Energy, Climate & Environment News

The Greenland ice sheet owes its existence to the growth of an arc of islands in Southeast Asia — stretching from Sumatra to New Guinea — over the last 15 million years, a new study claims.

Racial and socioeconomic inequality is not only harmful to humans, but is also impacting the biodiversity and ecological health of plants and animals in our cities, according to a new review paperpublished online today (Thursday, August 13) in the journal Science.

The racial justice and environmental justice movements have functioned independently for far too long, according to three UC Berkeley scholars. 

Rising temperatures driven by climate change could cause tens of millions of deaths per year worldwide by the end of the century, potentially matching the global death rate for all infectious diseases combined, according to a new UC Berkeley study.

Living under a translucent rock can be quite comfortable — if you’re a moss in the Mojave Desert. Some mosses in the California desert seek protection from the relentless sun and heat by sheltering under translucent quartz pebbles, essentially using the rocks as sunshades.

A big advance in carbon capture technology could provide an efficient and inexpensive way for natural gas power plants to remove carbon dioxide from their flue emissions, a necessary step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming and climate change.

New national report is first to use latest low renewable energy and storage prices, shows with the right policy the U.S. can avoid building new fossil fuels and increase energy sector jobs by over half a million each year, supporting recovery efforts

In the United States and around the globe, products produced by “dirty” or high-carbon-emitting industries are facing significantly lower import taxes than their cleaner counterparts, finds a new paperfrom the University of California, Berkeley.

Ever so slowly, communities around the globe are cautiously easing shelter-in-place orders, and people are heading back to work — bringing with them damaging behaviors that hurt the environment and impact climate change, such as increased reliance on single-use plastic grocery bags.

Air quality researchers predicted, and the EPA recently confirmed a more than one-third year-to-year drop in significant pollution levels around San Francisco.

University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers report a milestone in packing bacteria (Sporomusa ovata) into a “forest of nanowires” to achieve a record efficiency to convert and store solar energy.

Fewer vehicles on the road and the slowing world economy has lead to blue skies over the world including the Bay Area, China, and Italy.

In new research reported in Nature, an international team of chemical engineers have designed a material that can capture carbon dioxide from wet flue gasses better than current commercial materials. “Flue gas” refers to any gas coming out of type of pipe, exhaust, or chimney as a product of combustion in a fireplace, oven, furnace, boiler, or steam generator. But the term is more commonly used to describe the exhaust vapors exiting the flues of factories and powerplants. Iconic though they may be, these flue gases contain significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a major greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.

UC Berkeley engineers have developed a mineral-coated sand that can soak up toxic metals like lead and cadmium from water. Along with its ability to destroy organic pollutants like bisphenol A, this material could help cities tap into stormwater, an abundant but underused water source.

Climate skeptics have long raised doubts about the accuracy of computer models that predict global warming, but it turns out that most of the early climate models were spot-on, according to a look-back by climate scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA.

An international research team is calling on policymakers to focus not just on the threats of climate change, but on the increasing number of opportunities to drastically reduce greenhouse gases.