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BBC: Todmorden, in West Yorkshire, is striving to become self sufficient by growing fruit and vegetables and keeping livestock. Some unusual spaces have been taken over to producing food, with a group of gardeners working to cultivate enough for the whole community. Jenny Hill reports.

BBC: An investigation carried out by BP said it was responsible in part for the disaster, but it also blamed other companies working on the well. BP faces billions of dollars worth of legal claims for compensation over the spill, the worst in recent US history. An estimated 4.9m barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf after the blast. The well was capped on 15 July, and an operation to permanently seal it is due to take place in the next few weeks. In the 193-page internal ...

LA Times: A November ballot measure that would rescind California's landmark global warming bill until unemployment drops significantly has become an albatross for the Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate. For months, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have struggled with competing imperatives: appeasing members of their party who want to suspend the global warming bill while wooing environmentally-conscious independent voters who could carry them to victory in ...

Associated Press: In an internal report released Wednesday, BP blames itself, other companies' workers and a complex series of failures for the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the drilling rig explosion that preceded it. The 193-page report was posted on the company's website even though investigators have not yet begun to fully analyze a key piece of equipment, the blowout preventer, that should have cut off the flow of oil from the ruptured well but did not. That means BP's report is far ...

AFP: A string of failures by BP and other companies led to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, the British energy giant concluded Wednesday as it sought to head off possible multi-billion-dollar US lawsuits. As expected in the findings of its own inquiry, BP did not admit "gross negligence" for the rig explosion in late April that killed 11 people and caused the worst ever US environmental disaster. It put a share of the blame contractors Transocean and Halliburton, but it also ...

NPR: BP is releasing a 200-page assessment Wednesday, detailing the cause of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The spill ultimately put more than four million barrels of oil into the Gulf. In addition, a new federal study finds that oil is gradually disappearing, as bacteria continue to gobble it up.

ABC: Greens MP Adam Bandt and the independents who threw their lot in with Labor have made it clear they would like to see the Federal Government take action to address climate change. In its negotiations to form government, Labor agreed to convene a climate change committee made up of MPs and experts that would work towards putting a price on carbon. The Climate Institute says it is hopeful the new Government will act more promptly and decisively than the previous Labor government, ...

Reuters: Roadside air pollution in Hong Kong hit record highs in the first six months of the year, hurting public health and economic competitiveness compared with Asian rivals, activists and lawmakers said Tuesday. The city's air quality hit "unhealthy" levels about 10 percent of the time between January and June, the highest level in five years, said environmental group Friends of the Earth. The government advises people with heart or respiratory problems to avoid lingering in ...

Sydney Morning Herald: A new face may become the federal climate change minister, with Penny Wong tipped to stand aside after a difficult tenure. Her replacement faces the tough task of crafting a new climate policy - possibly involving a carbon price - out of a hung parliament. It will be an important decision for Prime Minister Julia Gillard; climate change became Labor's Achilles heel as the party struggled to come up with a policy. Senator Wong was one of Labor's most promising MPs when it ...

ANI: Expanded irrigation might mitigate the effects of climate change in some areas, a new study has revealed. But some major groundwater aquifers, a source of irrigation water, are projected to dry up in coming decades from continuing overuse, and when they do, people may face the double whammy of food shortages and higher temperatures. "An important question for the future is what happens to the climate if the water goes dry and the cooling disappears? How much warming is being ...

Business Green: China has surged ahead of the United States in the race to become the most attractive place for renewable energy investment, according to a report today from Ernst & Young. Last year, China and the US tied for first place in the consultancy giant's annual Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Indicies. However, this year's report shows the US has dropped two points in the official league table allowing China to top the list. The US fell back after it failed to incorporate ...

Reuters: A BP Plc investigation of the Gulf of Mexico disaster played down the company's role in the world's worst offshore oil spill, seeking to share the blame with its contractors. The 193-page internal report made public on Wednesday drew fire from U.S. lawmakers and one of the contractors, Transocean, called it a "self-serving" attempt by the British energy giant to escape responsibility for the "fatally flawed" design of its deepsea Macondo well. The report threatened to reignite ...

Business Green: The agreement between the US and China to co-operate on the development of critical clean technologies has delivered some of its first tangible results this week after US Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a $125m joint US-Chinese research programme that will provide funding to two academic consortia. The funding, awarded as part the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Centre initiative, will focus on advances in clean vehicles, along with developments in clean coal, including carbon ...

Carbon Positive: Australia's confused climate policy and approach to carbon pricing has taken another turn with the formation of a new minority government on Tuesday. Following a general election on August 21 that delivered a hung parliament, a government has now been formed by an alliance between the incumbent Labor Party, the Green Party and independents including two conservative rural MPs, all of whom support to varying degrees action on climate change. Just what this means, however, for the ...

Business Green: Over 4,500 pioneering early adopters of solar and other forms of micro-generation technology could be in danger of missing out on the government's new feed-in tariff incentive scheme. An analysis of the official register of feed-in tariff installations undertaken by the Renewable Energy Association has revealed that of the 6,900 installations entering the scheme since its launch in April, an estimated 1,390 were pre-existing installations that have simply transferred into the new ...

Washington Post: I'd love to stay home in my pajamas rather than fight through traffic so I can sit in a cubicle all day. I need help convincing my boss that working from home is a good idea. How much greener is telecommuting than dragging my sorry bones to work? The Lantern has been enjoying the pleasures of telecommuting for years, and its advantages are many -- that is, unless you like vehicle exhaust, tiny workspaces, dress codes and wasting your time. Working from home is a win-win situation for ...

National Public Radio: First of two parts While much of the U.S. real estate market has been floundering, one area has not seen a dip. Green building now accounts for nearly one-third of new construction in the U.S. That's up from 2 percent in 2005, according to McGraw-Hill Construction, which tracks the industry. The numbers suggest a revolution is taking place within an industry that is historically slow to change. There are many factors -- and many players -- in this move toward green ...

AFP: Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists. In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually. Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise ...

Mongabay: Forest carbon payment programs like the proposed reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) mechanism could put pressure on "wildlife-friendly" farming techniques by increasing the need to intensify agricultural production, warns a paper published this June in Conservation Biology. The paper, written by Jaboury Ghazoul and Lian Pin Koh of ETH Zurich and myself in September 2009, posits that by increasing the opportunity cost of conversion of forest land for ...

U.S. News World Report: The "Climate-1 Stop" aims to be just what its name implies: a single place where people easily can find all the reliable information, resources and tools about climate change that they need. Click here to find out more! "There's plenty of information out there, but it's really difficult to find the one specific thing you need," said Jessica Coughlin. "You can become overwhelmed." Coughlin heads the Institute for the Application of Geospacial Technology, a nonprofit ...