], whether there's possibilities for different forms of use, which source it's coming from. But I think what we really need to focus on is the overall production."

“Cutting off aid to Ukraine, as some in Congress propose, would undermine the immediate war effort in Europe and diminish the deterrent power of U.S. military force globally,” says Michael John Williams, associate professor of public administration and international affairs.

David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs, notes that while new factories will be needed to build electric vehicle batteries, the vehicles will require fewer suppliers producing parts. Many assembly workers will also need to be retrained. “We may also need fewer workers,” Popp says. But, he says, “there doesn’t seem to be a consensus yet on whether that is the case.”

“Among older people there is a reluctance to project negativity into their future,” says Merril Silverstein, professor and chair of sociology. “There’s research that they tend to put on rose-colored glasses about things like their own aging trajectory so it’s keeping up their ego integrity to want to be independent and stay in their home.”

Michiko Ueda-Ballmer, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, says the authority should install at least small metal gates to make the system safer. “It’s better than nothing,” she says. “If there’s somebody pushed, just by accident, and if you have metal bars, I think that would definitely help.”

Heather Law Pezzarossi, assistant professor of anthropology, argues that our contemporary arguments over cultural appropriation are misapplied to Louisa Keyser’s baskets. “Authenticity is a completely Western, American fixation we’ve mapped onto this concept of indigeneity to make it part of an American past, not an American future,” she says.

One of the main qualifications people seem to be looking for in their new spiritual communities is something that is less exclusionary than the denominations they were raised in. But it’s precisely the more “dogmatic” denominations and religious sects that are better able to keep adherents, says Merril Silverstein, professor of sociology.

When there is less precipitation than normal, warmer temperatures cause vegetation to dry out more quickly, says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment.