Magazine

Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research Once again, the summer of 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere has brought us an epidemic of major wildfires. These burn forests, houses and other structures, displace thousands of people and animals, and cause major disruptions in people’s lives. The huge burden of simply firefighting has become a year-round […]

Lucas Davis, University of California, Berkeley Americans have now purchased more than 800,000 electric vehicles, counting both plug-in hybrids and all-electric models. That may sound like a lot of EVs, and it is a big jump from the less than 5,000 that were on the road in 2010. But this is still less than 1

Cassandra Moseley, University of Oregon Just six months after the devastating Thomas Fire – the largest blaze in California’s history – was fully contained, the 2018 fire season is well under way. As of mid-July, large wildfires had already burned over 1 million acres in a dozen states. Through October, the National Interagency Fire Center

David Keiser, Iowa State University; Gabriel E. Lade, Iowa State University, and Ivan Rudik, Cornell University “Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue” – John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) Most Americans associate U.S. national parks with pristine environments that represent the very best

Daniel Sperling, University of California, Davis; Austin Brown, University of California, Davis, and Mollie D’Agostino, University of California, Davis Over the last half-decade, public transit ridership declined nationwide. The number of vehicle miles traveled in cars is rising, and traffic congestion is getting worse in many U.S. cities. At the same time, the century-old taxi

Garth Heutel, Georgia State University More California rooftops will soon sport solar panels, partly due to a new state mandate requiring them for all new houses and low-rise residential buildings by 2020. This rule immediately sparked lively debates. Even experts who generally advocate for solar energy expressed skepticism that it was actually a good idea.

Bill Ritter, Jr., Colorado State University Transforming U.S. energy systems away from coal and toward clean renewable energy was once a vision touted mainly by environmentalists. Now it is shared by market purists. Today, renewable energy resources like wind and solar power are so affordable that they’re driving coal production and coal-fired generation out of

Nicolas Gunkel, Boston University Leadership in addressing climate change in the United States has shifted away from Washington, D.C. Cities across the country are organizing, networking and sharing resources to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and tackle related challenges ranging from air pollution to heat island effects. But group photos at climate change summits typically

Joachim Seel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Andrew Mills, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Ryan Wiser, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Wind and solar energy are growing rapidly in the U.S. As these energy sources become a bigger part of the electricity mix, their growth raises new questions: How do solar and wind influence energy prices? And