Mold Remediation in Berkeley, CA

Press release from CDFW:

The launch of the California Wolf Project (CAWP) within UC Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources establishes a long-term partnership with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to advance the science and management of gray wolves (Canis lupus) in California.

With additional support from the National Geographic Society, CAWP brings together scientists, wildlife managers, and conservation communicators working with diverse stakeholders to better understand the social and ecological factors that shape wolf populations and inform management decisions. The new project integrates UC Berkeley’s expertise in ecology, sociology, economics and environmental policy, while leveraging the university’s extensive network of agency, non-profit, landowner and Tribal relationships. The CAWP team uses innovative and interdisciplinary methods to gather data on wolf spatial ecology, diet, predator-prey dynamics, and recolonization within California, while contributing to conflict reduction strategies for rural communities and livestock producers.

“It is exciting to see wolves back in California, but there are a lot of questions about where they fit amongst a rapidly changing landscape with new challenges for agencies and livestock producers,” said Arthur Middleton, CAWP co-lead and Goertz Professor of Wildlife Management at UC Berkeley. “We hope our growing team can provide new support to those interested in and impacted by the state’s growing wolf population.”

The gray wolf has returned to California after nearly a century of absence following their extirpation in the 1920s. Wolves are classified as endangered both under the California Endangered Species Act and the federal Endangered Species Act. Their natural recolonization into the state began in 2011 with individuals dispersing from Oregon. As of 2024, CDFW has reported at least seven wolf packs across California, with CAWP initially focusing on the Beyem Seyo (Plumas County), Harvey (Lassen and Shasta counties), Lassen (Lassen and Plumas counties), and Whaleback (Siskiyou County) packs. CAWP has also started to expand its work with the Yowlumni Pack (Tulare County), with the help of CDFW’s Central Region staff. CDFW continues to survey for the presence of uncollared and collared wolves, based on sighting reports and other signs of wolf activity.

California’s wolf packs utilize large expanses of habitat compared to other areas in the western United States, presenting challenges for monitoring the population and questions regarding the availability of prey. The state and many landowners are mounting a variety of livestock protection and conflict reduction efforts while learning new lessons about their efficacy. CAWP is a timely initiative complementing the state’s efforts with rigorous research and an outreach strategy for collaborating with local communities affected by wolf activity.

“Given the wolf population increases we’ve recorded in the last few years and the management challenges that have resulted, there’s no better time for this partnership between CDFW and UC Berkeley,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the State Gray Wolf Coordinator at CDFW. “There are so many important management questions relating to the ecological, economic and social effects of wolf recolonization in the state that already impact California’s ecosystems and its people. The formation of CAWP is expanding our capacity to address these questions in earnest.”

The path of wolf recovery in California – the most populous and diverse U.S. state – has the potential to shape national, and even global, perspectives on wildlife restoration and large-scale conservation. CAWP seeks to develop a model for how to bring universities, government agencies and local communities together around the science and practice of improving human-wildlife interactions on a shared landscape.

“The Wildlife Program at UC Berkeley is committed to fulfilling our university’s mandate to support the people, economies and nature of California with science, education and outreach. CAWP embodies those priorities and embraces the diversity of perspectives that accompany the recovery of large carnivores,” said Justin Brashares, CAWP co-lead and Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at UC Berkeley.

To read more about the return of gray wolves in California or to report a sighting, please visit wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Mammals/Gray-Wolf.

To learn more about the California Wolf Project (CAWP), please visit wildlife.berkeley.edu/cawolfproject.

Follow the project on social media for updates: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.

If Californians vote to approve a rent control measure on the ballot, thousands of Berkeley tenants could immediately see new limits on how much their landlords can raise their rent each year.

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“Families who are living in units that aren’t right for them will have a chance to move without losing their affordability,” said Leah Simon-Weisberg, a longtime tenant lawyer and chair of the city’s rent board. “For some people, it will keep them housed.”

That same scenario, in which the city could cap rent increases on single-family homes and apartments more than 20 years old and units with new tenants, is a nightmare for Krista Gulbransen, who heads the Berkeley Property Owners Association, representing the city’s landlords. “We would revert back to the 1980s and it wouldn’t just be roller skates or rainbow headbands, it would be a lot worse,” she said.

