The report, Tritium on Tap, produced by the Sierra Club of Canada, warned that radioactive emissions from various nuclear plants across the country have more than doubled over the past decade. The figures were based on statistics compiled by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission which measured pollution coming from the plants. "Once in our body, tritium enters our DNA, fat, proteins and carbohydrates -- and that is where it does its damage from close range," said the Sierra Club report. "It is a carcinogen and causes birth defects."

The supply of forests for offsetting pollution in developed countries is, potentially, almost infinite. There are an estimated 90 billion tons of carbon in Brazil's forests alone, and billions of tons more are sequestered in Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and other nations with substantial tropical forests, which are considered the most vulnerable to deforestation. The world has a major stake in keeping all that carbon where it is. The question now being debated in Washington and Copenhagen is whether the fate of the forests—and their people—will rest on the ability of industries to pay for preserving distant trees rather than reducing emissions closer to home.

At the start of the Neolithic period – about 9500BC – scientists estimate that species were becoming extinct at a rate of 20-30 per year. Since the population explosion of modern humans, that is estimated to have increased to 20,000-30,000. Most have never been documented by scientists. And in a couple of decades, Wilson reckons this will have increased to 200,000-300,000. Wilson's proposed international initiative, which he has developed with Simon Stuart, the chairman of the Species Survival Commission, would document this species loss and work out how to tackle it.

Indeed, the Chinese are treating the energy technology competition if it were an arms race. China is spending as much or more on greentech as it does on its military, hundreds of billions of dollars annually on renewable energy and grid infrastructure improvements. Those investments, if not vigorously countered, will effectively erode America's greentech industry leadership and secure China's dominance. China's economic stimulus package, targeted 38% of spending on greentech, as compared to a miserly 12% of the U.S. stimulus program. By 2013, greentech will account for 15 percent of the Chinese GDP. While the United States is projected to roughly triple its wind generation by 2020, China will increase its capacity twelvefold to a wind generating capability more than twice that of America's. And, while the United States is projected to increase its installed solar generation a modest 33% by 2020, China's solar generation is projected to increase 20,000%.

If constructed, the facility will generate a generous annual profit stream for United Water. Yet, local water customers will pay for United Water’s gain in the form of the rate increases that will be necessary to address the costs of United Water’s capital investment, as well as the massive amounts of energy that it takes to run a desalination facility. Because it will draw from the Hudson River, the drinking water the plant produces may contain traces of radioactive chemicals that pose a threat to human health. The plant may also damage the local marine environments and could contribute to global warming. A desalination facility would be an impractical and damaging investment for a state trying to lower its carbon emissions.

Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found

The British Antarctic Survey found that during past periods of high carbon dioxide, temperatures in Antarctica were up to 6C above current levels. - This could cause a sea level rise of up six metres, threatening coastal cities like London, New York and San Francisco. - It is the latest research to warn of the consequences of increased greenhouse gases on the Earth's climate. - Yesterday a study warned that carbon dioxide produced by man is now rising at record rates putting the world on a pathway for a 6C rise in temperature.

""Water levels have fallen 88 cm (nearly 3 feet) this year, far exceeding normal lows," Andrade said. "This is the biggest loss in decades, and it is definitely attributable to global warming," he added. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lake Titicaca is fed by rain and meltwater from the mountains, but much of the water is being lost at an increased rate due to a rise in solar radiation in the thin Andean atmosphere. Climate disruptions from global warming have also reduced the rainy season from six to three months, said Félix Trujillo, chief of Bolivia's National Meteorological and Hydrological Service."

At the same time that various organizations involved with fossil fuels are competing to obtain profitably favorable arrangements for themselves and the respective countries to which they supply fuels, leading climate change scientist around the world are putting out an entirely contrary message. They are indicating that, very quickly, global fossil fuel dependence has to greatly shrink to avoid run-away climate change that would cause much of the world's surface to be inhospitable to life. In other words, an almost complete cessation of its use must occur fairly soon despite ever increased worldwide demand.

The global food crisis has prompted various rich countries to start buying up land in the poorer world to secure their food supplies. As well as affecting domestic food supplies in the countries affected, Sue Branford says it could be a time bomb for the world’s ability to cope with climate change. -- The day that the food starts to run out in the world may come far more quickly than most of us imagine. At present, there are more than a billion people going hungry even though there is no shortage of food. The very poor don’t eat enough because they don’t have enough money. The underlying problem is one of social inequality, of the highly skewed distribution of financial resources in the world. -- Over the next century much worse food shortages may emerge. The climate crisis is already arriving far more quickly than scientists expected and proving far more dangerous. For a while, many scientists believed that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be partly compensated for by an increase in plant growth, caused by the greater availability of CO2. But now it seems that carbon fertilization, as it is called, will not happen or will happen far less reliably than was once imagined. --- And the world destroys its biodiversity at its peril, for it is hugely important to have genetically varied populations and species-rich natural and agricultural ecosystems, particularly at times of environmental stress. - Biodiversity plays a crucial role in supplying the raw materials and the genes that make possible the emergence of the new plant varieties on which we all depend. Such new varieties will be urgently required as the world heats up.

