Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency. The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 [...]

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute and Author of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years since [...]

By Daniel Gros Director of the Centre for European Policy Studies. Sometimes the most important news is what is not happening. This summer has given us one such example: the climate change bill, for which the US President Barack Obama had pushed so hard, will not even be presented to the US Senate because it [...]

HONG KONG — Even as China has set ambitious goals for itself in clean-energy production and reduction of global warming gases, the country’s surging demand for power from oil and coal has led to the largest six-month increase in the tonnage of human generated greenhouse gases ever by a single country. China’s leaders are so [...]

This analysis & posting by Michael Graham Richard of TreeHugger shows us where we are headed with our addiction to burning fossil carbon. Total World Coal Consumption in 2008: 7,238,207,000 Short Tons! When it comes to global warming and air pollution, coal is the number one enemy. We were curious to know which countries burned [...]

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said the EU has failed to convince the developing world that it is serious about global warming. Speaking in an unusually candid manner during a European Parliament hearing on Wednesday (14 April), De Boer said the UN climate negotiations in [...]

An economic assessment from APEC INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT GROUP Sooner or later, mounting losses on commercial real estate could crash through the market’s 2009 optimism and send the economy and stocks into a double-dip downturn. The major problem is that lawmakers and regulators are setting up investors into believing that commercial real estate (CRE) losses are [...]

Washington (CNN) — President Obama met with the Dalai Lama — the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader — at the White House on Thursday despite strong objections from Chinese government officials. The meeting has the potential to further complicate Sino-U.S. tensions, which have been rising in recent months. China has warned it would damage Beijing’s ties [...]

As US President Barack Obama gets ready to meet the Dalai Lama later today, news comes that China has been vigorously selling US government debt. China dumped $US34.2 billion of Treasuries Dec 2009, its fastest rate of selling in a decade. At the end of 2009, China’s holdings of US government debt stood at $US755.4 billion. [...]

Environmental activists are attacking a $60 billion deal that will keep Chinese power stations supplied with Australian coal for at least the next two decades. Under the agreement announced last week, the Australian coal and iron ore mining company Resourcehouse will build a new mining complex to give China Power International Development 30 million tonnes [...]