Three aspiring student entrepreneurs have set their sights on overcoming a major obstacle to electric vehicle (EV) adoption: "range anxiety." Range anxiety refers to the concerns of potential EV buyers about the limited range of these new automobiles and the accessibility of re-charging stations to keep them on the road. University of Michigan students Javier Rivera, Lawrence Han and Ajay Varadharajan believe they can eliminate these concerns by creating an EV network that matches the demand for electric vehicle power with supply.
North American forests appear to have a greater capacity to soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas than researchers had previously anticipated. As a result, they could help slow the pace of human-caused climate warming more than most scientists had thought, a U-M ecologist and his colleagues have concluded. The results of a 12-year study at an experimental forest in northeastern Wisconsin challenge several long-held assumptions about how future forests will respond to the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide blamed for human-caused climate change, said University of Michigan microbial ecologist Donald Zak, lead author of a paper published online this week in Ecology Letters.
Researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co. have assessed the global availability of lithium and compared it to the potential demand from large-scale global use of electric vehicles. The research findings, published in the current issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, conclude that sufficient resources of lithium exist for the next 90 years to supply a large-scale global fleet of electric vehicles through at least 2100. The study's main authors were Paul Gruber and Pablo Medina. They conducted the research as part of a graduate student research project before graduating in 2010 from the School of Natural Resources and Environment. The research partner was Ford Motor Co., the global automobile manufacturer based in Dearborn, Mich.
With 25 former Peace Corps volunteers enrolled in the Fellows program, University of Michigan ranked No. 6 as a Peace Corps Fellows/USA school in 2011. Out of those 25 students, eight are enrolled at SNRE--a disproportionately large share of fellows and an illustration of the globally oriented and service-minded goals the school shares with the Peace Corps.
Environmental injustice in people-of-color communities is as much or more prevalent today than 20 years ago, say researchers commissioned to conduct a follow-up to the 1987 landmark study, "Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States." The new report, "Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, 1987-2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States, " shows that 20 years later, disproportionately large numbers of people of color still live in hazardous waste host communities, and that they are not equally protected by environmental laws.
It was like deja vu all over again as Alan D. Hecht, Ph.D., Office of Research and Development with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency visited the University of Michigan in early January to deliver a cautionary tale about the importance of sustainability to the global environment. Hecht was back in town recently (as he was 15 years ago to commemorate the EPA's 35th anniversary) to refresh the message as the EPA turns 50 years old.