Podcast: When Science And Corruption Meet
On today's Planet Money: We hear and read stories of corruption every day, but finding cold hard data on the subject is so hard that MIT economics professor, Ben Olken, had to go dig up roads in Indonesia to get some. Olken and his team set out to measure the amount of raw materials that went missing when the government gave local villagers money for projects like building roads. The study not only required the researchers to dig up roads -- but also to build a few of their own. Download the podcast; or subscribe. Music: Broken Bells' "High Road." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Flickr.
When NPR's reporting team traveled deep into the Amazon rain forest to report on the environment, they took planes, a truck, and a motorcycle. Lots of fuel was burned. Lots of carbon was emitted. They felt guilty. In the process of reporting on the environment, were they making the problem worse? So they came to the Planet Money team with a question: What can we do about it? There's this one option. They can pay a little money and the fossil fuel pumped into the atmosphere can somehow go away. Carbon offsets have been around a long time. Long enough to know if they actually work. Today on the show: We investigate carbon offsets. Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr.