A year of climate breakthroughs from UC research

The 29th annual U.N. climate convention, or COP29, kicks off this week in Azerbaijan. Representatives from nearly 200 nations will spend the next two weeks negotiating goals for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and dealing with upheaval caused by climate change

Nearly three decades in, these annual meetings have gotten humanity pointed toward a more livable future. But many experts say the stately pace of change and modest scope of actual commitments have yet to catch up to the escalating destruction caused by a warming climate. "We're making a lot of progress, but we're not yet solving the climate problem," said David Victor, professor of public policy and co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at UC San Diego in an interview with KPBS. "Emissions are still going up. They have to come down."

Delegates gather for the opening ceremony of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Monday, November 11. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty

Thankfully, Californians aren't waiting for global governments to act. Regardless of the outcomes from COP29 and the role of the federal government in global and national climate policy going forward, California and UC are working flat out to solve the climate crisis. The state has passed some of the world's most ambitious and effective greenhouse gas emissions laws. And even since the last time global delegates met for COP28 in Dubai, the University of California has generated a burst of new solutions to some of the thorniest climate challenges we face.

If news from Azerbaijan has you looking for signs of urgent climate action, look no further. Read on to learn about 10 of the biggest climate breakthroughs to come out of the University of California in the past year.

1. An easier way to bulk up the electricity grid

America's energy sector has seen two promising trends in recent years: utility companies are generating more clean electricity, and more people are switching from fossil fuel-powered cars and appliances to zero-emissions electric options. But there's a catch: the electrical grid isn't big enough to deliver to customers all the new clean power coming online. And the standard approach to adding grid capacity - building more towers to run more and bigger wires - is expensive and takes a long time.

In a study published in September 2024, UC Berkeley scientists found a way to break through the bottleneck. Rather than build a bunch of new transmission towers and lines, utility companies could upgrade the lines on existing towers, swapping out the steel-core lines manufactured in the 20th century for state-of-the-art carbon fiber instead. This relatively quick and affordable fix could double transmission capacity in the U.S. within a decade and save ratepayers $85 billion.

A study from UC Berkeley found a cheaper, easier way to add capacity to the electrical grid. Credit: Getty/Sirisak Boakaew

"We were pretty astonished by how big of an increase in capacity you can get by reconductoring," Amol Phadke, senior scientist at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, told the New York Times. "It's not the only thing we need to do to upgrade the grid, but it can be a major part of the solution."

UC's climate policy commits the entire 10-campus system to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions no later than 2045, aligning the University with the State's target date for net zero carbon emission.

This was the scene around UC Davis in 2022, during the first phase of the shift from fossil fuels. When all phases are complete, pipes will carry hot water instead of steam, which is more efficient and safer to maintain. The shift will save energy, take advantage of renewably generated electricity and reduce fossil fuels and water use. Credit: UC Davis/Kat Kerlin.

Find out how sustainability experts at three campuses are making progress toward that ambitious goal.

2. The 'no-brainer' solution to expanding solar energy

As renewable energy infrastructure expands, it's running into rising opposition from people who don't want to lose farmland, habitat or views to giant wind and solar farms. A January 2024 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, found that community opposition has helped tank about a third of all wind and solar projects proposed in California in the past five years.

UC Merced researchers are joining an effort to ease solar siting woes. In April 2024, construction crews started building solar panels over a stretch of the Delta-Mendota Canal in Merced County. Funded in part by the U.S. Department of the Interior through the federal Inflation Reduction Act, the project demonstrates a new approach to siting solar panels that has less effect on farmland and habitat, and that also saves water by preventing evaporation. UC Merced is also part of the state-funded Project Nexus, building solar panels over Turlock Irrigation District canals in Stanislaus County.

Hear from the UC Merced researchers who are helping solve California's solar conundrum. Want more like this? Subscribe to Fig. 1, our video series about big ideas and the brilliant UC minds behind them.

UC Merced researchers found that building solar canopies over all 4,000 miles of California's agricultural canals could generate 13 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power a city the size of Los Angeles for nine months a year and more than half of the new solar power we'd need by 2030 to meet the state's decarbonization goals. And covering canals could save enough water to meet the annual demands of 2 million people. "This is a no-brainer. This is common sense," said Calif. Governor Gavin Newsom at a groundbreaking ceremony.

The power grid is vulnerable to climate disasters. A UC San Deigo scholar is studying how to keep the lights on.

Another step closer to limitless clean energy: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough three times.

