Written by Ryan McGuine //
Cooling enables many things that are taken for granted in modern life, including keeping indoor spaces comfortable, and preserving food and medicine. Refrigeration works by boiling a refrigerant to remove heat from a space and condensing it to dump the heat outside, a cycle which needs a high rate of energy. Continue reading
Written by Ryan McGuine //
Humans produce a staggering 2 billion tons of refuse annually, and rising. When managed poorly, it has a tendency to build up and cause problems for human health — it collects in the oceans, harming sea life; clogs sewer drains, leading to floods; and gets burned openly, causing respiratory illness. This carries enormous costs. Continue reading
Written by Ryan McGuine //
In the 1950s, Simon Kuznets postulated that as economies become wealthier, the level of inequality there would increase, then decrease. When plotted against income per capita, this creates the inverted-U shaped curve seen below. Around 1991, Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger noted a similar inverted-U shaped relationship between income levels and environmental degradation, dubbed the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Continue reading
Written by Erica Petersen // Waiting in Chicago O’hare Airport's international terminal in May 2019, I had no idea what to expect of the upcoming ten weeks. My colleague from the Masters of Public Health program at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I were both nervous and excited as we boarded our flight to Nairobi. The two of us were headed to Maseno, Kenya, a small town on the west side of the country, to assist a local university in conducting a Community Health Needs Assessment under the supervision of a professor who has been doing HIV prevention work in Kenya for over 20 years. Continue reading
Written by Ryan McGuine // In October, economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." Until the 1980s, the field of development economics, which seeks to determine why some countries grow rich while others remain poor, was mostly concerned with big questions, debates about foreign aid were heavily ideological, and billions of dollars were spent on untested projects based on untested assumptions. Enter the Randomistas. Continue reading
Written by Ryan McGuine // There have been numerous energy transitions in the past, all of which have been driven by economic imperatives or resource scarcity, and have moved in the direction of increasing power density. The current energy transition toward energy sources that emit less greenhouse gases is a departure from previous transitions in both respects: it is driven by environmental imperatives, and moves in the direction of decreasing power density. Continue reading
Written by Ryan McGuine // In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released a new special report. While the report is long and jargon-rich, it is at its core a charge to alter the way people interact with land. Farmers have achieved nearly-miraculous yield gains in the past, yet even more food will be needed to feed a projected 10 billion people by 2050. At the same time, the ways that humans use land contributes massively to climate change, and climate change is making it harder to feed the world. Continue reading