In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Inês Azevedo, an associate professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy. Azevedo publishes on a very wide range of topics, but the conversation in this episode focuses on her work that examines the effects of particulate matter emissions from the power sector and how those emissions affect public health. Azevedo describes where the emissions come from, how the pollution affects different parts of the country, how effects vary across racial and demographic characteristics, and much more.

References and recommendations:

“Fine Particulate Air Pollution from Electricity Generation in the US: Health Impacts by Race, Income, and Geography” by Maninder P. S. Thind, Christopher W. Tessum, Inês L. Azevedo, and Julian D. Marshall; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.9b02527

“Optimizing Emissions Reductions from the U.S. Power Sector for Climate and Health Benefits” by Brian J. Sergi, Peter J. Adams, Nicholas Z. Muller, Allen L. Robinson, Steven J. Davis, Julian D. Marshall, and Inês L. Azevedo; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.9b06936

“Energy Efficiency: What Has Research Delivered in the Last 40 Years?” by Harry D. Saunders, Joyashree Roy, Inês M. L. Azevedo, Debalina Chakravarty, Shyamasree Dasgupta, Stephane de la Rue du Can, Angela Druckman, Roger Fouquet, Michael Grubb, Boqiang Lin, Robert Lowe, Reinhard Madlener, Daire M. McCoy, Luis Mundaca, Tadj Oreszczyn, Steven Sorrell, David Stern, Kanako Tanaka, and Taoyuan Wei; https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-environ-012320-084937

Collaborative late-night show episodes about climate change; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/arts/television/late-night-climate-change.html

Many recent blog posts from Resources for the Future about fuel economy standards, machine learning, smart thermostats, and the Clean Electricity Performance Program on the Resources website; https://www.resources.org/