"On a beach where dozens of turtles used to nest on a given night, scientists spied only 32 leatherbacks all of last year. With leatherbacks threatened with extinction, Playa Grande’s expansive turtle museum was abandoned three years ago and now sits amid a sea of weeds. And the beachside ticket booth for turtle tours was washed away by a high tide in September. “We do not promote this as a turtle tourism destination anymore because we realize there are far too few turtles to please,” said Álvaro Fonseca, a park ranger."

Investing billions today to protect threatened ecosystems and dwindling biodiversity would reap trillions in savings over the long haul, according to a UN-backed report issued Friday. More than a billion of Earth's poorest denizens depend directly on coral reefs, forests, mangroves, aquifers and other forms of "natural capital" to eke out a living. Unless world leaders take swift action to halt the accelerating depletion of these resources, the result could be hunger, conflict and environment refugees, the study warned.

The 2010 Ford Flex will include the auto industry's first use of wheat straw, a waste byproduct of wheat production.Wheat straw will make up 20 percent of the vehicle's two third-row storage bins, lowering the bins' weight by 10 percent, reducing Ford Motor Company's petroleum use by 20,000 pounds a year and lowering its carbon dioxide emissions by 30,000 pounds a year.Ford is already looking at expanding its use of wheat straw to other car parts like center console bins and trays, armrest liners, interior air registers and door trim panels.The use of wheat straw in the plastic bins also represents the first production-ready application to come out of the Ontario BioCar Initiative, a collaboration among Canadian universities and the auto industry to advance the use of plant-based materials.

A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada.Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers.During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost like a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage."It is one of the largest resource losses in the country," said Thomas S. Buqo, a Nevada hydrogeologist. "Nobody thought to say, 'You are destroying a natural resource.' "

Water quality in the Clinch River is already impaired, and the river cannot withstand additional pollution. Since 2002, the Clinch River has been identified by the EPA as having unacceptably high levels of mercury, chlorane and other toxins. The river's condition is even worse after the coal ash disaster last year. Nevertheless, TDEC is not requiring TVA to limit the amount of mercury, selenium or other metals that will be discharged from its new scrubber system. Under the Clean Water Act TVA should be required to help restore water quality and at a minimum to install the best available treatment technology for its wastewater. Instead, TVA is dumping essentially untreated wastewater into the Clinch River.

Chainsaws, bulldozers, and fires are the tools of rainforest destruction, but roads are the enablers which link markets to resources and empower loggers, farmers, ranchers, miners, and land speculators to convert remote forests into economic opportunities. - As William F. Laurance insists, “actively limiting frontier roads is by far the most realistic, cost-effective approach to promote the conservation of tropical nature and its crucial ecosystem services.” -- However, governments will continue with road construction to supply the world market until they realize the ultimate costs of those roads far exceed the short-term benefits, for Brazil and for the world. --- Once the ecocide is complete and the Amazon destroyed, the people of Brazil will be in a statistically similar position of development and a state of general welfare as they were before, but the abundance of natural resources that would have sustained itself indefinitely will be gone, therefore, objectively leaving them worse-off. --- --- For the most part, the development occurring in Brazil is a biological and social one-way street; where roads advance, trees fall and the inhabitants of the forest – human and nonhuman – are forever changed.

A major review of Japanese government spending could spell the end to whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, according to Greenpeace, after the review committee proposed massive cuts in subsidies to a body which funds the so-called scientific research programme.

An array of West Virginia's top political leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder Tuesday with executives from the state's top coal producers, vowing to form a united front in the face of what they call mixed signals and heavy-handedness from federal mining regulators. Gov. Joe Manchin arranged the summit, attracting U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Reps. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., and aides to Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va.

Five years ago the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency assured the nation that the technology credited with opening vast new natural gas supplies was safe. Now Congress has ordered the agency to take another look.

The IEA, energy adviser to 28 industrialized countries, said the world must act urgently to put greenhouse gases on a track to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius. Every year's delay beyond 2010 would add another $500 billion to the extra investment of $10,500 billion needed from 2010-2030 to curb carbon emissions, for example to improve energy efficiency and boost low-carbon renewable energy.