Laura Kuhl

For years, Puerto Rico has also faced a debt crisis which left the island unable to afford to maintain the grid, according to Laura Kuhl, of Northeastern University.

The island’s power grid suffered from underinvestment even before the damage caused by Hurricane Maria, said Laura Kuhl, a professor at Northeastern University who has written about energy policies in Puerto Rico.

Reports that cloud seeding caused this week’s flooding were likely erroneous, but the reaction they inspired “represents a healthy kind of skepticism about what happens when we interfere with natural systems,” Laura Kuhl, a public-policy professor at Northeastern University who studies climate adaptation, told me. 

In a publication for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Laura Kuhl, a public policy professor at Northeastern University, argues that cloud seeding may do “more harm than good” due to these uncertainties and because, given its limited effectiveness, it promotes a sense of “techno-optimism” that “can obscure deeper structural drivers of vulnerability like unsustainable water use and […]

By Laura Kuhl, Professor at Northeastern University.

“The needs for climate finance are much, much higher — more on the order of a trillion dollars per year,” says Laura Kuhl, assistant professor of public policy and international affairs at Northeastern University.

“We really can’t look at this event without looking at both the extreme vulnerability of the power grid and the people,” said Laura Kuhl, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who has done research demonstrating an inequitable recovery in Puerto Rico after Maria. 

Water management will be a major problem in agriculture, said Laura Kuhl of Northeastern University. She said simple tech, like drip irrigation, needs to spread to more small farmers in developing countries. The high-tech part comes in to help decide when to irrigate.