| Reuters: A massive landslide buried a crowd trying to dig out a bus from deep mud on Sunday, killing at least 22 people, with dozens more feared dead, as torrential rains battered Guatemala. Emergency workers recovered 22 bodies from the landslide on a major highway in Cumbre de Alaska northwest of the capital, and they warned it could take two days to dig out all the victims. "A wall of earth fell on a bus and around 100 local people organized themselves to dig out the victims," said ... |
| Reuters: Increasingly erratic rainfall patterns related to climate change pose a major threat to food security and economic growth, water experts said on Monday, arguing for greater investment in water storage. In a report by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), experts said Africa and Asia were likely to be hardest hit by unpredictable rainfall, and urged policymakers and farmers to try to find ways of diversifying sources of water. The IWMI research estimates that up ... |
| Business Green: One of the oldest rail lines in the US will soon become home to a cutting-edge energy-harvesting technology that promises to recover the energy lost by braking trains and feed it into the grid. Philadelphia-based smart grid firm Viridity Energy and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) announced last week that they have been awarded a $900,000 (£583,000) grant by the State of Pennsylvania that will allow them to complete an ambitious pilot ... |
| Business Green: The Chinese government has reportedly pledged to increase its hydroelectric power capacity 50 per cent by 2015 as it continues to accelerate efforts to boost its low-carbon energy supplies. According to local reports, officials said they were aiming to increase hydropower capacity from 200 million kilowatts currently to 300 million kW by 2015. The announcement came as China's largest hydropower station, the Xiaowan dam in Yunnan province, came online. State-backed news ... |
| BBC: World leaders may pay a heavy price in history if they fail to tackle global warming, Tony Blair has warned. He said politicians did not have to wait for chaotic climate change in order for them to act. The risks of not cutting emissions, given the potentially massive consequences, was enough to justify action, he told BBC Radio 4. The former prime minister added that it had always been a struggle to explain the uncertainties in climate science. He told Radio 4's ... |
| Financial Times: As global growth picks up after the economic crisis, carbon emissions are going back up too. With China and India back on track to double their gross domestic product every decade, and with coal providing nearly 30 per cent of global energy, the chances of stabilising and reducing emissions are low. Indeed, little progress has been made in the last two decades. Only recessions lower emissions – and then only for a short time. This is partly due to the failed strategy for carbon ... |
| Mongabay: Singapore's Golden Agri-Resources, a holding of the embattled Sinar Mas Group, said it will form a partnership with the government of Liberia to establish a 220,000-hectare plantation in the West African nation, reports the Jakarta Globe. The 25-year $1.6 billion joint venture will establish oil palm estates in southeastern Liberia. Golden VerOleum, a subsidiary of Golden Agri-Resources, is leading the project, which is seeking additional outside investors. The announcement ... |
| New York Times: A bone from a bowhead whale skull rests on the Arctic shore near Barrow, whose Inupiat residents center their culture around whaling and their livelihoods, often, around the oil industry. On Thursday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had a meeting with the only people outside the gulf region whose waters had been opened to offshore oil exploration. He was in Barrow, Alaska, the capital of the North Slope Borough, where people have the same conflicted feelings about the oil industry as ... |
| New York Times: Spanish trains whisk passengers from Madrid to Barcelona in little more than two and one-half hours. Japan has bullet trains. China is building a vast network of high-speed rail routes, including the recently opened line between Guangzhou and Wuhan, which covers 1,070 kilometers at the world's fastest average speed. Soon, perhaps, the United States, with the world's largest economy will also clamber on board. So far, the United States – in spite of or perhaps because of its vast ... |
| Mongabay: Protection of forests for their carbon value through Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) schemes has been increasing in recent years. These schemes concentrate on preserving forest cover, and thus have great potential for the conservation of natural biodiversity. Some (REDD+) initiatives already specifically take biodiversity protection into account. There has been debate about the potential impacts of REDD schemes on biodiversity, given its potential to ... |
