EMS Sustainability News

Despite the devastating impact the emrald ash borer has had on forests in the eastern and midwestern parts of the U.S., climate change will have a much larger and widespread impact on these landscapes through the end of the century, according to researchers.

Penn State scientists are working to predict possible breaks in massve underground reservoirs that store geothermal energy and how to mitigate the potential fallout. 

Developing new ultrathin metal electrodes has allowed researchers to create semitransparent perovskite solar cells that are highly efficient and can be coupled with traditional silicon cells to greatly boost the performance of both devices, said an international team of scientists.

Increasingly aggressive strategies are needed to reduce current and future carbon emissions and proactively remove carbon-based heat-trapping gasses that have been emitted to date. A panel of experts will discuss this topic during the webinar “Getting to negative: strategies, ethics and co-benefits.”

With a sled full of wooden stakes, green tree shelters and saplings in tow, Tim White made his way across acres of mud and grass and at times ankle-deep water to a three-person team planting saplings along a trench.

In 2020, Penn State and the University of Freiburg launched a pilot program to create collaborative, integrated virtual classroom courses by providing development and implementation money to faculty teams.

This month, Penn State's Sustainability Institute (SI) and the Student Sustainability Advisory Council (SSAC) honored six Penn State students for their leadership and commitment to sustainability throughout their time at Penn State.

The social cost of methane — a greenhouse gas that is 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat — varies by as much as an order of magnitude between industrialized and developing regions of the world, according to researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley and Penn State.

Jean Paul Allain, professor of nuclear engineering and head of the Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Department of Nuclear Engineering at Penn State, will discuss the recent progress made in nuclear fusion, emerging technologies and the remaining challenges to realizing energy generation from a star here on Earth at a talk at 4 p.m. Monday, April 12.

A panel of energy experts from Penn State and industry will discuss how energy systems are currently designed to be resilient to extreme weather events, and how they may need to be designed in the future. The panel discussion, which is free and open to the public, will be broadcast at 2 p.m. EDT on Monday, April 12 via Zoom.