Proposition 33 would repeal a state housing law limiting how cities can regulate rents, letting local governments make that decision. Most California cities wouldn’t see an immediate change. But in a few cities like Berkeley, local laws already contain language allowing much more sweeping regulation than current state law. In those cities, and in others where left-leaning elected officials have expressed public support for expanding rent control, renters could see the soonest benefit from Prop. 33 — and landlords the soonest headaches.

More than 30 cities in California already place some limits on rent increases, with caps ranging from 3% to 10% annually for covered units, some pegged to inflation.

At the state level, California caps rent increases for apartments and corporate-owned houses more than 15 years old at 10% per year — a rate that tenant advocates have said can still place a significant burden on tenants.

Some of those local ordinances were once much stricter. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, concern about soaring housing costs led a few cities to limit rent increases even when a new tenant moves in — known as vacancy control. But the 1995 law that Prop. 33 would repeal, known as the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, put a stop to that, along with any rent control on single-family homes or those built after 1995.

It’s the ban on rent control for single-family homes that most bothers Melvin Willis, a city council member in Richmond, one of the Bay Area’s few remaining solidly working-class cities. Many families in his district rent their houses, he said, and some complain to him about steep rent increases.

“It’s a hard conversation to have with someone when they say, ‘My rent increased, but we have rent control,’ ” he said. Willis recalled explaining to one family whose rent had doubled that the city’s 3% cap on rent bumps doesn’t apply to single-family homes. “I’ve had that conversation multiple times and it doesn’t feel good,” he said.

Richmond’s rent ordinance leaves out any housing “exempt from rent control pursuant to the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.” Willis and other affordable housing advocates take that to mean that if Costa-Hawkins goes away, single-family homes and other dwellings that the state law excluded would automatically fall under rent control.

Nicolas Traylor, the executive director of Richmond’s rent program, was more cautious. The ordinance could be referring to units actually exempt under Costa-Hawkins, he said, or just the types of units, like single-family homes, that Costa-Hawkins excluded. If Prop. 33 passes, he said, the rent program’s general counsel would have to recommend how to move forward.

In San Francisco, city supervisors avoided that ambiguity by unanimously passing legislation that would kick in if Prop. 33 passes, bringing rent control to an estimated 16,000 additional units. Mayor London Breed has said she will sign it if the proposition passes, the San Francisco Standard reported.

San Francisco belongs to a group of cities — along with Berkeley, Oakland, Los Angeles, and the southern California cities of West Hollywood and Santa Monica — with longstanding rent control that current state law especially constrains. That’s because Costa-Hawkins grandfathered in any exemptions they had for more newly built units. So in San Francisco, apartments built after 1979 are considered “new construction” and exempt from rent control. In Los Angeles, it’s 1978.

“It’s completely arbitrary that we can create rent control for buildings from 1978 but we can’t do it for 1980,” said Los Angeles City Council member Hugo Soto-Martínez, pointing to the city’s homelessness crisis. “Every year we continue to lose more of our rent-stabilized housing.”

The council last week passed a resolution, authored by Soto-Martínez, endorsing Prop. 33.

Those kinds of actions by cities trouble landlords, who point out that their costs for utilities and insurance are rising, in some cases outpacing inflation.

In an email newsletter sent to housing providers Friday, real estate firm Bornstein Law warned its clients that “there is a real possibility that Proposition 33 will pass because of the widespread belief that the rents are too damn high.”

The firm urged landlords, in preparation for the potential policy shift, “to raise the rents to market rate if landlords are able to do so” and to consider offering voluntary buyouts to tenants paying below-market rent.

Prop. 33 opponents have also raised concerns that cities will enact rent control so strict it will stifle new housing construction at a time when the state desperately needs it.

“The state has done so much to remove barriers to building housing and to incentivize affordable housing construction, but Prop. 33 would give NIMBY cities a really powerful weapon to do an end run around those rules,” said Nathan Click, a spokesperson for the No on 33 campaign.

But San Francisco shows that, given the flexibility to craft new policies, even cities with strong histories of tenant advocacy might opt for more modest changes to rent control that can win broad political support. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin had originally proposed that the city expand rent control to cover housing built before 2024, but walked that back to 1994, an idea that won backing from both the city government’s progressive and moderate wings.

