Selected Presentations & Appearances
Outreach & Engaged Scholarship
Georgia
Energy & Environment
Kentucky
Primary Theme: Energy & Environment
Coal has been an historically important energy resource in the United States. It remains important in many parts of the country, but has experienced a recent severe decline that seems likely to continue. Coal is still king in many parts of the U.S., even if it sometimes seems like the throne has been abdicated. Miners and their families no longer live in company-owned housing like their early-20th-century forebears, but the coal industry is often still the nucleus around which their social, economic and political lives revolve. It informs identities and offers relatively high wages in areas where decently paying jobs are scarce. In good times, those wages circulate through the local economy, bolstering businesses and generating tax revenue to support schools and much-needed public services. These are not, however, good times. Coal employment has been in a tailspin for the past three decades, even as annual production figures have remained at or above record highs. Since 1980, the industry has shed more than 160,000 jobs, with 60,000 of those coming since 2011. Trends in power generation and in the mining industry itself point toward a world that will likely soon need less coal, and even fewer coal miners.
Primary Theme: Energy & Environment
The technologies, processes and products we develop have impacts on the environment and our health. Some impacts are intended, and some are not. The policies adopted to regulate the risks of such developments may themselves pose unintended consequences. We can point to examples of product and policy advances intended to deliver benefits by minimizing one target risk, only to uncover later that unanticipated consequences created new risks. These complexities pose challenges for both private innovation and public oversight. They also present opportunities to improve understanding and decision-making. An important step in enabling such improvements is to understand the interconnected physical, economic, legal and cultural factors along the lifecycle of a set of decisions related to characterizing and managing risks.
United States of America
United States of America
Georgia
Energy & Environment
Kentucky
Primary Theme: Energy & Environment
Coal has been an historically important energy resource in the United States. It remains important in many parts of the country, but has experienced a recent severe decline that seems likely to continue. Coal is still king in many parts of the U.S., even if it sometimes seems like the throne has been abdicated. Miners and their families no longer live in company-owned housing like their early-20th-century forebears, but the coal industry is often still the nucleus around which their social, economic and political lives revolve. It informs identities and offers relatively high wages in areas where decently paying jobs are scarce. In good times, those wages circulate through the local economy, bolstering businesses and generating tax revenue to support schools and much-needed public services. These are not, however, good times. Coal employment has been in a tailspin for the past three decades, even as annual production figures have remained at or above record highs. Since 1980, the industry has shed more than 160,000 jobs, with 60,000 of those coming since 2011. Trends in power generation and in the mining industry itself point toward a world that will likely soon need less coal, and even fewer coal miners.
Primary Theme: Energy & Environment
The technologies, processes and products we develop have impacts on the environment and our health. Some impacts are intended, and some are not. The policies adopted to regulate the risks of such developments may themselves pose unintended consequences. We can point to examples of product and policy advances intended to deliver benefits by minimizing one target risk, only to uncover later that unanticipated consequences created new risks. These complexities pose challenges for both private innovation and public oversight. They also present opportunities to improve understanding and decision-making. An important step in enabling such improvements is to understand the interconnected physical, economic, legal and cultural factors along the lifecycle of a set of decisions related to characterizing and managing risks.
United States of America
United States of America
United States of America
United States of America