Climate Change

Furthering the State’s continued efforts to address the effects of climate change, California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird today announced the appointment of 14 leaders in state climate science and infrastructure design to the Climate-Safe Infrastructure Working Group. ... Through its deliberations, the working group will investigate:

As the United States reverses its climate policies, the world's top greenhouse gas emitter is in the midst of setting up a national carbon-trading system. Chinese officials are preparing to launch an emissions market later this year that will cover roughly a quarter of the country's industrial CO2. Officials and nonprofit groups from the European Union, Australia and California have been advising the Chinese on their program design. ...

Fellow Rachel Golden writes for California to achieve its goals, it must address a source of climate pollution that is largely unchecked and literally hits close to home: the buildings where we live and work. Gas-powered appliances such as space and water heaters produce massive amounts of climate-damaging pollution. In fact, gas burned for heating is responsible for nearly as much carbon pollution as all of the state’s power plants combined.

Margaret Torn, a senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA), has been named by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as a 2017 AGU Fellow. Every year, the AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the Earth and space sciences. Vetted by a committee of AGU Fellows, honorees represent no more than 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000 members.

Global warming is going to steal away some of those postcard-perfect weather days in the future, according to a first-of-its-kind projection of nice weather. On average, Earth will have 10 fewer days of mild and mostly dry weather by the end of the century, the researchers estimate. Some places will get more days perfect for picnics or outdoor weddings, while other places will lose a lot. Rio de Janeiro, Miami and much of Africa are big losers, while Europe and Seattle will gain nicer weather. ...

Rising sea levels, as well as droughts and earthquakes, threaten the levees protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, which supplies 25 million Californians with fresh water. But the state’s solution isn’t to build higher but lower—150 ft below the earth.

Getting to 100 percent renewable energy in Hawaii by 20245 means granting energy access to "everyone, everywhere," said Holmes Hummel, director of Clean Energy Works and former senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Policy and International Affairs. "It gives me hope that 30 years after 2045, we may be able to celebrate an energy sector that is fossil-free worldwide," she said. To do that, the International Energy Agency said that $1 trillion of energy investment capital must be deployed every year for over the next decade.

Fellow Laura Wisland says losing solar energy during the eclipse isn't a big deal for grid operators in California and elsewhere, since they can take advantage of a range of alternative options for electricity generation. However, she is hoping the state can back-fill the lost power by convincing Californian's to use less power during the two-hour eclipse window.

Ouachita has embraced an energy efficiency financing method known as Pay As You Save (PAYS), which uses an innovative method to fund retrofits. Rather than loan the money to pay for an improvement, and saddle the customer with debt, the PAYS method uses an on-bill tariff that is tied to the the home's meter. There are some specific metrics that must be present, including payoff length and whether a member co-pay is needed, but the end result is instant on-bill savings for the customer and decreased load for the cooperative. ...