Preston Johnston

PhD candidate @MITPoliSci

[Zeke Hausfather @hausfath]

Degrowth is dumb.

We can have an abundant and equitable future by (largely) replacing digging fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them with clean energy technologies like solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, etc.

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

Lots of (justified) talk about how AI will change social science and the role of humans in the research process moving forward, but I will say -- a 30 min face-to-face meeting with one of my advisors today gave me way better ideas than weeks of toiling away alone/with AI input

[Philipp Heimberger @heimbergecon]

This new QJE paper concludes that the macroeconomic costs of climate change are far greater than earlier estimates suggested. It finds that a 1°C rise in global temperatures reduces world GDP by over 20%.

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

One more day to submit abstracts for this!

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

Eric Scheuch (Yale) and I are organizing a one-day virtual workshop on home insurance and climate, cosponsored by the Consortium on the American Political Economy, on April 10th, 2026, tailored to grad students or postdocs.

[Alexander F. Gazmararian @alexgazmararian]

The Biden Admin directed hundreds of billions to clean energy and manufacturing.

Did these investments shift public opinion?

We find that these projects are visible but not traceable:

People notice nearby investments, but connect them to Governors, not Biden.

Full thread 👇

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

In case it’s not already obvious, American democracy is in serious peril.

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

Breaking WaPo:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.
https://t.co/MnpKdOpiCW

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

Indicate interest here: https://t.co/2ytj0TKqrq

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

Eric Scheuch (Yale) and I are organizing a one-day virtual workshop on home insurance and climate, cosponsored by the Consortium on the American Political Economy, on April 10th, 2026, tailored to grad students or postdocs.

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

Even as climate risk ravages insurance markets and causes billions in damages from disasters each year, climate denialism gets more entrenched. A terrible decision. We can only hope that state govts, and the inexorable downward march of renewables prices, will help counteract it

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: The Trump administration repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being, meaning that the EPA can no longer regulate them. https://t.co/pUJpRC2yoK

[Sean T at RCP @SeanTrende]

This is 100% correct. There needs to be a serious, comprehensive, across-the-board clawback in the powers of the executive.

[Daniel Swain @Weather_West]

Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, & disaster research underpinning half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, & increased resilience.

[Jeff Jenkins @jaj7d]

Great day of @PIPECollab conferencing yesterday, with excellent papers by @JakeJares, @prhjohnston, Debora Villalvazo, and Douglas X. Leonard. Lots of learning at the Political Economy of Insurance Conference.

[Jake M. Grumbach @JakeMGrumbach]

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025.

US Constitution & institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom.

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

To build off this, the more warming we experience, the more difficult adaptation-mitigation tradeoffs become. As more resources get diverted to adaptation, less will be available for mitigation investments. This is why proactive adaptation and mitigation now is crucial

[Prof. Ryan Katz-Rosene @ryankatzrosene]

Something to consider: IF the world does indeed warm by 3°C above pre-Industrial by 2050, it implies an acceleration in the rate of warming between now and then, and IF that’s the case, what does that imply about the amount of warming we’d see in 2100? Or a century from now? And what does it say about how much more difficult it will be stop warming?

One of the most insidious things about an acceleration in warming in the near-term is that it increases the “mismatch” between our present-day lived experience in relation to our climate today, and the future lived experience in relation to future climatological conditions. It’s not only harder to imagine how different/difficult a 2100 climate would be like compared to present day, at greater levels of warming, but also it’s harder to stabilize global temperatures/ limit further warming too!

[Zeke Hausfather @hausfath]

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong".

Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

@captgouda24 Are you not worried about external validity/generalizability from an RCT like this? Your claim seems very strong. Our priors that poverty causes crime (due to financial necessity, stress, poor health, etc) are surely very, very strong, not least because of sociological evidence

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

Is it not “material uplift” to try to lessen the chance that working class people die in a heat wave, flood, or wildfire? The false dichotomy between “material issues” and climate has always been puzzling, given that climate shocks literally destroy communities and cost billions

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

@jaj7d I would be interested in participating in the insurance conference! Could submit work related to insurance and climate.

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

In a year where devastating and unprecedented climate shocks have already disrupted thousands of lives, this decision is simply horrible. What a grim time.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: The Trump administration dismissed all the scientists working on the government’s premiere report on the effects of climate change in the U.S. https://t.co/9B8xcmza4D

[Preston Johnston @prhjohnston]

The popularist premise that public opinion is a fixed parameter and politicians should adjust their messaging to match it is not well supported by the empirical evidence. Some topics might be stickier than others, but in many cases public opinion follows elites, not vice versa