Local rent control expansion “is also going to depend on not just tenant and housing organizations but other civil society organizations in those communities,” said Shanti Singh, legislative director for Tenants Together. “Are they going to be ready to or willing to push for it?”

Manuel Pastor, director of the University of Southern California’s Equity Research Institute, said his research shows that rent stabilization without vacancy control helps prevent displacement by keeping rents more affordable, while avoiding slowing new construction since there are still incentives to build.

If cities start capping rent increases when new tenants move in, he said, the effects become more difficult to predict. That’s in part because the last time California cities experimented with vacancy control was more than 30 years ago — back when more multifamily housing was being built and before the tech boom put unprecedented pressure on Northern California’s housing market.

One thing that is likely, he said: California would see geographic variation, with more progressive coastal cities putting in stricter rent caps while inland cities with moderate politics seek to lure development with looser rules.

“If the proponents of Prop. 33 think this will solve our housing crisis, they’re mistaken,” he said. “If the opponents of Prop. 33 think that this will result in housing armageddon, they’re mistaken as well.”

​​Berkeleyside is a media partner of CalMatters, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site covering the state Capitol and issues related to public policy in California. Berkeleyside occasionally republishes CalMatters stories we believe will be of interest to our readers.

In the highest-spending ballot measure campaign so far in this election cycle, much of the funding for the two competing camps has come from outside Berkeley — and, in the case of one of those camps, from outside California.

Many of this year’s 12 ballot measures have drawn funding from organizations headquartered elsewhere. But the committee campaigning for Measure CC has gotten over two-thirds of its contributions — $195,000 out of a total $235,250 — from the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors (NAR), according to election filings.

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Measure CC and the opposing Measure BB each include numerous revisions to the city’s intricate Rent Control and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance. Broadly speaking, Measure CC would ease restrictions on city landlords, making new units exempt from rent control and establishing a fund to pay landlords directly when tenants cannot pay rent. BB would expand protections against eviction and new charges, lower the maximum allowable annual rent increase and make some new units in Berkeley rent-controlled. Both measures include frameworks for tenants to form associations, BB by a simple majority and CC by a 2/3 majority.

The NAR, by its own accounting, is the largest trade association in the U.S. Its political action committee has consistently ranked as the top-spending PAC in the U.S., according to data available on Open Secrets.

Proponents of BB have questioned why a national organization like the NAR — which was recently the target of a federal class-action antitrust lawsuit that ended in a nine-figure settlement, which has apologized for endorsing racially restrictive covenants in decades past and which opposed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — would wade into a municipal ballot measure question.

“I would think that people would be concerned when you’ve got the largest, most powerful lobby in the country just dropping millions and millions of dollars across the state to prevent us from having the tools to stop the housing crisis,” said Leah Simon-Weisberg, treasurer of the pro-Measure BB committee and chair of the Rent Stabilization Board.

Besides its contributions in Berkeley, the NAR has piped $5 million into the effort to stop Proposition 33, according to a CalMatters analysis. Prop 33, if successful, would repeal 1995’s Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.

Measure CC’s supporters have said it makes perfect sense for a national organization to have a nationwide lobbying footprint.

“I think any national organization is responsible for the entire nation, and so money goes where they think it’s most important. And Berkeley has a very highly regulated rental industry,” said Krista C. Gulbransen, treasurer of the committee fundraising for CC and executive director of the Berkeley Property Owners Association. “I don’t think anybody would be surprised wherever there is extraordinary regulation there are people trying to make a better and fairer balance of those regulations.”

The NAR has also kicked in $100,000 to oppose Measure GG, which would impose a tax on natural gas use in most buildings over 15,000 square feet. That ballot measure is also on the expensive side this year, with opponents having spent $276,469 as of their most recent filing. The campaign against GG has raised more money than the campaign for CC but, so far, spent less.

Nearly all of CC’s other funding, $40,000, has come from the California Association of Realtors’ political organization, based in Los Angeles. It has out-fundraised Measure BB more than four to one. So far, the pro-BB camp has raised $52,069 and spent or owes $37,515; the supporters of CC have spent or owe $282,614, according to election filings.

Measure BB has also gotten most of its contributions from out of town, albeit from within California. Of its war chest, $15,000 came from the Southern California-based PAC that spearheaded Proposition 33 and another $15,000 from the UAW Region 6 Western States PAC, based in Pico Rivera.

