Berkeley Lab and China’s Tsinghua University forged ties on Aug. 12 to promote the development and implementation of building energy efficiency, a move intended to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in both the U.S and China.

The biggest environmental challenges facing scientists today will require a better understanding of nanosized minerals, which abide by their own often mysterious rules. Scientists at the Berkeley Nanogeoscience Center are working to learn these rules.

Two researchers at Berkeley Lab, Evan Mills and Michael Wehner, contributed to an analysis of the effects of climate change on all regions of the United States, described in a major report released June 16 by the multi-agency U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Global climate change is hotly debated, to say the least. But two experts warn that using short-term trends that show little temperature change (or even slight cooling) to refute global warming is misleading. The long-term pattern clearly shows human activities are causing the earth’s climate to heat up.

The Department of Energy will invest $777 million in 46 new Energy Frontier Research Centers over the next five years as part of President Barack Obama’s plans to reinvigorate American science. Berkeley Lab will be home to the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, led by Don DePaolo, director of the Earth Sciences Division, to study carbon dioxide storage deep underground.

Roofs and pavements that reflect sunlight keep individual buildings and whole cities cooler. Staying cool saves energy, so one way to keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere is to use more cool roofing and paving materials, especially in urban areas. Cooling the neighborhood could help cool the world.

Jayant Sathaye, who heads the International Energy Group in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division and who shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a leading participant in the Governors’ Global Climate Summit taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, Nov 18 and 19, in Beverly Hills, CA.

Berkeley Lab and the University of California, Berkeley have announced a joint research and development program in which researchers will work with the government and private sector of India to develop paths toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining sustained economic growth.

Mark Levine heads Berkeley Lab’s China Energy Group, created in 1988 to further energy efficiency by working with Chinese organizations. In this interview Levine discusses his testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on China’s energy policies and their environmental impacts.

Abrupt climate change is the focus of IMPACTS, a major new program bringing together six DOE national laboratories to investigate the instability of marine ice sheets, warming of the boreal forests and Arctic, megadroughts in the Southwest, and catastrophic release of methane from hydrates.