News Archive:
ERG Professor John Harte recently published an article on Environmental Health News giving a roadmap on how to utilize the interconnectedness that is spurring catastrophe to instead promote health and sustainability.
“In the current pandemic, huge gaps in the U.S. public health and medical support system, including gaps in access to affordable medical care and a scarcity of hospital facilities to treat Covid-19 victims, may be leading to the potential collapse of our economy, including our food, transportation, education, and social welfare systems, as well as our capacity to prevent or treat the disease itself.”
To read the full article, click here.
On Tuesday, March 31 from 4:30 – 6:00 pm, Fossil Free California will be hosting a community forum on COVID-19 and the climate crisis. This live webinar featured ERG Professor Dan Kammen, who will be presenting his views on how the current global pandemic intersects with the climate crisis.
To learn more, click the link here.
In an article titled “Hand-washing is critical in the fight against coronavirus, but what if you don’t have safe water?” published by The Hill, authors ERG Alumni Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley highlight the critical need to increase clean water access in America in order to protect families from the Coronavirus and lack of drinkable water.
“We must also ensure water services are available to everyone to help stop the spread of the virus. In the past few days, temporary suspensions of water shutoffs for inability to pay have been announced in more than 250 communities around the nation,” the article states.
To read the full article, click here.
ERG professor Dan Kammen has recently joined a group of progressive policymakers in creating green policy proposals that would be included in an economic stimulus package. The bill aims to help the nation recover from the coronavirus pandemic while simultaneously combating climate change.
According to the article on The Hour, Kammen was “one of 10 signatories of a letter asking Congress to alter the economy” and a vocal supporter of the bill.
To read the rest of the The Hour article, click here. To read another similar article by Politico that also mentions Kammen, click here.
ERG alumnus Christopher Jones was recently cited in the Scientific American article “How the Coronavirus Pandemic Is Affecting CO2 Emissions” and Global News article “Coronavirus lockdown eases pollution, Venice canal runs clear”. In both articles, he discusses how Coronavirus is effecting global carbon emissions and the general environment.
“Pull one string here, and it affects everything else. With the economy and carbon footprints, they’re so interrelated that you really quickly start to have all these complex interactions,” said Jones.
Read the Scientific American article here, and the Global News article here.
ERG Professor Dan Kammen was recently cited on The New Republic for an article titled “Joe Biden’s Sketchy Climate Record”. He discusses the comparison between Sanders’ and Biden’s climate plan, and how Sanders’ policies better addresses the rising issues of climate change.
“Biden has a rough plan to get to carbon neutral by 2050. Sanders has a plan and an investment package to do it by 2030… I’m really disappointed that the Biden plan hasn’t kept up with the latest results out of the U.S. national laboratories and my lab here. We could go much further than 2050 and do so in a way that generates more jobs,” Kammen said.
To read the full article, click here.
ERG PhD student Julia Szinai, ERG Alumnus Anand Gopal, and two other co-authors Colin Sheppard and Nikit Abhyankar from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have recently published a collaborative research paper on Energy Policy. Titled “Reduced grid operating costs and renewable energy curtailment with electric vehicle charge management”, the paper discusses the grid value and renewable integration benefits of electric vehicle charge management in California.
Their analysis focuses “on the state of California in 2025, and improves on prior work by linking high-resolution mobility and grid dispatch models to quantify the value of managed charging under a 50% RE grid and PEV adoption scenarios up to California’s 5 million vehicle target.”
To read the rest of the paper, click here.
ERG professor Isha Ray with ERG Alumni Kripa Jagannathan and Andrew Jones recently published a new collaborative research paper titled “The making of a metric: Co-producing decision-relevant climate science”. Their paper examines how the “co-production strategies we identified can be used to design and implement productive scientist decision-maker interactions. Overall, the approaches and metrics we developed can help climate science to expand in new and more use-inspired directions.”
Read the full Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society paper here.
ERG PhD Student Veronica Jacome has recently been selected as a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. This fellowship was awarded from the prestigious University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. They offer “postdoctoral research fellowships, professional development and faculty mentoring to outstanding scholars in all fields whose research, teaching, and service will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity at UC.”
To learn more about the program, click here.
ERG Dan Kammen was recently quoted on KQED critiquing the Trump Administration’s decision to appoint “former PG&E attorney to head the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in San Francisco.”
“His resume is of an oil-and-gas knowledgeable person with exceedingly little background on the environment. EPA’s job is to protect and defend the environment, both natural and human. His background looks very much like he is someone with experience and depth on the traditional energy side of PG&E,” said Kammen.
To read the full article, click here.