| AFP: Bjoern Lomborg, the bad boy of the climate debate who has rejected for years "alarmist" prophecies from environmentalists, stresses in a new book the need to invest billions to fight global warming. In "Smart Solutions to Climate Change," Lomborg lashes out at current policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions but also highlights the need to spend 100 billion dollars a year on intelligent research and green technologies. By spending billions in a smart way, the world could ... |
| Guardian: Transocean, the American rig owner at the centre of BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill, has been accused of compromising safety in the North Sea by "bullying, harassment and intimidation" of its staff. The allegations, in a damning report by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) seen by the Guardian, will deeply embarrass Transocean, which on Tuesday appears before a House of Commons investigation into the lessons to be learnt from the Deepwater Horizon spill. The offshore and ... |
| Associated Press: Environmentalists on Saturday praised Burger King's decision to stop buying palm oil from an Indonesian company accused of destroying rainforests. The U.S. hamburger chain giant -- which recently sealed a deal to sell itself for $3.26 billion to 3G Capital -- said Friday that it was canceling its contract with PT Sinar Mas Agro Resources and Technology over concerns it had not adopted sustainable farming practices. It cited an independent audit that found the company's ... |
| Sunday Mail: PRINCE Charles faced ridicule yesterday for taking the Royal train on a week-long nationwide tour to promote cycling. The prince has ordered the nine carriage train for a five-day, 1300-mile "green tour" of Britain, starting from Glasgow tomorrow. His trip is aimed at promoting environmentally friendly lifestyles and ethical modes of transport and he has boasted that the train will run on biofuels. But yesterday experts accused Charles of hypocrisy after it emerged the ... |
| AFP: Australia's environmental lobby is celebrating an unprecedented "Greenslide" in national elections, but it remains unclear whether new political power will translate into action on climate change. The Greens, a left-wing minority party, emerged as the big winners from the country's cliffhanger polls, doubling their share of the national vote to a record 11.5 percent and taking a critical seat in the deadlocked lower house. Jubilant leader Bob Brown called it a "Greenslide", ... |
| AFP: Increasing water pollution and dwindling water quality around the globe will be the main focus as around 2,500 experts begin gathering in Stockholm Sunday for the 20th edition of the World Water Week. "Driven by demographic change and economic growth, water is increasingly withdrawn, used, reused, treated, and disposed of," organisers cautioned in their introduction to this year's conference. "Urbanisation, agriculture, industry and climate change exert mounting pressure on ... |
| Grand Island Independent: The Nebraska State Fair is a lot of fun and a lot of food. Make that a lot of deep-fried food. Even the most health-conscious fair-goer is tempted by the many deep-fried food fancies offered at the fair. But that's all right with Robert Byrnes, owner of Nebraska Renewable Energy Systems. Robert Byrnes, owner of Nebraska Renewable Energy Systems, pours a jug of used fryer oil through a filter after collecting the oil from food vendors at the Nebraska State Fair in Grand ... |
| Age: PREMIER John Brumby has called on Victorians to support his landmark climate change law which, for the first time, has set a bipartisan, ambitious target to cut carbon pollution. ''They are big savings and will require a big community effort to achieve them,'' he told The Sunday Age after Parliament passed the bill on Friday afternoon. ''But the faster we achieve these savings, the bigger the benefits for the environment, but also people's household budgets.'' The ... |
| Telegraph: Ornithologists have found that species including the turtle dove, willow warbler, tree pipit and redstart are struggling to find enough food in the weeks before they set off in the spring to fly to the UK. The scientists believe that years of poor rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa have reduced supplies of the seeds, fruits and insects which the birds rely on to build up vital energy supplies. The finding could explain a steep decline which has led to many migratory birds being ... |
| Telegraph: The UK Met Office is leading the project to create a new set of temperature records from around the world. The move is being seen as a response to criticism by global warming sceptics of the withholding of data used in climate change research. The records, taken from land-based temperature recording stations around the world, will be made open to the public and researchers to carry out analysis to help answer key questions about how climate change will affect individual ... |
