Glen Martin

Sep 19, 2024 | universityofcalifornia.edu | Glen Martin

If any person has a firm grasp on those issues, it’s Dave Jones, the director of the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Jones served as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 through 2018, and he was the founder and chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum, an international group of insurance regulators that identifies best regulatory responses for climate risk.

Jul 26, 2024 | alumni.berkeley.edu | Glen Martin

Wildfires today are not what they were in the nineteenth century—or even 20 years ago. Disastrous, history-making fires are no longer anomalies. The 2017 Sonoma County Tubbs Fire and the Camp Fire in Butte County, which utterly destroyed the town of Paradise a year later, are stark examples. Fire season, once limited to late summer and early fall, now spans the entire calendar. But the problem isn’t just razed houses.

May 31, 2024 | alumni.berkeley.edu | Glen Martin

Neutrinos are the Zeligs of subatomic particles, ghostly chameleons produced in vast quantities by a variety of nuclear and cosmic processes—colliding black holes, the fusion reactions at the heart of every star, uranium and plutonium fission in nuclear power plants. Nearly massless and thus extremely difficult to detect, neutrinos pass through anything and everything, including planets like ours, effortlessly.

May 31, 2024 | alumni.berkeley.edu | Pat Joseph |Margie Cullen |Glen Martin

It may be hot, the old saw goes, but at least it’s a dry heat. That’s not much consolation in an era of accelerating climate change. As reported in Berkeley News, a recent study by David Romps, a Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science, found that the heat index (how hot it feels) is increasing about three times faster than the thermometer would suggest.

May 31, 2024 | alumni.berkeley.edu | Pat Joseph |Glen Martin

The future may or may not be green, but one thing’s for sure: It’s going to be an energy hog. Along with the usual demands, add the expected growth in EVs, burgeoning (and power-hungry) AI, and a surge in air conditioning due to hotter temperatures. Producing that power is problematic, of course. New coal and gas plants? Forget it; they just make a warm world warmer. We need sustainable low-carbon energy, and lots of it: solar, wind, perhaps new-gen nuclear—and, ultimately, fusion.