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Business Green: EBay has introduced a reusable shipping box for sellers on the auction site, in a move that the company said would not only deliver environmental benefits but would also encourage buyers to become sellers. The "eBay Box" is designed to be reused over and over again, allowing users of the site to significantly cut down on packaging waste. The box is made of 100 per cent FSC-certified and recycled material, printed with water-based inks, and is designed to require minimal ...

AFP: British oil giant BP revealed Friday it has so far spent eight billion dollars to battle the Gulf of Mexico disaster, as its crews retrieved key evidence from the seabed. Robotic submarines recorded the delicate operation as engineers raised a failed blowout preventer from the ruptured well and began lifting it to the surface in order to hand it over to the US Justice Department. The US government is conducting what could be a criminal investigation into the April 20 explosion ...

Independent: The global effort to reach a legally binding agreement on tackling climate change has stalled. There is little prospect of a quick breakthrough when the negotiators reconvene at Cancun in Mexico in December. Nor is it likely that there will have been much progress by the time they meet again in Cape Town a year later. An ocean of ink and a lot of finger pointing has been offered to explain the near collapse of the Copenhagen talks last year. Much attention has been paid to the ...

NYT: An oil rig caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, forcing workers to dive overboard to escape the flames, and sending chills through a region just beginning to recover from one of the worst oil spills in history. For many, the images of smoke and flames engulfing the rig recalled the fire that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig back in April and set off an uncontrollable undersea oil leak that lasted for nearly three months. Yet despite some superficial resemblances to the ...

Guardian

Business Green: The US government has announced almost $9m (£5.8m) of fresh funding to support research into second-generation cellulosic biofuels that do not affect food supplies. The research grants, to be administered by the Departments of Agriculture and Energy, will help to increase US independence from foreign oil, officials said. The two departments will award $8.9m in grants to teams researching how to generate energy from lignocellulosic material. Researchers claim lignocellulosic ...

AFP: Oil giant BP revealed Friday it has so far spent 5.1 billion pounds to battle the Gulf of Mexico disaster, as its crews worked to retrieve key evidence from the seabed. Robotic submarines recorded the delicate operation as engineers sought to raise a failed blowout preventer from the sunken rig to the surface and hand it over to the US Justice Department. The US government is conducting what could be a criminal investigation into the April 20 explosion and subsequent oil spill ...

Press Association: The UK's greenhouse gas emissions have risen in the past two decades rather than declined, because of the carbon "embedded" in imported goods, the government's chief environment scientist has said. Speaking in a documentary to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 next week, Professor Bob Watson said there was a need to be more open about the rises in emissions generated by-products made in places such as China but destined for the UK market. Under the current system of counting ...

Guardian: In recent years the electronics industry has gained notoriety for creating an endless stream of disposable products that make their way at life's end to developing countries, where poor people without safety gear cut and burn out valuable materials, spilling contaminants into their water, air, and lungs. Solar modules contain some of the same potentially dangerous materials as electronics, including silicon tetrachloride, cadmium, selenium, and sulfur hexafluoride, a potent greenhouse ...

AFP: Proposed US limits on offshore oil drilling could hurt BP's ability to pay for damages stemming from the huge Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a company executive said in an interview Friday. David Nagle, executive vice president for BP America, told the New York Times that legislation pending before Congress could have an impact on the company's ability to compensate losses from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Of particular concern is a bill passed by the House of Representatives on ...

Carbon Positive: The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen by almost half over the past year, according to government data. The figures are only preliminary and need to be confirmed with satellite data, but indications are that the estimate of a 47.5 per cent decline in lost forest area in the period August 2009 and August 2010 is close to the mark. Deforestation of tropical forests is a major contributor to greenhouse emissions worldwide. Forest loss adds billions of tonnes of ...

Reuters: The United States reiterated on Friday that it was committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 even though the Senate has failed to pass legislation. "I am in no sense writing off legislation over time. And I'm quite sure the president isn't," U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern told a news conference during two days of talks in Geneva among about 45 nations reviewing climate finance. He said Washington would rely on a combination of regulation by the Environmental ...

Reuters: A website launched on Friday will help track whether rich countries are keeping a pledge to come up with $30 billion in climate aid for the poor, seen by the U.N. as a "golden key" to progress in talks on global warming. The United Nations-backed site (www.faststartfinance.org) so far lists cash promises by 6 European donors including Germany and Britain and 27 recipients from Bangladesh to the Marshall Islands. Many of the developing nations have blank entries on the amount of aid ...

Wheels: Anthony Haines looks toward the imminent arrival of the electric car with enthusiasm and apprehension. Why? As chief executive of Toronto Hydro, he has to run the wires that, in a few years, will charge up the batteries of thousands of cars across the city. And he knows that right now, he can't do it. "If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails," Haines told an audience at Ryerson University ...

Vancouver Sun: British Columbians may know that green power is good power, but homeowners are shying away from alternative sources such as solar panels because of high installation costs and the inexpensive option of hydro electricity. The head of a Victoria alternative energy company says that at current energy prices, it makes little sense for homeowners served by the BC Hydro grid to convert to solar power for their home electricity. "You're looking at between 60 and 80 years for a return ...

UPI: Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may threaten climate change and be bad news for humans but poison ivy likes it, U.S. researchers say. A report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives last year said the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has grown by 22 percent since 1960, not so good for humans but great for poison ivy and other vines, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. In a study in Durham, N.C., a researcher simulated the carbon dioxide content in the air 50 ...

AAP: THE world is facing a mass extinction event that could be greater than that of the dinosaurs, new Australian research shows. Macquarie University palaeobiologist Dr John Alroy used fossils to track the fate of major groups of marine animals throughout the Earth's history. He compiled data from nearly 100,000 fossil collections worldwide, tracking the fate of marine animals during extreme extinction events some 250 million years ago. The findings, published this week in ...

Economist: IT IS what passes for a winter's day in upstate São Paulo. The sun is blazing from a blue sky feathered lightly with cirrus cloud. In a large, sloping field overlooking the city of Piracicaba, a mechanical harvester chomps through a stand of three-metre-high sugar cane, fat and juicy from months of sunshine. The harvester slices the cane into 20cm chunks and regurgitates them into a 30-tonne trailer moving alongside that will lug them a few kilometres to the Costa Pinto mill (pictured). ...

Financial Times: Wheat prices rose further on Friday in the wake of Russia's decision to extend its grain export ban by 12 months, raising fears about a return to the food shortages and riots of 2007-08. In Mozambique, where a 30 per cent rise in bread prices triggered riots on Wednesday and Thursday, the government said seven people had been killed and 288 wounded. Vladimir Putin's announcement on Thursday extended an export ban first introduced last month until late December 2011, sending ...

NPR: Reporting in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers write that organically grown strawberries contain more antioxidants and vitamin C than conventional berries. Ira Flatow and guests discuss the findings, and whether the differences would have any meaningful impact on Americans' health.