Search: Environmental News, Air quality

Leave no trace. This principle, familiar to outdoors enthusiasts, exhorts us to minimize our impact on the natural environment. In the near future, technology may enable us to extend this concept to the process of meeting global energy needs. Rising fuel costs, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, air quality issues, and even national security concerns over dependence on foreign oil have generated both political will and scientific advances in this area. Thanks to a number of recently formed collaborative groups, UC Berkeley researchers are poised to make unique, high-impact contributions to that challenging but achievable goal.

An online mystery game in which student sleuths will monitor air pollution in South Central Los Angeles and in Cairo, Egypt, and a project using cell phones to teach English to children in India have won funding for two University of California, Berkeley, professors.

By identifying unique sets of compounds in the air, Allen Goldstein and his team can discover what types of human actitivities are contributing to local air pollution - everything from cooking meat to brewing coffee to driving cars. The technology has the potential to play a vital role in understanding sources of pollution - and how to combat them.

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found evidence that the prevalence of building-related symptoms (BRS) increases with increasing outdoor concentrations of the pollutant ozone. They have also discovered that the type of air filter that some buildings use in their ventilation systems may also play a role in the prevalence of BRS.

While visiting Beijing this past spring, I found myself gazing up at the city's impressive high-rise landscape one morning and suddenly realizing that I had seen neither the sun nor the sky since arriving. The natural tendency is to explain such a vanishing act as due to inclement weather or some other unique atmospheric condition. The reality is, however, that the penumbra that hangs so persistently over most Chinese cities is man-made, caused by a combination of emissions from coal-fired factories and power plants (a new power plant is brought online somewhere in China each week); the rapidly growing number of private cars and commercial vehicles (China produced only 640,000 private cars in 2000, but by 2005 it was producing 3.1 million); and the dust and sand that blows down from the deserts of Xinjiang and the steppes of Mongolia, turning Beijing's all-too-few spring rain showers into mud baths.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has awarded the Cozzarelli Prize to ARE assistant professor Max Auffhammer and his co-authors for their 2006 paper showing that reductions of human-generated air pollution could create unexpected agricultural benefits in one of the world's poorest regions.

A surprising study suggests many common household chemicals may provide a source of air pollution in the home. Local researchers found risk increased with an increase in ozone levels. This is one of the first studies to look at air pollutants in the home. With Professor William Nazaroff.

An analysis by researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego found that the combined effects of atmospheric brown clouds and greenhouse gases negatively affected growing conditions for rice in India. The study suggests that reducing the man-made sources of pollution could increase harvest growth.

On November 29 2006, the US Supreme Court will hear the case Massachusetts et al. v EPA et al. to decide if the EPA has the authority to regulate emission of greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles as required by the Clean Air. Professors Inez Fung and John Harte of UC Berkeley are among a group of climate scientists who have submitted an Amicus Curiae Brief in support of regulation.

A cheap and efficient new way of removing mercury from coal-fired power-plant emissions could help prevent the toxic element from poisoning the environment and entering the food chain. By injecting halogen gas into a power plant's stacks, elemental mercury in the waste stream can be oxidized and then readily trapped.