California Connected Newsroom

Wired News reports that Google is building “solar trees” on the parking lots and rooftops of its Mountain View headquarters, enough to power about 30 percent of the complex. “About a third of the 9,000 solar panels Google’s installing will take the form of overhanging parking shades at the million-square-foot campus in Mountain View,” Wired’s […]

The New York Times reports in-depth that power executives and economists are increasingly worried about global warming’s future impact on profits and society at large. To head off a crisis, more and more of them are calling for a federal pricing policy that taxes or caps carbon emissions and encourages technological innovation.
“Global warming can be […]

Computer model of Arctic ice vanishing in 40 years. (Animation Copyright UCAR.)
The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle report on a new study that predicts the Arctic polar ice-cap could melt into open sea during summers in less than 40 years. “In the simulations, the shift seems to occur when a pulse of warm […]

The Los Angeles Times’ Stephanie Simon reports on cities across the country that are bypassing the Bush administration and trying to meet the greenhouse-gas reduction targets of the international treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels started the civic trend two years ago by adopting the targets and then challenging other cities […]

Solar panel installation on rooftop. Photo by Abraxas3d.
The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Craig D. Rose filed part one of his special report on California’s solar power ambitions, reporting that a new 10-year subsidy program beginning next year will pump $3.4 billion dollars into the solar panel market. That translates to 1 million solar roofs, he writes, […]

Clean twinkling tree. Photo by Taryn Domingos.
The Sacramento Bee reports that a hydrogen fuel cell is powering the 6,500 lights on the state Christmas tree that sits in front of California’s capitol building. “The one-kilowatt unit, which converts bottled hydrogen into electricity, is about the size of a window air conditioning unit and is meant […]

A NASA image of Planet Plankton, aka Earth.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a new NASA study that shows global warming’s negative impact on marine life. Satellite data show an ebb in the oceanic food chain as global temperatures rise, beginning with reductions in tiny phytoplankton that generate more than half of the world’s oxygen. […]

The Orange County Register reports today that California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, co-author of the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, arrived in Washington on Wednesday to make a case for a federal response to global warming. “We saw a necessity to take the lead in the area of climate change because we knew that the […]

Los Angeles public radio station KPCC has created a special page on climate change, including a week’s worth of stories on global warming’s impact on California. “California recently became the first U.S. state to cap greenhouse gases,” the page states. “It did so because officials foresee serious threats to the state’s environment, public health, and […]

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairwoman-to-be of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, announced that she will summon Gov. Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez to Washington to testify on climate change and California’s landmark law to reduce greenhouse gases.
Boxer says she intends to model a federal global warming […]