Maxwell School News and Commentary

“If they [Saudi Arabia] want to be able to guarantee their population food security, they know that they can’t really do that domestically,” says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment. The Arizonan land was particularly appealing to the kingdom “because you can get more bang for your buck when you buy that farm,” says Koch.

“The Remembrance Scholars represent the future while honoring the past, which is both a great privilege and a great responsibility,” says Vice Chancellor and Provost Gretchen Ritter. “This year’s students, who have demonstrated strong leadership skills and a commitment to service, are up to the task. As with those who were tragically lost nearly 35 years ago, we are proud that these students are members of our University community.”

The 2020 presidential candidate and former hedge fund manager visited the Maxwell School as part of the inaugural Sustainable Syracuse series. 

“If you can invest the capital to drill a deep well that can get deep into the groundwater supply, then you can really pump as much as you want,” says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment. “This was appealing to the Saudis as well to go [to La Paz County], where they’re not being charged for water they extract because there’s no measuring of it.”

“It’s a generational thing,” says Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment. “A lot of younger generations are really fixated on climate and understand that nuclear is one our best options to deal with climate, so we gotta keep it on the table.”

“The authors show that the effect of warming on home runs is less for indoor stadiums and night games, making a somewhat controlled experiment,” says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment. “There may have been other changes to gameplay or equipment which could have also affected trends in home runs, but one might not expect those things to differ between indoor and outdoor stadiums or night versus day games.”

"There are three primary effects [of climate change on flying]: a reduction in payload capacity for some flights because of rising temperatures, an increase in clear air turbulence on some flight routes, and changes in fuel consumption on some routes due to changes in upper level wind speeds," says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment.

Timur Hammond, assistant professor of geography and the environment, has written “Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul” (University of California Press, 2023). 

The fact that the costs of compliance are typically borne by workers and consumers is a fundamental flaw of carbon pricing programs, says Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment. It’s one that, he suggests, has led to the Biden administration’s relatively skeptical stance on cap-and-trade programs.

The professor of geography and the environment will spend part of the summer researching peatlands and helping develop a doctoral program in Chile.