| Telegraph: They rise up high above the sun-scorched countryside, looking out over hilltop villages, palm trees, neatly-tended vineyards and olive groves. But for all their promises of a clean, green future, Italy's windfarms have now acquired a somewhat dirtier whiff - as the latest industry to be infiltrated by the country's mobsters. Attracted by the prospect of generous grants designed to boost the use of alternative energies, the so-called "eco Mafia" has begun fraudulently creaming ... |
| Nature: Meteorologists are meeting this week to hammer out a solution to one of the thorniest problems in climate science: how to make raw climate data freely available to all. The workshop, to be held in Exeter on 7-9 September, will be hosted by Britain's Met Office. It follows years of discussion within the climate-science community, which wants to draw disparate climate data together into a single, comprehensive repository to streamline research. But the effort has been given fresh ... |
| Herald Scotland: Stricter and lower speed limits, higher parking charges and a five pence per kilometre road-pricing scheme are being proposed by the Scottish Government as part of a major new offensive to cut the pollution that is disrupting the climate. The sugestions, contained in a key policy report leaked to the Sunday Herald, are part of radical plans being drawn up to meet the ambitious target of a 42% cut in carbon emissions by 2020. The government's new package of 30 "proposals and ... |
| AFP: UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has warned that a string of weather calamities showed the deepening urgency to forge a breakthrough deal on global warming this year. Speaking on Thursday before some 40 countries were to address finance, an issue that has helped hamstring UN climate talks, Figueres said that floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia and other weather disasters had been a shocking wakeup call. "The news has been screaming that a future of intense, global climate ... |
| Lexington Herald Leader: The landscapes of Eastern and Western Kentucky have little in common, but the areas share at least two things: an abundance of coal and a pivotal role in the U.S. Senate race. That means coal policies, such as the controversial "cap and trade" approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, are a key issue in the contest between Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Jack Conway. In Western Kentucky, one concern is that cap and trade would cause higher rates for electricity produced ... |
| Wichita Eagle: Attorney General Steve Six has joined Kansas with 10 other states in an effort to head off federal regulation of greenhouse gases. They seek to block federal courts from proceeding with a trial that Six says could lead to more restrictions on carbon emissions by utilities and other industries. Six announced late last week that he has joined the state to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Indiana in the case Connecticut v. American Electric Power Co. The brief asks the ... |
| Chico Enterprise Record: In windy areas of California, motorists can drive past wind farms where towering structures with propeller-type blades capture the wind to generate electricity. But in poor and remote areas of the world, where energy is needed for the most basic of resources, it's not very likely trucks with windmill building supplies will be rapidly rolling in. Students from Chico State University had these realities in mind when they designed a 15-foot tall windmill that could be built in ... |
| Asian Age: Newly detected rising sea levels in parts of the Indian Ocean have led Indian scientists to conclude that the Indian Ocean is rising faster than other oceans. Dr Satheesh C. Shenoi, director, Indian National Centre for Ocean Infor-mation Services, speaking at a workshop on "Coasts, Coastal Populations and their Concerns" o rganised by the Centre for Science and Environment, warned that sea surface measurements and satellite observations confirm that an anthropogenic climate ... |
| Asian News International: Ten of the planet's eighteen penguin species have experienced further serious population decline, warn Penguin biologists from around the world. Among the major factors contributing to the decline are, climate change, over fishing, chronic oil pollution and predation by introduced mammals.ore than 180 penguin biologists, government officials, conservation advocates, and zoo and aquarium professionals from 22 nations have convened in Boston for the five day International Penguin ... |
| Times of India: In the near future, Goa could avail of funds under the national agriculture innovation project to tide over instances of saline water entering agricultural land. The project, which is aimed at making farming more resilient to climate change, could also apply to the state as salinity in its seven major rivers is likely to increase due to a rise in temperatures. Anil Kumar Singh, deputy director general (NRM), ICAR, New Delhi, announced this to the press on the sidelines of a seminar on ... |
