Maxwell School News and Commentary

When automakers faced bankruptcy in 2008, auto workers faced a tough decision: lose jobs or agree to contract changes that would help the companies get a federal bailout. The union chose the latter. “This was a concession they had to make in order to sustain the bailouts and have some kind of recovery,” says Tod Rutherford, professor of geography and the environment.

“The UAW…strike action is ultimately trying to realize one of the Biden Administration’s core policy goals and political selling points: you can have good, family-sustaining union jobs alongside climate action. The problem is the automakers see EV production as a way to trim labor costs and shift production to non-union plants,” says Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment.

"One initial impetus for the book was my desire to bring geography’s concepts and insights into better conversation with topics in Middle East area studies," says Timur Hammond, assistant professor of geography and the environment. "Although over a decade has passed since I started research on this topic, expanding the disciplinary connections between geography and Middle East area studies continues to be a core goal."

"Trajectories of Translation," co-authored by Timur Hammond, assistant professor of geography and the environment, was published in Progress in Human Geography.

Jacob Bendix, professor emeritus of geography and the environment, says the grasses provided “fine fuels that ignite easily” due to their high surface area-to-volume ratio, dense growth patterns and height.

"If we want to meet timelines to reduce emissions, we have to build wind and solar at a totally unprecedented rate,” says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment.

Hot air is less dense than cold air meaning planes have less lift when the mercury rises. “This is a physical restriction related to air density, and there are not a whole lot of direct technological fixes for it,” says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment.

One of 15 geographers from 11 states and the West Indies, Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment, will focus on climate and society. 

“This is a perfect sweet spot for a public power entity to take on some of that risk, to try to really get a technology that we need off the ground,” Matt Huber, professor of geography and the environment, says of TVA’s small modular reactor program. ​“They have the resources and the social mission to do that, where private capital wouldn’t.”