Flashing Back to the Day When Rush Limbaugh Discussed my Environmental Research

The Legal Planet blog tends to focus on serious subjects. I salute this but I always try to cross the line.  A few years ago, Matt Kotchen and I wrote a good paper documenting that the deep recession had chilled interest in combating climate change. Our empirical study used Google search trends by state/year/month. We documented that searches for the words “global warming” declined the most in states where the unemployment rate had increased the most while searches for the word “unemployment” increased the most in these same states.  Rush Limbaugh read our paper and proceeded to give us a thrashing on his nation wide radio show. You can read his funny transcript here and our unfunny paper here.