The Bay Area's popular commuter corridors are also generators of carbon dioxide and micro pollutants. So what happened when COVID-19 forced most commuters off the road and into their homes? "...We saw this incredible change. The amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere in the Bay Area was 25% lower in that period than just before the lockdown six weeks before," says UC Berkeley professor Ron Cohen. "So we've been thinking about this as a model for the electric car." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. A story on this topic also appeared in Science Daily.

As wildfires get bigger, more frequent and more dangerous, experts predict there will be no easing off unless the state and federal government spend billions of dollars on forest management, a reversal of decades-long policies of forest preservation. Listen as UC Berkeley professor of fire science, Scott Stephens joins other experts in talking about how to reduce fires in the coming years.

The best available science suggests that before Europeans arrived in California, wildfires claimed from 4.4 to 12 million acres annually. Native Americans knew to regularly burn their environment. "On reflection, anthropogenic burning is higher than what we had for the lower estimate," said the lead author of that paper, Scott Stevens of UC Berkeley. "You talk to Native American elders and they say they burned oak woodlands every 2-3 years."

As if the pandemic and economic recession weren't bad enough, millions of Californians now face recurring threats of abrupt blackouts during a heat wave in the nation's most populous state. UC Berkeley professors Daniel Kammen and Severin Borenstein discuss the state's problems with managing and storing power, and the complications of climate change and the pandemic.

Regenerative ranching - a holistic approach to managing grazing lands - may enhance ranchers' adaptive capacity and socioeconomic well-being while also providing an opportunity to mitigate climate change, according to a new study from Oregon State University, co-authored by Susan Charnley of the U.S. Forest Service and Paige Stanley of the University of California, Berkeley. Regenerative ranching practices rebuild ecological processes, allowing ranchers to reduce reliance on products such as chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, which are significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Matteo Garbeletto, a University of California Cooperative Extension forest pathology specialist based at UC Berkeley, has developed a tool to tell if a tree is healthy. He named the app "Evalutree," and hopes the app will help PG&E track and trim, or remove, unhealthy trees. Some of California's largest wildfires in recent history have been caused when trees or branches fell on power lines.

Today, 40% of America's electricity comes from carbon-free sources. The Democratic presidential candidate has made getting that to 100% by 2035 a centerpiece of his $2 trillion plan to address climate change and create jobs. Getting there would take an enormous expansion of solar and wind capacity in the U.S., backed by mass adoption of energy-storage technologies and hanging onto existing hydroelectric and nuclear plants. A recent study from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley determined that the U.S. grid could use existing technologies - solar, wind, nuclear, hydroelectric dams, and batteries - to supply 90% of its electricity needs by 2035. For more on this, see our press release at the Goldman School of Public Policy.

UC Berkeley researchers say they have found a better way to make natural gas power plants emit less carbon dioxide, a tool they hope can help fight climate change even while California tries to shift to renewable energy. Working with ExxonMobil, the Berkeley researchers identified a new technique that they say can catch about 90% of the planet-warming carbon dioxide emitted from a gas-burning plant and is six times more effective than the method currently used. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Doomsayers and hopemongers alike may need to revise their climate predictions after a study that almost rules out the most optimistic forecasts for global heating while downplaying the likelihood of worst-case scenarios. The international team of scientists involved in the research say they have narrowed the range of probable climate outcomes, which reduces the uncertainty that has long plagued public debate about this field. "It is moderately good news. It reduces the likelihood of some of the catastrophically high estimates. If we were planning for the worst, the worst has become less likely," said one of the authors, Zeke Hausfather, of the Energy and Resources Group at University of California Berkeley. "But fundamentally, it means we must do more to limit climate change. We are not anywhere near on track to do that."

While overall power sales and wholesale electricity prices have fallen, and disconnections and late fees have been blocked to help vulnerable customers, experts consider utility companies to carry less risk in the face of the pandemic compared to other industries. Rapidly transitioning to a clean electricity grid can save customers money and create hundreds of thousands of jobs. A recent report from the University of California, Berkeley and GridLab found a 90% clean electricity grid is possible by 2035. For more on this, see the press release at The Goldman School of Public Policy. A story on this topic also appeared in The New York Times.

The U.S. can deliver 90% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2035, according to a new report from the University of California, Berkeley, and experts say accelerating clean energy deployments could also play an important role in the country's economic recovery. The falling costs of solar, wind and battery storage makes a 90% carbon-free grid feasible.

