Water Resources

Even though renewables (not counting small hydro) averaged 12 percent of the in-state power mix between 2001 and 2012, compared to hydropower that generation did not vary unpredictably from year to year. That predictability is very valuable to your electric utility, which needs to plan ahead and unfortunately can’t forecast the water year. Read more

Evan Hansen of Downstream Strategies said the bills matches up to the way West Virginia’s Senate Bill 373 started the legislative process. That bill, which was signed into law earlier this week, changed, however, as it worked its way through both houses of the legislature. “The West Virginia bill is much more comprehensive,” he said Thursday. “They overlap in terms of having new regulations on aboveground storage tanks, but the West Virginia bill includes a lot more.”

Evan Hansen, an environmental consultant who has testified about the leak before the West Virginia legislature, has tracked the cumulative effect of that objective throughout the government. “In the past ten or fifteen years, they’ve systematically weakened virtually all the major water-quality standards that apply to the coal industry,” he said. “One by one, there’s been a steady effort to undermine the implementation of environmental laws, to the point that it’s become a part of everyday normal life here.”

One of the ways our Fellows lead is by providing expert testimony before state and national legislative bodies. In March, Mike Wilson and Evan Hansen were called to testify before the U.S.

The 2014 Chancellor’s Achievement Awards for Diversity and Community have been presented in the categories of Academic Senate and Academic Federation, staff, undergraduate and graduate student, community member — and in a new category, post-doctoral scholar. ...

You work hard every day on issues affecting the health of residents in your state. You release reports about the dangers of fracking and other critical environmental issues. You try to link economic development with natural resource stewardship. You tweet and blog and host webinars to get the issues out to the public. But if you live in a state like West Virginia, you’re literally swimming upstream struggling for recognition of the big issues in the face of policymakers tied to a carbon-based future.

Even as the researchers have been trying to unravel the tangled effects of pesticides and other chemicals on children’s development, they’ve been devising practical ways to help the study’s participants reduce their risk of exposure—a rare example of community engagement by academic scientists. In a place that’s often sharply polarized between those who own the fields and those who work in them, CHAMACOS researchers have insisted on involving all sides.

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.