Energy, Climate & Environment News

Solar panels, also known as photovoltaics, rely on semiconductor devices, or solar cells, to convert energy from the sun into electricity. Manufacturers typically dope the solar cell with chemicals so that one layer of the device bears a positive charge and another layer a negative charge. But chemical doping and layered synthesis also add extra costly steps in solar cell manufacturing.

After decades of inaction and failed attempts, the U.S. has finally passed federal legislation addressing climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is groundbreaking not only in its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also in how it demonstrates that we don’t have to choose between good jobs and action on the climate.

An analysis by climate scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, finds that the apparent temperature, or heat index, calculated by meteorologists and the National Weather Service (NWS) to indicate how hot it feels — taking into account the humidity — underestimates the perceived temperature for the most sweltering days we’re now experiencing, sometimes by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

As wildfires become more frequent and severe due to climate change, it’s increasingly important to determine how and when the resultant smoke will move toward communities. To assist with predictions, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) turned to Tina Katopodes Chow, UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering, and her students.

Coming from a long line of Iowa farmers, David Savage always thought he would do research to improve crops. That dream died in college, when it became clear that any genetic tweak to a crop would take at least a year to test; for some perennials and trees, it could take five to 10 years. Faced with such slow progress, he chose to study the proteins in photosynthetic bacteria instead. But the advent of CRISPR changed all that.

The Energy & Biosciences Institute (EBI), headquartered at UC Berkeley, has renewed its partnership with Shell, entering into a new five-year research agreement, effective February 28, 2022, to continue funding research that meets the growing demand for energy in ways that are economically, environmentally, and socially responsible.

In Berkeley Talks episode 143, a panel of UC Berkeley experts discuss climate displacement — what it means to abandon places, the power dynamics between the Global South and the Global North, challenges for both the sending and receiving regions, and what needs to happen to address this fast-growing problem.

On Thursday, a panel of leading scholars will join Daniel Aldana Cohen, UC Berkeley assistant professor of sociology and director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, to discuss how addressing the climate crisis requires tackling these long-standing racial and global inequalities and also dismantling the political and economic systems that created them.

As climate change warms the planet, glaciers are melting faster, and scientists fear that many will collapse by the end of the century, drastically raising sea level and inundating coastal cities and island nations. A University of California, Berkeley, scientist has now created an improved model of glacial movement that could help pinpoint those glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic most likely to rapidly slide downhill and fall into the ocean.

In episode 139 of Berkeley Talks, Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), gives the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group’s 28th Annual Lecture on Energy and Environment. In the March 31, 2022 talk, Ogunbiyi discusses how to drive a just, inclusive and equitable transition to affordable and sustainable energy for all, and how the Russia-Ukraine war is affecting energy markets around the world.

New research  from Berkeley Public Health and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management published today in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology shows that community exposure to oil and gas wells is more likely in historically redlined neighborhoods, exposing residents to environmental stressors such as water and air pollution. The study results add to evidence that structural racism in government policy is associated with more oil and gas wells being situated in marginalized neighborhoods.

In this Berkeley Voices episode, Bree Rosenblum, a professor of global change biology at UC Berkeley, talks about why we need to stop blaming each other for the environmental crisis that we’re in, and instead confront its root causes and expand our ideas of what it means to be human on our planet.

Early this past Monday morning, a small team of University of California, Berkeley, engineers gathered around a two-story-tall drilling rig parked at an out-of-the-way spot on the north side of campus. As the overnight rain turned to drizzle, the team watched as a drilling crew used a massive 8-inch-wide drill bit to start punching a new borehole in the soil.

Despite the grim findings of the latest U.N. Climate Report, UC Berkeley associate adjunct professor and report lead author Patrick Gonzalez expresses a “science-based optimism” about humanity’s ability to cut carbon emissions and limit the worst projected impacts of climate change.

A new study published online today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences combines scientific data with Indigenous oral histories and ecological knowledge to show how the cultural burning practices of the Native people of the Klamath Mountains — the Karuk and the Yurok tribes — helped shape the region’s forests for at least a millennia prior to European colonization.

Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine just over two weeks ago, payments to Russia for fossil fuels have already exceeded 9 billion euros ($10 billion) from European Union member states alone, according to the Europe Beyond Coal’s tracker. And while the war in Ukraine came as shocking news to many, the involvement of the fossil fuel industry in a global disaster is no longer unfamiliar.