Climate Change

A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month.

"The changes in hydraulics and internal pressures associated with reversing flow in a pipeline, particularly one that crosses multiple hills and valleys, can increase the risk of a spill," said Director of Conservation Carol Foss of the Audubon Society of New Hampshire explained in a recent press conference. "While any discharge of crude oil into the North Country environment would be a disaster, impacts of a dilbit spill would be particularly severe and lasting.

Evan Hansen, principal with Downstream Strategies, said the state’s RPS needs to change significantly if West Virginia is to have a future that includes renewables. The current RPS has allowed the state to rely on existing alternative energy projects, even projects from out of state. “It’s done absolutely nothing to promote the use of renewables,” he said. “Not one renewable energy project has been built to satisfy those requirements … It was an entirely hollow bill.”

Rafe Sagarin has been working the last several months at Biosphere 2, which is now owned by the University of Arizona. We have been working to find the right balance of scientific research, STEM education, and visitor outreach for this strange and rather amazing facility with a history to match.

If Robert Klee is daunted by the challenge that lies ahead as the state’s next Department of Energy and Environmental Protection commissioner, he doesn’t show it. The agency’s former chief of staff under then-Commissioner Dan Esty, Klee views his pending ascendancy to DEEP’s top job as an opportunity to remake Connecticut at a historic juncture. During an 90-minute interview last week at his office, Klee said the state is on the verge of seismic shifts in terms of energy, solid waste and recycling as well as reuse of brownfield properties across the state.

Switzer Fellows Evan Hansen and Mike Wilson testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works about how we might prevent chemical threats and improve safety at facilities across the country.

An hour south of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania’s Washington County, millions of gallons of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing wells are stored in large impoundment ponds and so-called "closed container" tanks. The wastewater is then piped to treatment plants, where it is cleaned up and discharged into streams; trucked to Ohio and pumped deep down injection wells; or reused in other fracking operations.

Different patterns of urban development may have widely varying long-term effects on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To investigate such effects, we used UPlan geographic information system–based software to model three 2050 urban-growth scenarios for Yolo County, a predominantly agricultural area near Sacramento, Califor- nia. Two scenarios correspond to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s A2 and B1 storylines.