By Julian Borger
    The Guardian UK

    Saturday 23 June 2007

Drought and advancing desert blamed for tensions. Chad and southern Africa also at risk from warming.

    The conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and environmental degradation, which threaten to trigger a succession of new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage, according to a UN report published yesterday.

    "Darfur ... holds grim lessons for other countries at risk," an 18-month study of Sudan by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) concludes.

    With rainfall down by up to 30% over 40 years and the Sahara advancing by well over a mile every year, tensions between farmers and herders over disappearing pasture and evaporating water holes threaten to reignite the half-century war between north and south Sudan, held at bay by a precarious 2005 peace accord.

    The southern Nuba tribe, for example, have warned they could "restart the war" because Arab nomads - pushed southwards into their territory by drought - are cutting down trees to feed their camels.

    The UNEP investigation into links between climate and conflict in Sudan predicts that the impact of climate change on stability is likely to go far beyond its borders. It found there could be a drop of up to 70% in crop yields in the most vulnerable areas of the Sahel, an ecologically fragile belt stretching from Senegal to Sudan. "It illustrates and demonstrates what is increasingly becoming a global concern," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director. "It doesn't take a genius to work out that as the desert moves southwards there is a physical limit to what [ecological] systems can sustain, and so you get one group displacing another."

    
    By Chris Buckley
    Reuters

    Friday 22 June 2007

    Beijing - China said on Thursday it was unfair for rich countries to buy its cheap goods and then condemn its greenhouse gas pollution, a day after one study suggested the nation was already the world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter.

    China's growing greenhouse gas emissions are under a glare of international attention as nations prepare to seek a climate change treaty after the Kyoto Protocol targets expire in 2012.

    Many experts and foreign politicians say an effective new deal needs China to accept specific emissions goals, if not restrictions, which the Protocol does not now demand.

    But China's Foreign Ministry spokesman said Western countries needed to consider his country's role as a low-cost export powerhouse that in effect helps rich Western consumers avoid emissions at home.

    "China is now the factory of the world. Developed countries have transferred a lot of manufacturing to China. What many Western consumers wear, live in, even eat is made in China," spokesman Qin Gang told a regular news briefing.

    "On the one hand, you want to increase this production in China. On the other hand, you want to condemn China over the issue of emissions reductions. This is unfair."

    
    By Jessica Lee
    Indypendent

    Monday 18 June 2007

As the earth warms and politicians remain complacent, an international group gaining traction in the US is fighting back.

    Near the town of Carbo in western Virginia on July 10, 2006, 75 people stood on a bridge between massive coal trucks and the Clinch River power plant. Owned by American Electric Power, the plant is responsible for emitting 4.25 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the air annually. As the coal trucks stopped, two people locked themselves to the trucks' frame. They flattened the tires of the coal trucks and prevented them from moving forward. The demonstration resulted in closing the only access to the power plant for most of the day.

    Meet the group Rising Tide.

    Rising Tide is a grassroots network that encourages nonviolent action to confront the root causes of climate change by promoting local, community-based solutions.

    The movement was born in the Netherlands in 2000 in order to bring a radical voice to U.N. climate talks, that failed to salvage what was left of the Kyoto Protocol. Employing popular education and with a focus on climate justice, Rising Tide now spans three continents - North America, Europe and Australia.

    In North America, Rising Tide's strategy is "a no-compromise approach of stopping the extraction of more fossil fuels and preventing the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure." The group adds, "we must phase out our current fossil fuel use and make a just transition to sustainable ways of living."

   
    By Sholnn Freeman
    The Washington Post

    Friday 22 June 2007

    The Senate passed a sweeping energy legislation package last night that would mandate the first substantial change in the nation's vehicle fuel-efficiency law since 1975 despite opposition from auto companies and their Senate supporters.

    After three days of intense debate and complex maneuvering, Democratic leaders won passage of the bill shortly before midnight by a 65 to 27 vote.

    The package, which still must pass the House, would also require that the use of biofuels climb to 36 billion gallons by 2022, would set penalties for gasoline price-gouging and would give the government new powers to investigate oil companies' pricing. It would provide federal grants and loan guarantees to promote research into fuel-efficient vehicles and would support test projects to capture carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants to be stored underground.

    Democratic leaders said they hoped the legislation will be a rallying point for voters concerned about national security, climate change and near-record gasoline prices.

    "This bill starts America on a path toward reducing our reliance on oil by increasing the nation's use of renewable fuels and for the first time in decades significantly improving the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks," said Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader.

   
    By Steve Connor
    The Independent UK

    Tuesday 19 June 2007

... and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change. Those are not the words of eco-warriors but the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

    Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

    They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

    Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in "imminent peril".

    In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world's leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the "gravest threat" of climate change.

    "Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures," the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add.

    
    By Alistair Lyon
    Reuters

    Monday 18 June 2007

    Beirut - If rising sea levels force the people of the Maldive Islands to seek new homes, who will look after them in a world already turning warier of refugees?

    The daunting prospect of mass population movements set off by climate change and environmental disasters poses an imminent new challenge that no one has yet figured out how to meet.

    People displaced by global warming - the Christian Aid agency has predicted there will be one billion by 2050 - could dwarf the nearly 10 million refugees and almost 25 million internally displaced people already fleeing wars and oppression.

    "All around the world, predictable patterns are going to result in very long-term and very immediate changes in the ability of people to earn their livelihoods," said Michele Klein Solomon of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM).

    "It's pretty overwhelming to see what we might be facing in the next 50 years," she said. "And it's starting now."

    People forced to move by climate change, salination, rising sea levels, deforestation or desertification do not fit the classic definition of refugees - those who leave their homeland to escape persecution or conflict and who need protection.