News

If you care about global warming, you must like wind power, right? But what if wind power itself ends up contributing to a warmer climate? That appears to be the case, according to a new study.

However, reporting by the San Diego Union-Tribune has revealed numerous instances where companies and nonprofits selling offsets didn’t shrink their carbon footprint as a result of the program — raising questions about the ability of the program to fight climate change. In some situations, groups maintained green business practices that long preceded the offset program, […]

California is hosting an international summit this week to push for global action on climate change. While the Trump Administration steadily rolls back climate policies — or attempts to — cities, states and businesses from around the world are pledging major action to cut carbon emissions. On Monday, Gov. Jerry Brown set the stage by […]

Electric cars have been on the market for some time now but surveys show that even in California adoption has been slow. A new initiative called Veloz, however, hopes to change that with a multimillion dollar public awareness campaign announced Wednesday. Auto giants are teaming up with California officials and local power utilities to launch […]

Nearly a dozen employees of a Fresno warehouse that took in hundreds of used mattresses and box springs each week for recycling are waiting to hear when – or if – they will receive their final paychecks after being laid off with no warning. In the meantime, about 250,000 mattresses are sitting in storage in […]

Ride-haling such as Uber and Lyft are changing the ways people travel. Despite widespread claims that these services help reduce driving, there is little research on this topic. This research paper uses a quasi-natural experiment in the Denver, Colorado, region to analyze basic impacts of ride-hailing on transportation efficiency in terms of deadheading, vehicle occupancy, […]

Last year the California Legislature raised gasoline taxes by 12 cents a gallon, and conservatives were so outraged they launched an effort to repeal it at the ballot box. Proposition 6 comes up for a vote in November. Now, with considerably less fanfare, the state’s air-pollution agency has enacted a regulation that will raise gas […]

Defying the Trump administration on climate change, California’s air-pollution agency ruled Friday that automakers must comply with the state’s strict rules on greenhouse gases if they want to continue selling cars here. The California Air Resources Board approved a regulation that will significantly curtail carbon spewed by new cars sold in the state, beginning in […]

The advocacy and research group, Coalswarm, which claims to have information on 13,000 existing and proposed coal plants worldwide via its Global Coal Plant Tracker, says satellite imagery shows China is set to add 259 GW of new coal-fired capacity to its grid. In a new report, Coalswarm says the central government in Beijing transferred […]

Authors of a new UN climate report say it is “extremely improbable” that governments across the globe will be able to stop global warming beyond the 1.5C target, the Guardian reported. According to the report, the global population would need to take dramatic action in terms of how it generates energy, and grows food, among […]

“If you want to understand San Francisco’s self-inflicted housing crisis, look no further than the city’s very first zoning law, commonly known as the Cubic Air Ordinance, which set a disturbing standard for the city’s eventual missteps. Proposed in 1870, during a time of rampant real-estate speculation in a boomtown renowned for its lawlessness, the […]

We may be celebrating — if that’s the right word — the tenth year since the onset of the financial crisis and collapse of the real estate market. Yet before breaking out the Champagne, we should recognize that the hangover is not yet over, and that a new housing crisis could be right around the […]

Labor force composition and the allocation of talent remain of vital import to modern economies. For their part, governments and companies around the globe have implemented equal employment opportunity (EEO) regulations to influence labor market flows. Even though such regulations are pervasive, surprisingly little is known about their impacts. We use a natural field experiment […]

The gap between the price of a new and used vehicle is as wide as it has been in years, pushing an increasing number of consumers to the used-car lot and putting pressure on auto makers to deepen discounts on new cars to keep them competitive. Demand for used cars was unusually strong this summer […]

Driving 100 miles in a ZEV consumes 30 kilowatt-hours of electric power, according to the federal government. Therefore, assuming they were still traveling 330 billion miles each year, recharging 30 million ZEVs would expand annual electric power consumption from 300 terawatt-hours to at least 400, and that extra juice also would have to come from […]