MORE than a billion ”phantom” plastic bags are floating around Australia, or being compressed in landfill sites, according to confidential industry data which shows bag use is far higher than official figures indicate. The number of bags being handed out at supermarket chains has been underestimated by 30 per cent in some cases. But data [...]

SPIEGEL: Isn’t Obama’s plate too full? He conducts war in Iraq and Afghanistan, he wants to close Guantanamo, he is trying to reform the health care system, he is promising progress on climate change and wants to strengthen, almost in passing, the rights of trade unions and homosexuals. Isn’t that too much change for a [...]

In a SPIEGEL interview, former US vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, 61, discusses Barack Obama’s environmental policies, the endless push by lobbyists to derail reforms and his hopes for a global deal at the climate change summit in Copenhagen next month. SPIEGEL: Mr. Vice President, you write in your new book, [...]

International negotiators lost one of the key elements to a successful deal on global warming today after Democratic leaders in the US Congress ruled out passing a climate change law before 2010. In the latest obstacle on the road to the UN summit in Copenhagen next month, Senate leaders ordered a five-week pause to review [...]

With leading climate scientists in agreement that the targets on the table are too low, there’s doubt hanging over Copenhagen, writes David Spratt Right now, the global community is supposed to be negotiating an agreement to contain greenhouse gas emissions to manageable levels. With less than five weeks until the Copenhagen summit, however, the major [...]

Agriculture is responsible for a huge chunk of Australia’s greenhouse emissions, so why is it being treated as not negotiable in our efforts to address climate change? Few Australians would link images of our hardworking, independent farmers on tractors with greenhouse gas pollution — certainly not in the way that we do with sooty coal miners [...]

Report Melting Arctic Ocean Raises Threat of ‘Methane Time Bomb’ Scientists have long believed that thawing permafrost in Arctic soils could release huge amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Now they are watching with increasing concern as methane begins to bubble up from the bottom of the fast-melting Arctic Ocean. by Susan Q.Stranahan For [...]

Adapted from the book ZERO Greenhouse Emissions – The Day the Lights Went Out – Our Future World. The book contains many unknown facts that should be understood by the person in the street. I have chosen to write it in language and in a manner that combines some poetic licence with a fictional element [...]