“Tenants are workers, and workers are more and more, tenants,” Simon-Weisberg said of the donation from UAW and smaller ones from SEIU 1021 and the Berkeley Federation of Teachers. “People are demanding higher wages because they can’t afford housing.”

The campaign for CC became the target of an investigation by the Fair Political Practices Commission for allegedly failing to properly report the NAR’s first contribution, $35,000 worth of polling, in August, although that contribution appears in later filings. “We were made aware of the error on our part, and we immediately corrected it,” Gulbransen said.

The Berkeley Tenants Union announced Thursday it had lodged new allegations against the CC campaign of improper filing, failing to disclose major donors on literature and other violations with the Berkeley Fair Campaign Practices Commission.

“Each election, we face a few allegations, yet none have been found to have substantial merit. We are confident this latest complaint will be no different,” Gulbransen said in response to BTU’s announcement.

In the contest between BB and CC, there are echoes of the showdown eight years ago between two other ballot measures, U1 and DD, the costliest ballot measure campaign in Berkeley in that election cycle. The Berkeley Property Owners Association’s committee, the same one now boosting CC, poured $892,540 into the campaign for DD, against a relatively paltry $76,400 for U1, which nevertheless prevailed.

Both measures were meant to raise money for Berkeley’s Housing Trust Fund. DD would have raised a business tax on rents by 39%; U1 raised it by 166%, but exempted newly constructed units from the new rate for 12 years.

Gulbransen said intricate ballot measures like BB and CC, particularly when they conflict with each other, are a disservice to Berkeley and its voters. “I would really like to see all of us come together at the table for 2026 and come up with reasonable, agreed-upon changes,” she said.

A new type of porous material called a covalent organic framework quickly sucks up carbon dioxide from ambient air

October 23, 2024

Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide humans produce is key to lowering atmospheric greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, but today’s carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases.

Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO₂ levels, which have reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won’t reach humanity’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions. The porous material — a covalent organic framework (COF) — captures CO₂ from ambient air without degradation by water or other contaminants, one of the limitations of existing DAC technologies.

“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, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper that will appear online Oct. 23 in the journal Nature.

“I am excited about it because there’s nothing like it out there in terms of performance. It breaks new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem,” he added.

According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO₂ from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO₂ for storage underground.

UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper’s first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO₂ in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.

“Flue gas capture is a way to slow down climate change because you are trying not to release CO₂ to the air. Direct air capture is a method to take us back to like it was 100 or more years ago,” Zhou said. “Currently, the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere is more than 420 ppm, but that will increase to maybe 500 or 550 before we fully develop and employ flue gas capture. So if we want to decrease the concentration and go back to maybe 400 or 300 ppm, we have to use direct air capture.”

COF vs MOF

Yaghi is the inventor of COFs and MOFs (metal-organic frameworks), both of which are rigid crystalline structures with regularly spaced internal pores that provide a large surface area for gases to stick or adsorb. Some MOFs that he and his lab have developed can adsorb water from the air, even in arid conditions, and when heated, release the water for drinking. He has been working on MOFs to capture carbon since the 1990s, long before DAC was on most people’s radar screens, he said.

Two years ago, his lab created a very promising material, MOF-808, that adsorbs CO₂, but the researchers found that after hundreds of cycles of adsorption and desorption, the MOFs broke down. These MOFs were decorated inside with amines (NH₂ groups), which efficiently bind CO₂ and are a common component of carbon capture materials. In fact, the dominant carbon capture method involves bubbling exhaust gases through liquid amines that capture the carbon dioxide. Yaghi noted, however, that the energy intensive regeneration and volatility of liquid amines hinders their further industrialization.

Working with colleagues, Yaghi discovered why some MOFs degrade for DAC applications — they are unstable under basic, as opposed to acidic, conditions, and amines are bases. He and Zhou worked with colleagues in Germany and Chicago to design a stronger material, which they call COF-999. Whereas MOFs are held together by metal atoms, COFs are held together by covalent carbon-carbon and carbon-nitrogen double bonds, among the strongest chemical bonds in nature.

As with MOF-808, the pores of COF-999 are decorated inside with amines, allowing uptake of more CO₂ molecules.