3. Eliminating carbon emissions from concrete

About 40 percent of the carbon released into the atmosphere each year comes from our buildings, including eight percent from making new cement, a key ingredient in concrete. This year, engineers at UCLA invented a way to make cement almost carbon-free.

Traditional cement manufacturing involves decomposing limestone in a kiln heated by coal or natural gas. As it breaks down, the limestone releases a lot of carbon, and the kiln devours fossil fuels, emitting even more. The new method, which its inventors named ZeroCAL, dissolves the limestone in water. This avoids emissions from firing the kiln, and the carbon in the limestone can be filtered out of the solution, instead of being released into the air as a gas. The whole process is designed to work with existing cement plants, meaning the switch could be made quickly and affordably.

The ZeroCAL approach, which can be integrated within the existing cement-production process, uses limestone to produce calcium hydroxide, which emits no carbon dioxide when burned to produce lime for cement. Credit: Adrienne Johnston/UCLA

"Mitigating climate change demands urgent, paradigm-shifting actions across many areas to decarbonize our society," said ZeroCAL co-inventor Fabian Rosner, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA whose research is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy. "We believe the ZeroCAL process offers a unique pathway to enable accessible and rapidly scalable decarbonization of cement production in a way we have not previously considered."

Credit: UCLA

UCLA researchers discover new mechanism to cool buildings while saving energy: Coating walls and windows with this new material can reduce the need for A/C.

How 'going under' is getting greener: Anesthesia can be up to 2,500 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. UC San Francisco doctors are leading a national movement to protect patients and the planet.

Thanks to UC, that's finally starting to change. In July, the U.S. Department of Energy launched an effort to jump-start California's hydrogen industry. The Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, or ARCHES, will steer an estimated $12 billion to jump-start a coordinated network of hydrogen fuel producers, purveyors and consumers up and down the state.

Some of the world's leading hydrogen experts work at UC, and the university led the campaign to establish ARCHES. Altogether, the projects will eliminate 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions every year, equivalent to taking 445,000 gas-powered cars off the road. They'll create over 200,000 new good jobs. And by swapping diesel combustion engines spewing toxic exhaust for zero-pollution fuel cells, Californians will save nearly $3 billion in health care and related costs annually.

5. and 6. Two approaches to zero-carbon jet fuel

California's growing hydrogen economy figures into a strategy proposed by UC Riverside engineering professor Mihri Okzan to decarbonize air travel, which is responsible for nearly three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In a paper published in February, Ozkan proposed swapping conventional jet fuel for e-kerosene, which is made by combining carbon dioxide with hydrogen.

Two new approaches to carbon-neutral jet fuel from UC Riverside research could reduce emissions from global air travel. Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty

Electricity from renewable sources can generate hydrogen from water through a process called electrolysis, and the carbon dioxide and hydrogen can then be made into e-kerosene. It's chemically identical to standard jet fuel, Okzan notes, meaning there's no need to modify existing aircraft to put e-kerosene into circulation.

The same month that Ozkan's study came out, her colleague, UC Riverside Associate Research Professor Charles Cai, solved one of the biggest challenges to making jet fuel from plants. The promise of affordable, carbon-neutral biofuels has been held back at the first step, breaking down the tough material called lignin that gives plants structure. Cai discovered a simple, renewable chemical that speeds up lignin digestion. His breakthrough, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, makes biofuel manufacturing cheap and easy enough to compete with jet fuel made from petroleum.

UC Riverside Professor Charles Cai discovered a chemical that can speed up a critical step in biofuel production. The breakthrough could make plant-based jet fuel cost-competitive with petroleum.

7. Transforming the land from carbon source to carbon sink

Plants continually pull carbon from the atmosphere and transform it into leaves and wood. As they decompose, they cycle carbon into the ground, where healthy soils can store it safely, making the land one of our most potent forces in the climate fight. And yet the ways we currently use land - to landscape our communities, grow food, raise livestock and harvest timber - currently account for over a fifth of the human-caused carbon emissions worldwide each year.

Take, for example, the bag of peat moss stacked on pallets outside your local hardware store. It's a garden staple used to improve soil drainage, but most green thumbs don't know that that peat might have taken millennia to get to their yards. It forms in bogs, where standing water prevents dead plants from fully breaking down. Carbon-rich plant material builds up in thick layers year after year. Peat mining operations interrupt this process, releasing thousands of years of stored carbon in a single go.

