Following the release of a 2018 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, many media outlets began running headlines warning that humans have 12 years to avoid the most catastrophic climate change scenarios. Daniel Swain, climate scientist within UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, is quoted in Chicago Sun Times and Inside Climate News explaining why these headlines may be misleading.
Read more →
Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, was quoted in a Time Magazine article about avoiding dangerous levels of pollution while driving. To decrease pollution exposure during long commutes, Zhu recommends changing out a car’s cabin filter every six months to a year and switching on the A/C’s “air recirculation” function. “This shuts down the air exchange between the inside of the vehicle and the outside, and instead uses recirculated air,” she said.
Read more →
Mark Gold, appointed in July 2019 as deputy secretary for oceans and coastal policy and director of the Ocean Protection Council at the California Natural Resources Agency, reflected on his tenure as UCLA’s associate vice chancellor for environment and sustainability in a Verdexchange profile.
Read more →
Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies in the Luskin School of Public Affairs, was quoted in a Los Angeles Times story about a North Carolina State University research project about the carbon footprint of electric scooters. The environmental cost of producing the scooters, their relatively short lifetimes, and the carbon generated while collecting the scooters for charging contribute to their surprisingly high carbon footprint, researchers found.
Read more →
In late July, California reached an agreement with four automakers—Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW—to continue increasing the fuel efficiency of their vehicle fleets by 3.7 percent annually from 2022 to 2026. The new agreement, which was negotiated by the California Air and Resource Board, presents a direct challenge to the Trump Administration’s attempts to weaken vehicle emission standards nationally. Following the announcement, UCLA faculty provided expert legal analysis on the agreement in several media stories.
Read more →