“Trapping CO₂ from air is a very challenging problem,” Yaghi said. “It’s energetically demanding, you need a material that has high carbon dioxide capacity, that’s highly selective, that’s water stable, oxidatively stable, recyclable. It needs to have a low regeneration temperature and needs to be scalable. It’s a tall order for a material. And in general, what has been deployed as of today are amine solutions, which are energy intensive because they’re based on having amines in water, and water requires a lot of energy to heat up, or solid materials that ultimately degrade with time.”

Yaghi and his team have spent the last 20 years developing COFs that have a strong enough backbone to withstand contaminants, ranging from acids and bases to water, sulfur and nitrogen, that degrade other porous solid materials. The COF-999 is assembled from a backbone of olefin polymers with an amine group attached. Once the porous material has formed, it is flushed with more amines that attach to NH₂ and form short amine polymers inside the pores. Each amine can capture about one CO₂ molecule.

When 400 ppm CO₂ air is pumped through the COF at room temperature (25 °C) and 50% humidity, it reaches half capacity in about 18 minutes and is filled in about two hours. However, this depends on the sample form and could be speeded up to a fraction a minute when optimized. Heating to a relatively low temperature — 60 °C, or 140 °F — releases the CO₂, and the COF is ready to adsorb CO₂ again. It can hold up to 2 millimoles of CO₂ per gram, standing out from other solid sorbents.

Yaghi noted that not all the amines in the internal polyamine chains currently capture CO₂, so it may be possible to enlarge the pores to bind more than twice as much.

“This COF has a strong chemically and thermally stable backbone, it requires less energy, and we have shown it can withstand 100 cycles with no loss of capacity. No other material has been shown to perform like that,” Yaghi said. “It’s basically the best material out there for direct air capture.”

Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change.

“We’re very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we’ve been doing,” he said.

The work was funded by King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, Yaghi’s carbon capture startup, Atoco Inc., Fifth Generation’s Love, Tito’s, and BIDMaP. Yaghi’s collaborators include Joachim Sauer, a visiting scholar from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and computational scientist Laura Gagliardi from the University of Chicago.

As of October 2024, the average solar panel system costs $2.53/W including installation in Berkeley, CA. For a 5 kW installation, this comes out to about $12,669 before incentives, though prices range from $10,769 to $14,569. After the federal tax credit, the average price drops by 30%.

You'll probably pay even less than what we show here. It doesn't include the federal ITC or Berkeley, CA state incentives, which will lower this price by at least a few thousand dollars.

It may seem obvious but larger solar panel systems cost more money. We use cost per watt ($/W) so you can easily compare quotes, controlling for slight variations in system size.

While a 5 kW system will only cost you $12,669 in Berkeley, CA, doubling the system size effectively doubles the price, so you'll pay about twice that for a 10 kW system. The higher the price tag, though, the more you'll get back as a credit towards your federal tax bill.

Average solar cost by system size in Berkeley, CA

If you can't shell out $12,669 in cash to pay for solar, don't sweat it. You can choose to finance your system with a loan instead. Some companies even offer $0-down loans so you can start saving on day one if your loan payments are less than your current electric bills. Just keep in mind that your long-term savings will be lower with a loan due to interest rates.

The numbers we're showing are averages. The price you'll pay for solar depends on many factors unique to you and your home:

If you're looking for solar companies in CA, here are some popular suggestions:

Solar is a major purchase, but you can get the price tag to come down a bit by being an educated shopper. Taking advantage of incentives and rebates and shopping around for quotes can bring down your cost of solar in Berkeley, CA.

As long as your federal tax bill is high enough, you can take advantage of the federal tax credit in Berkeley, CA. This incentive allows you to apply 30% of your solar installation and equipment costs toward your federal tax bill. If the amount exceeds your tax bill, you can roll over the remaining credit to the following year. Many states also offer great local incentives and rebates.

Comparing multiple solar quotes can save you money through competition and transparency. Each additional quote you receive for solar will help you find the right solar panel system at the right price.

This is where EnergySage can help. With funding from the Department of Energy’s SunShot Prize, EnergySage opened the country’s first (and now the largest) marketplace for home solar panel installations. We gather custom solar quotes from local installers on your behalf and put them in an easy-to-compare format. When you compare quotes for solar panels on the EnergySage Marketplace, you can expect to see prices up to 20% lower than if you work with a single solar company.