Because tropical forests absorb so much carbon dioxide, they're one of the best antidotes to climate change, but there's a catch. Heat stress and drought kill trees, releasing their stored carbon back into the atmosphere. A new study suggests that if warming reaches 2°C above preindustrial levels, vast portions of tropical forests will begin to lose more carbon than they take in. However, associate energy and resources professor Lara Kueppers is concerned that the study might be too optimistic in forecasting that cooler forests, especially in Asia and Africa, will continue to absorb large amounts of carbon as they warm. She says it's not certain that those forests will behave the way ones in South America have, or that they can adapt to the speed of human-induced climate change. "I don't have confidence that forests are going to be able to adjust on the time scale they will need to," she says.

A new study by associate agricultural and resource economics professor Joseph Shapiro finds that tariffs and other global trade barriers are lower for carbon-intensive products than greener ones, and that creates an "implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions" that amounts to $550 billion to $800 billion a year. This makes it harder to fight climate change, Professor Shapiro says. "The resulting change in global CO2 emissions has similar magnitude to the estimated effects of some of the world's largest actual or proposed climate change policies," he writes in the report. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Tariffs and other features of the global trade system are interfering with climate goals and indirectly subsidizing fossil fuels, according to a new study by associate agricultural and resource economics professor Joseph Shapiro. He calls the interference an "environmental bias." He says it hasn't been measured in the trade system previously, but it's worth between $550 billion and $800 billion a year, amounting to more than direct subsidies that governments paid in the form of tax incentives to big greenhouse gas emitters in 2007. "This research is pointing out that different sets of policies that seem completely separate -- trade policy and climate change -- are connected quite closely in ways people might not have noticed," he says. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

A new report by Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project and the nonprofit EcoAdapt calls for climate change mitigation efforts to be integrated with other priorities, such as affordable housing, food and water security, and public safety, in order to prevent the displacement of disadvantaged individuals and families from their neighborhoods or communities. "Displacement -- whether temporary or permanent, forced or voluntary -- is an issue rooted in inequity and exacerbated by climate change," according to the report. "Climate change poses significant threats to the physical, cultural, spiritual, social, and economic displacement of communities around the world. It is also causing increasing mental and emotional distress or 'solastalgia' -- the loss of sense of place or identity."

If I could wave my magic wand and we all had electric cars tomorrow, I think this is what the air would look like, says chemistry and earth and planetary sciences professor Ron Cohen, an air quality researcher, referring to the beneficial side-effect of improved air quality during the COVID-19 shutdown. He and his team are monitoring air quality, and through an analysis of satellite measurements they've found a 32% decline in levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution over the first three weeks of shelter-in-place rules in Southern California, compared to the prior three weeks. They also, however, found a 26% reduction between the same periods in 2019, suggesting that spring weather contributed to the effect. "Driving is dramatically lower," he says, "but differences in weather between this year and last still make it hard to put numbers on how much cleaner the air is because of the shelter-in-place." Expressing dismay about how the pandemic is helping his research, he says: "It's terrible to get that view by people getting sick. ... It's not at all how we would design the experiment if we had a choice."

Asked in an interview about what global drops in air pollution due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic can tell us, energy and public policy professor Dan Kammen, chair of Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group, says: "Well, it shows how quickly we can change our system. We've seen 30% to 40% drops in pollution over many of the world's cities. And it also shows us how quickly we could switch to clean energy if we took climate change as seriously as coronavirus. ... But it also shows us that actions do matter. Our individual decisions, whether we take an extra trip, whether we just drive to go get one thing at the store and come back, those actions all add up. And we scale it up to industry and to countries and regions. It really shows us that if we put our mind to it and if we invested in science we could not only do a far better job on climate change but we could also do it in a much more equitable way than we're doing now." Warning that overconsumption and its attendant pollution resurged after 9/11, and the same thing could happen when the coronavirus threat subsides, he says we'll be battling climate change for decades. "And so the real question is can we learn the positive lessons out of this horrible experience with coronavirus and say we want to switch to clean energy now? It's cheaper in many places and we want to invest in better systems so that low-income communities can actually generate their own power. Make themselves more resilient. And we're not doing that with coronavirus today by denying some of the poorest communities testing and respirators. And we're doing the same thing on climate. So we're making a natural disaster into a social disaster when we have all the tools to make this into a chance to really build a green stimulus." Link to video.