Climate Change

As the policy manager for autonomous vehicle policy at AAA Northern California, Nevada and Utah, Fellow Xantha Bruso is developing and implementing AAA’s AV policy strategy to advance AV safety while enabling innovation. She also supports strategic initiatives to accelerate AV deployment and foster mobility solutions.

Fellow Garrett Fitzgerald is the Strategic Collaboration Director at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), where he helps the organization’s local government members advance their work in sustainability.

When it comes to sharing emergency information during natural disasters, new University of Vermont research shows how timing is everything.

In this important new primer, Dustin Mulvaney makes a passionate case for the significance of solar power energy and offers a vision for a more sustainable and just solar industry for the future. The solar energy industry has grown immensely over the past several years and now provides up to a fifth of California’s power. But despite its deservedly green reputation, solar development and deployment may have social and environmental consequences, from poor factory labor standards to landscape impacts on wildlife.

... “We typically think about climate change in terms of extreme events like hurricanes and wildfires, but it actually causes impacts in all sorts of other ways,” said coauthor Miyuki Hino of Stanford University. “This is one way where it’s really a part of people’s daily lives. It’s chronic.” Annapolis is seeing seas rise at about twice the global rate, and Hino said the flooding there foreshadows the problems other coastal communities can expect.

Fellow Sarah Myhre is a woman, a scientist, and a climate advocate. Are these strengths in a climate crisis?, asked a recent profile of her on Grist. “I think you can be both rigorous and objective and be human at the same time,” Myhre says. “And I have come to a place where I’m no longer willing to divorce my humanity from the science that I have participated in and am stewarding.”

From the Los Angeles Times: Heat waves will grow more severe and persistent, shortening the lives of thousands of Californians. Wildfires will burn more of the state’s forests. The ocean will rise higher and faster, exposing California to billions in damage along the coast. ...

Fellow Martha Matsuoka co-authored the chapter "Working Together to Clean Up Freight Transportation" in the new report from the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, Strategies for Health Justice: Lessons from the Field.

Fellow Kimberley Miner has published a new article in Nature. A screening-level approach to quantifying risk from glacial release of organochlorine pollutants in the Alaskan Arctic Abstract