News

In a March 19th article in Mother Jones, AirUCI faculty Annmarie Carlton is cited among those striving to fight the COVID virus or ease its effects. In working to create online instruction for her classes, she built a simplified model using Google Trends and air quality data that she thinks is able to predict the spread of the disease in places where there are no tests at all. She describes being torn between refining this model and continuing to create online content for her classes so her students can make their own models one day.  Read the article

A Reuters article dated March 11, 2020 discussed potential setbacks to global climate agreements due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus and the collapse in oil prices.  Historically, difficult financial times, such as the current shutdown of economies worldwide, have pushed environmental concerns aside in favor of economic growth.  AirUCI faculty Steve Davis is quoted about his recent publication in the science journal Nature Communications.
 
The great recession's impact in the United States was particularly marked, with CO2 emissions falling 10% between 2007-2009, due to factors including less consumption of goods and services, Steve said, and the subsequent growth in U.S. usage of natural gas helped suppress the rebound. “The conclusion that the Great Recession helped decrease emissions is still true,” he said, “but that’s not the way we want to win the war on climate change.”       Read the article
 

AirUCI faculty Kim Fortun is cited in an article on Citylab.com about the crisis of methamphetamine use in rural and disaffected America.  Her concept of "late industrialism" describes the current era as "a time when many workers are overextended and living in precarity," when every social class and region is affected by such events as factories closing, jobs migrating overseas, and few remaining options for the populations left behind.  Read the article

AirUCI faculty Jack Brouwer is quoted in the February 1, 2020 issue of Scientific American in an article about reducing carbon based energy sources. Renewable hydrogen is replacing natural gas in European towns and has great potential to be a major source of power for segments of the worldwide economy that cannot simply plug into a big electrical outlet, such as heavy transport. “Far too many people have been misled into believing that electrification is the entire [carbon] solution,” says Jack, who has been engineering solutions to our region’s dirty air for more than two decades. “And many of our state agencies and legislators have bought in,” without considering how to solve energy storage or to fuel industry, he says, however the new push is to decarbonize electric grids and heavy industry rather than transportation.  Read the article