Ekaterina Landgren

Mitigating the consequences of climate change and reducing political polarization are two of the biggest problems facing society today. These problems are intertwined, since meeting international climate-mitigation targets requires implementing policies that accelerate the rate of decarbonization, and these policies can succeed only with widespread bipartisan support. Ekaterina will work with Matt Burgess to provide a road map for how to build momentum for climate action and counteract polarization around climate policies. She will study this problem through the lens of economic opportunity and migration in the United States. While concerns about the cost of decarbonizing and job loss in the fossil fuel energy sector have been barriers to clean energy policies, recent forecasts show that the transition to clean energy could be cheaper and faster than previously thought. The economic opportunity created by the low cost of clean energy is interwoven with the patterns of state-to-state migration in the U.S., which is often driven by economic factors. The goal of the project is to evaluate how the geographic siting of renewable energy projects can affect political support for climate change mitigation.