Climate Change

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.

In 2012, through a Switzer Leadership Grant, I had the opportunity to join the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy to help advance work in freshwater conservation and climate change adaptation in the bi-national Lake Champlain Basin.

Economic factors within China are also prompting the government to look outside the country for agricultural land. Jia-Ching Chen, a research fellow at Brown University who studies the tensions between urbanization and rural land use in...

Solar power is growing so fast in California — with installations by customers increasing tenfold since 2006 — that it is turning the state’s power system upside down.