In this lecture, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of public policy and economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, Jay Shimshack, probes the concept of environmental inequality - how it both shapes and is shaped by public policy.

In an article for The Virginian-Pilot, Batten's William Shobe writes that with careful planning and policy design, decarbonization in the Commonwealth is achievable by 2050. Earlier this year, Shobe and his colleagues at UVA’s Energy Transition Initiative released the state's first study to analyze the actions needed to reach this goal.

The Trump administration’s decision to remove federal Clean Water Act protections from millions of acres of wetlands and millions of miles of streams is based on dubious methodology and flawed logic, according to a new report by Batten professor Jay Shimshack and environmental economists from leading research institutions across the U.S.

As part of the Virginia Clean Energy Summit on Tuesday, Batten professor William Shobe outlined how it is feasible for Virginia to “decarbonize” the state’s economy by 2050.

Air pollution can have serious consequences for a person’s quality of life. Inhaling high concentrations of “fine particulate matter,” or particles approximately 40 times smaller than a grain of sand, has been linked to cancer, heart disease, and even death Jonathan Colmer told an online audience last week.

PM2.5 air pollution has fallen substantially in the past four decades, yet relative disparities still persist throughout the United States. That is the key finding from a paper published in the July 31 issue of Science magazine, written by Batten School Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Jay Shimshack. 

Upon realizing the vast number of students who were suddenly losing summer jobs and internships, the Cooper Center leapt into action. Batten Professor Bill Shobe and his team made the decision to take on as many interns for its Virginia Clean Energy Project as it could possibly handle.

For the latest installment of Batten’s Expert Chat Series, water sustainability experts Charles Iceland and Jon Freedman spoke and took questions on the world’s most vital resource.

Efforts by the United Nations and others to develop a coordinated global response to climate change rely heavily on an ensemble of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to make projections linking human activities to climate outcomes (IPCC, 2014, 2018). IAMs are coupled models of the global economic and climate systems, first developed to represent fossil fuel emissions from the energy system (Reister and Edmonds, 1977), and later expanded to include land use change and forestry emissions, as well as non-CO2 emissions (Di Vittorio et al., 2014).