Climate Change News

redOrbit:

Reuters: A clean-burning diesel sedan, Volkswagen AG's Jetta TDI, won the "Green Car of the Year" award at the Los Angeles auto show on Thursday, the first time a diesel-powered car has taken the industry's top environmental honor. "This signals that clean diesel has arrived," said Ron Cogan, editor of Green Car Journal, the trade magazine that awards the prize. Diesel, a conventional combustion approach long favored by Europeans, has been making inroads into the U.S. market as a ...

Reuters: Greenpeace blocked the entrance on Thursday to a Spanish nuclear power station facing closure next year and urged the government to shut it down immediately in line with election pledges to phase out nuclear power. The environmental group said 30 protesters were arrested outside Garona, the first of seven nuclear plants whose operating permits come up for renewal between 2009-11, within the mandate of the recently re-elected Socialist government. Some of those arrested had ...

Guardian: Europe today moved to join the scramble for the vast mineral riches of the Arctic being opened up by global warming, declaring for the first time that the region's resources could help stem anxiety about Europe's energy security. In what it described as "a first step towards an EU Arctic policy", the European commission issued a paper spelling out Europe's interests in the Arctic's energy resources, fisheries, new shipping routes, security concerns, and environmental ...

Business Green: Green IT systems have moved past the stage of marketing hype and are a genuine business imperative for many firms, according to a major new European survey which found that almost half of large UK IT departments now have a green IT strategy in place. The survey of more than 450 Western European firms, each boasting more than 1,000 staff and at least one datacentre, was carried out by analyst firm IDC and found that IT departments in the UK and Germany had the most progressive attitude ...

San Francisco Chronicle: Most of California's native salmon, steelhead and trout species face extinction by the end of the century unless the state acts quickly to provide adequate freshwater and habitat, according to a study released Wednesday by the state's leading salmon expert. Twenty of 31 species of the prized fishes are in sharp decline, including the Sacramento River winter run of chinook salmon, the Sierra's California golden trout and coastal coho, according to the study by Peter Moyle, a nationally ...

Reuters: The Arctic offers new energy and fishing resources as a result of global warming and new technology, the European Union said on Thursday. Melting ice also presented new navigation possibilities such as a short route to the Pacific Ocean, the EU executive said. The rapid recession of sea ice, snow cover and permafrost were helping to accelerate global warming and the loss from the Greenland ice sheet would bring a swift rise in sea levels, it said in a paper. States ...

Business Green: Outgoing US presidents traditionally use their last few months in office to leave some kind of legacy, an indelible sense of their administration's defining philosophy. It looks as if George W Bush is not about to break with tradition. If you are being generous, the philosophy Bush is attempting to enshrine as the removal vans close in on the Oval Office is one of laissez faire, pro-business, light touch regulation. To the president's critics the last few days of the Bush White ...

Guardian: Frank Asbeck knows how to attract publicity. There was the time Germany's self-styled "Sun King" offered all the country's atomic engineers a job in his solar-technology company if Germany turned its back on nuclear fuel. The colourful maverick, who within 10 years has turned his Bonn-based SolarWorld into a multimillion euro concern and one of the leading solar companies in the world, has now done it again with his offer to buy the German car-maker Opel. The 49-year-old son of ...

Environment News Service: Five large U.S. corporations and a coalition of investors and environmental groups today announced that they have formed a new organization to lobby for strong U.S. climate and energy legislation in early 2009 to spur a clean energy economy and reduce global warming. The founding members of Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy, to be known as BICEP, are Levi Strauss & Co., Nike, Starbucks, Sun Microsystems and The Timberland Company. BICEP members believe that ...