Central Valley farms produce a lot of pistachio shells, and most of them go to waste. A UC Davis professor finds that they could become a substitute for peat moss in gardens and nurseries, so carbon-rich peat could be left in the bogs where it forms (above). Credit: UC Davis

Jackson Gross, a researcher at UC Davis, has hit on a replacement for peat that uses an abundant byproduct of California's booming agricultural industry: pistachio shells. This year he found that a soil mixture he developed boosted production of lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers, and now he's studying the nutritional content of crops grown in the new mixture.

Biologists in southern Oregon recently spotted a fat Chinook salmon wiggling its way up an ankle-deep stream, 230 river miles from the Pacific Ocean. This was the first salmon known to have swum this far up the river for over a century, since the completion of a series of dams in northern California and southern Oregon blocked off the Klamath River and its tributaries.

Alongside commercial fishing and climate change, the loss of hundreds of miles of streambed habitat has pummeled the Klamath River's salmon populations. In a desperate bid to save the species from extinction, a coalition led by the Yurok, Hoopa, Karuk and Klamath Tribes pushed for decades to remove the dams. This year, it finally happened: crews wrapped up demolition work on the largest dam removal project in world history in early October, just weeks before the chinook made its return.

Find out how researchers at UC Davis are working closely with members of the Klamath's state, federal and tribal communities to study how the dams' removal plays out for fish populations up and down the river.

8. Shedding light on deep-sea carbon sequestration

If we're going to stay on the more livable side of the two-degree warming threshold, we're not only going to have to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "All the best models that we have say that we have to do some form of carbon dioxide removal in order to hit climate goals," said UC Santa Barbara geochemist Morgan Raven.

Raven has been studying one way to remove carbon from the atmosphere: harvesting plants grown on the surface and stashing them at the bottom of the ocean, where they can neither decompose nor escape to the surface. In research published this year, Raven identified areas of the seafloor called anoxic marine basins as the best, or as she put it, the "least bad" option for deep-sea carbon sequestration. These are deep, isolated pockets of the ocean, cut off from currents that could deliver oxygen or carry carbon toward the surface.

Of the three basins she studied, Raven found that the Black Sea in Eastern Europe holds the most promise for carbon sequestration. It's isolated from the rest of the world's oceans, and at a mile and a half deep and nearly 125,000 square miles in size, it's big enough to hold enough carbon-rich biomass to make a difference for the climate.

UC Santa Barbara geochemist Morgan Raven evaluated three deep, remote pockets of the world's oceans for their potential to store carbon in submerged plant matter. A basin on the floor of the Black Sea emerged as a location that could "make a dent in the climate," Raven found. Credit: PeterHermesFurian/Getty

9. A new material that passively absorbs carbon dioxide

Chemists have long sought to mimic the molecular interactions between plants, water, air and sunlight that fix carbon in leaves and soil. But most of the methods we've invented to remove carbon from the atmosphere - a set of technologies known as direct air capture - are costly, consume lots of energy, only work at high levels of atmospheric carbon concentration like the mouths of smokestacks, and wear out quickly.

Last month a team at UC Berkeley announced a major direct air capture breakthrough: a new substance that can passively filter carbon from the ambient air. Their creation is called a covalent organic framework. It's a hexagonal arrangement of atoms studded with polyamine molecules that can efficiently snag passing carbon dioxide molecules at everyday concentrations.

The powder in this vial is reusable and can passively absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, solving at least two of the biggest problems with current carbon capture technologies. Credit: Zihui Zhou, UC Berkeley

"We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air - just outdoor air - into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO2. Everything," said Omar Yaghi, professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper announcing the breakthrough. Once saturated, the material can get heated up to break the bonds holding carbon dioxide to polyamine, then can be sent right back into service.

The University of California is sending about two dozen of our faculty, students and staff to COP29 as part of our official observer delegation, led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Members of UC's delegation at COP28 in Dubai in 2023. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego is again cohosting the Ocean Pavilion at COP29, an exhibit and gathering space that's highlighting the risks of climate change to the world's oceans, and the role that oceans can play in mitigating climate disasters. Credit: UC San Diego

UC delegates will attend official negotiation sessions, deliver testimony, submit written comments and speak to the media, aiming to get the findings of their research in front of the people who need it to make informed decisions. New this year, delegates will pay extra for their ticket to COP as a way to cover the estimated cost of damages to society that the carbon emitted by their trips to Azerbaijan will incur.