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.

Lab researchers are joining a multi-agency project to measure California’s summertime greenhouse gas emissions to determine the state’s relative contribution to the global total. Aircraft with atmospheric sampling devices will fly over the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley areas to quantify regional carbon exchange.