Climate Now

Climate Now is taking a break this week - but will be back on June 20 with one more solution we can include in our portfolio of opportunities to tackle climate change. Read more below, and stay tuned. In the meantime, take a listen to our 'This Week in Climate News' segment, and catch up on some past episodes about how we can all do more to address climate change - from the policy level...

Since humans began settling down and building civilizations 10,000 years ago, the Earth's climate has been relatively stable. But before that, the climate was more unstable - unpredictable - and humans were nomads, forced to follow the good climate for food and shelter. Today, the global average temperature is higher than it has ever been since the beginning of civilization. What does this me...

A 2022 study by Yale University found that two thirds of Americans (67%) rarely or never talk about climate change, and rarely or never hear people they know talking about it either. Despite the existential threat that it poses, one third of Americans (32%) only hear about global warming in the media a few times a year - or less!  Are these statistics shocking? Or does it matter that people don’t...

In 1909, headlines declared the U.S. would run out of petroleum by 1940. In 1945, the estimate was that the U.S. had 13 more years of petroleum reserves left. In 1966, we only had 10 more years before the “figurative dipstick in the United States’ oil supplies” came out dry. In the 1970’s United States, alarmist projections about exponential growth of energy demands expected that we would run out...

According to a 2022 poll from the Associated Press , although 93% of Americans acknowledge that human activity impacts climate, nearly half of Americans (47%) feel that their actions don’t have an impact on climate change. And yet, we know – it is the collective momentum of tiny particles of snow that drive an avalanche. In our upcoming episode, Climate Now sits down with James Regulinski, co-foun...

Since the Industrial Revolution nearly 150 years ago, global average temperatures have increased by more than 1 degree C (1.9 degrees F), with the majority of that warming occurring since 1975. But during these recent decades of accelerated warming, temperatures in the arctic (latitudes above 66 degrees north) have have been rising even faster - nearly four times faster than the average global rat...

The built environment represents one of society’s largest environmental impacts - contributing nearly one fifth of global GHG emissions , not to mention impacts on natural resources like air and water quality, local ecosystems, and quality of life for residents. Increasingly, policies and public opinion are concentrating on reducing those impacts - creating incentives for new construction and urba...

Every approach to decarbonizing the energy sector comes with its share of costs and benefits: renewables are cheap and clean , but require enormous amounts of land and are not always available when power is needed. Batteries provide useful back up power , but add cost to a renewable-supplied grid and compete with other needs for critical minerals like lithium and cobalt. Carbon capture on fossil f...

On March 30, 2023, in partnership with the Livermore Lab Foundation and The Maddy Institute, Climate Now hosted a one day summit in Fresno, CA, examining the intersection of climate change and agriculture. Agriculture is both a leading driver of greenhouse gas emissions (contributing nearly one fifth of all global emissions ) and a potential solution to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere....

Renewable natural gas (RNG), made from the decomposition of organic waste like livestock manure, is not necessarily net-zero if it's burned to run a turbine or drive a car. But what if the RNG is not burned, but is rather pyrolyzed, breaking it down into hydrogen and another product called "carbon black," an essential component of car tires, among other things? Then the hydrogen can...

As we transition to a clean energy economy, demand for minerals like copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium is projected to skyrocket. According to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency, the total mineral demand from clean energy technologies will quadruple by 2040 under their “sustainable development scenario” or at least double under stated policies.  Where will all those minerals come...

For a building owner, building decarbonization has myriad benefits : lower utility bills, lower maintenance, healthier and more comfortable living. But the barriers to reaching those benefits are large, particularly the high upfront costs and complicated renovation process (many inspections, many permits, coordinating with many contractors). Scale up to trying to decarbonize every building in a ci...

Reducing average global temperatures. Preserving biodiversity. Decreasing the risk of droughts, floods and hurricanes. Reducing air pollution. Reducing utility bills. Creating new jobs and opportunities. Building community engagement. Fostering environmental equity and justice. There doesn’t need to be just one reason to decarbonize a city. And when the specific needs, concerns and goals of commun...

On February 15, 2023, the U.S. Senate held a hearing considering a national clean fuels program, modeled after California’s state-wide Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). The LCFS sets an annually decreasing standard of net carbon intensity (amount CO2 emissions per unit energy) for all the fuels being sold in the state. Companies that produce fuels or fuel equivalents below the carbon intensity thre...

2022 potentially marked a turning point for the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) market, with new EV car sales increasing by 65% over 2021 sales, and now accounting for nearly 6% of all new vehicle sales. (If EVs maintained a 65% annual growth rate, they would reach 100% of new vehicle sales in about 6 years.)  But for medium and heavy duty vehicles, which produce an outsize share of U.S. transportation...

More than one third of the world’s 2,000 largest publicly traded companies have made some kind of net-zero commitment, and the list is growing quickly. A critical part of those corporate plans will be securing cleanly sourced electricity for their energy needs, but that requires that there is enough fossil-free electricity available on the grid for every company that prefers to use it. In 2021, re...

Electrification is going a long way in decarbonizing small vehicles (like passenger cars) in the global transportation sector, which produces about 16% of global emissions . But for long-haul transportation: trucking, shipping and the aviation industries, electrification is far from being technologically ready. Enter a controversial solution: biodiesel. Biodiesel is a fuel derived from organic mat...

In November 2021, the City of Ithaca announced the approval of a plan to decarbonize all of its buildings by 2030 . In this first-of-its-kind decarbonization plan, Ithaca outlined a pathway to electrify roughly 6,000 homes and buildings as a first step to enacting the city’s own Green New Deal - a resolution established to locally address climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice....

On April 22, 1970, 20 million people across the U.S. marched, attended speeches and sat in teach-ins, marking the first Earth Day , and spurring on the enactment of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the founding of the EPA, all of which occurred later that year. Then and now, activism has been critical to enacting environmental and climate policy, and in shifting attitudes of the general...

In 2021, U.S. President Biden signed an executive order with the directive to achieve 100% carbon-pollution free electricity in the United States by 2030. The goal is certainly achievable: currently wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity generation, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar and wind has increased more than 2000% in the last 15 years , and there are already 1.3 te...

The agricultural sector produces about a tenth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and while most of that comes from livestock (about 2/3), emissions from crop production still total about 2.2 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent . Interestingly, we only actually use about half of what we grow: this is not because of food waste ( its own issue ), but because more than half of any crop is res...

“We've built an entire industrial economy around a set of energy sources, and we're now thinking about diversifying way beyond that. And that's a big set of changes.” What will it take to diversify our energy economy, and how do we actually do it? That is the remit of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), according to Kate Gordon, senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy. In th...

The carbon footprint of stuff For the last two centuries, continuous economic growth (the increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and services that a society produces, per capita) has been recognized as the critical driver in the drastic global decrease in extreme poverty.   The problem is, an ever-increasing "quantity and quality of economic goods and services" - in t...

Last week, LLNL's National Ignition Facility successfully 'ignited' a nuclear fusion reaction equivalent to what takes place in the sun: the conversion of hydrogen to helium + energy. In a first, the experiment produced more energy than was needed to initiate the reaction. While the experiment lasted only fractions of a second, it proved what had been hypothesized since the 1960’s:...

Can Earth’s geothermal heat warm - and cool - your home? The hottest day ever recorded on Earth was on July 10, 1913. Thermometers in California’s Death Valley measured 134oF . The coldest day ever recorded on land (not on an Antarctic ice sheet) was in the tiny Siberian settlement of Oymyakon, which got as cold as -90oF on February 6, 1933. But anyone standing in either of these locations, on the...