By Claudia Lauer
    The Los Angeles Times

    Thursday 26 July 2007

To offset emissions, individuals can buy vouchers that the Forest Service will use to plant CO2-absorbing trees.

    Washington - You take public transportation to work, use energy-saving lightbulbs and turn off the air conditioner when you're not home - but still you feel somewhat guilty that your lifestyle isn't totally pollution-free.

    The federal government may have an answer for you.

    For years, companies have been allowed to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing "carbon offsets" - vouchers for investment in alternative energy sources, tree-planting and other projects that can mitigate global warming.

    Now the idea is spreading to individuals, with the Forest Service's announcement Wednesday that it will be the first federal agency to offer personal carbon offsets through an initiative called the Carbon Capital Fund.

    "We came up with the idea because everyone is looking at what they can do in terms of climate change," said Bill Possiel, president of the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit partner of the Forest Service. "The money goes to a restricted fund for projects on national forests."

    Trees and forests are "carbon sinks," Possiel said, because they draw carbon dioxide - the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming - out of the atmosphere and store it for long periods of time.

    
    Agence France-Presse

    Thursday 26 July 2007

    Ozone in smog will accentuate global warming this century as it will damage plants and trees that help soak up carbon emissions, a study says.

    Its authors fear a major factor in the climate-change equation has been badly overlooked.

    They say ozone at ground level is damaging the ability of plants to absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and so limiting their ability to act as carbon sinks.

    As a result, more CO2 will build in the atmosphere instead of being taken up by the land, which in turn will stoke global warming and thus worsen climate change, the researchers report today online in the journal Nature.

    In the stratosphere, a thin, naturally-occurring level of ozone is a vital shield for life on earth, providing a shield against DNA-damaging ultraviolet.

    But at ground level, it is a pollutant, brewed in a reaction between fossil-fuel gases and sunlight.

    Ozone has long been known to be a risk to health by damaging the airways, but recent research has also highlighted its damaging effect on vegetation.

    
    By David Roberts
    Grist.org

    Thursday 26 July 2007

A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins.

    If politicians think in sound bites and intellectuals think in sentences, Amory Lovins thinks in white papers. His speech is studded with pregnant pauses - you can almost hear the whirs and clicks as an enormous mass of statistics, analyses, and aphorisms is trimmed and edited into a manageable length. I've talked to experts who struggle to substantiate their answers. Lovins struggles to leave things out.

    No one has done more to change the world of energy, both its intellectual underpinnings and its real-world practice, than Lovins. Beginning with a seminal Foreign Affairs article in 1976 - "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" which introduced the "soft path" to energy - Lovins shifted the focus from bigger to smarter, from more to more-with-less. He's consulted with businesses, governments, and militaries on how to achieve organizational goals using less energy and less money. His books and articles are legion; the latest is Winning the Oil Endgame, a "roadmap to getting the U.S. completely, attractively, and profitably off oil."

    This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the "think and do tank" Lovins founded. The occasion will be celebrated in early August at an event attended by, among others, Bill Clinton and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

READ ON -- THIS IS AN EXCELLENT INTERVIEW! 

    
    By Michael McCarthy
    The Independent UK

    Tuesday 24 July 2007

    Flood-ravaged Britain is suffering from a wholly new type of civil emergency, it is clear today: a disaster caused by 21st-century weather.

    This weather is different from anything that has gone before. The floods it has caused, which have left more than a third of a million people without drinking water, nearly 50,000 people without power, thousands more people homeless and caused more than £2bn worth of damage - and are still not over - have no precedent in modern British history.

    Nothing in the past hundred years, in terms of flooding caused by rainfall, has been as bad. According to the Environment Agency, even the previous worst case, the extensive floods of spring 1947, which were aggravated by the vast snow melt that followed an exceptionally hard winter, has been surpassed.

    "We have not seen flooding of this magnitude before," said the agency yesterday. "The benchmark was 1947, and this has already exceeded it." And the 1947 floods were said to have been the worst for 200 years.

    Most remarkable of all is the fact that the astonishing picture the nation is now witnessing - whole towns cut off, gigantic areas underwater, mass evacuations, infrastructure paralysed and grotesquely swollen rivers, from the Severn and the Thames downwards not even at their peaks yet - has all been caused by a single day's rainfall. A month's worth and more in an hour. It is obvious that the Government and the civil powers, from Gordon Brown down to the emergency services, are struggling to cope, not only with the sheer physical scale of the disaster itself, but with the very concept of it. It is entirely unfamiliar. It is new. Yet it is exactly what has been forecast for the past decade and more.

    
    By Frank Davies
    The San Jose Mercury News

    Monday 23 July 2007

Inaction on national greenhouse gas proposals makes state's job tougher.

    Washington - The fervor to do something about global warming has reached new heights this summer, as huge crowds worldwide vowed to reduce carbon emissions during Live Earth concerts on every continent. These days, everyone from Wal-Mart to the Vatican is going green.

    But the reality has been very different on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Last month, supporters of a plan requiring utilities to produce 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources - solar, wind, biomass - said they had more than 50 votes. But they didn't have 60, the hurdle an idea must clear in the Senate to remain alive, so that proposal did not even come up for a vote.

    The Senate did take a significant action by voting to increase fuel efficiency in new vehicles by 40 percent to average 35 mpg by 2020, long a legislative goal of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. It would be the first time Congress has imposed standards in 32 years - but so far, the House has yet to take any action.

    Halfway through the legislative year, the report card for Congress on global warming initiatives - a priority for the new Democratic majority when it took over in January - is a big "incomplete." Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, the state's two senators and both Democrats, have had to celebrate small victories: mandates for more energy efficiency in federal buildings, and a $2 million program to better measure greenhouse gas emissions.

    
    The New Zealand Herald

    Monday 23 July 2007

    Athens - Greece is now on a war footing against weather phenomena "the likes of which we haven ever seen", warns the country's Public Order Minister Byron Polydoras.

    Polydoras was speaking as countries around the Mediterranean roasted, with temperatures soaring to "furnace levels", as one meteorologist described it.

    Temperatures are likely to reach 43C in the shade this week, making this the hottest summer on record for Greece in the past century.

    Macedonia has declared a state of emergency. Spain, Italy and France are experiencing droughts that are measuring up to become the worst on record.

    According to the most recent bulletin from the French Government, the situation remains "preoccupying", with recent rain in the north failing to replenish subterranean reservoirs.

    Many politicians now fear the Mediterranean coast may soon become too hot to sustain a viable tourist industry.