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 ...

AP: What now for the Gulf? News of another oil rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico, so soon after the BP oil spill, has set off a wave of anxiety along the Gulf Coast and prompted calls for the government to extend its six-month ban on deepwater drilling. Just when it seemed the Obama administration might be ready to lift the unpopular ban, the fire raises new questions about the dangers of offshore drilling, leaving the industry wondering when it can get back to work. "Anything ...

Guardian: The UN has called an urgent meeting on rising global food prices in an attempt to head off a repeat of the 2008 crisis that sparked riots around the world. Seven people, including two children, were killed in Mozambique this week during three days of protests triggered by a rise in the cost of bread. There has also been anger over increasing prices in Egypt, Serbia and Pakistan, where floods destroyed a fifth of the country's crops. The UN's announcement came after Russian ...

Reuters: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Friday he cannot predict whether Royal Dutch Shell, which has invested $3.5 billion in an offshore Arctic oil-development program, will be allowed to drill the five wells it plans next year in Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. "We will be making that decision in the several months ahead," he said at an Anchorage news conference, citing pending reports on offshore drilling safety and the results of an investigation into the Deepwater Horizon ...

Reuters: Drought has cut Peru's Amazon River to its lowest level in 40 years and it is already below the minimum set in 2005, when a devastating dry spell damaged vast swaths of South American rainforest in the worst drought in decades. Scientists in Peru and Brazil say the lack of rainfall, which is typical for this time of year, should continue for a few more weeks until the start of the rainy season. But there is some concern that the dryness could persist as what is shaping up to be ...

Independent: Photovoltaic cells provide environmental benefits but unless properly disposed of they could amount to over 600,000 tons of un-recycled waste per year. The rapidly expanding market for photovoltaic (solar) cells brings obvious environmental benefits, encouraging the use of alternative energy resources and reducing the world's reliance on oil. Yet despite these advantages, the disposal of photovoltaic cells creates an environmental problem: it is estimated that 1.4 million tons ...

AFP: Greenpeace chief Kumi Naidoo on Friday likened Japan's treatment of two of its anti-whaling activists to the tactics of the former apartheid regime he once campaigned against in his native South Africa. The activists, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, face possible jail terms Monday for stealing a box of whale meat, which they later presented to media and authorities as proof of embezzlement in the state-run whaling programme. Naidoo, at a Tokyo news conference, condemned Japanese ...

Guardian: BP said today it is a fortnight away from sealing the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico for good, as it revealed that the bill for containing and cleaning up the oil spill – the largest in American history – has reached $8bn. Depending on the weather, the oil giant hopes to seal the well for good in mid-September. Since 15 July, no new oil had flowed into the gulf from the ruptured well, BP said. It continues to search for oil on the surface. The bill has steadily risen ...

IPS: Quality of life in Eastern European cities will continue to fall unless outdated systems of city life dominated by cars are abandoned, NGOs in the region say. At a meeting in Prague last week environmental groups from countries from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia said city authorities were failing to address growing traffic problems and lagging far behind the West in approaches to what has become a serious problem in some parts of the region. They said that ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

NYT: Vietnamese forestry officials seized hundreds of pounds of illegal wildlife from restaurants in a popular tourist province this week, in what was one of the country`s largest such enforcement actions. Illegal meat from from pangolins, mouse deer, monitor lizards and sambar deer was confiscated, as well as bear paws and skins from clouded leopards, binturong (also known as the Asian bearcat), and several monkey and ape species. A dozen restaurant owners were arrested, and a ...

National Geographic: Changes in the towering wall of vertical clouds surrounding the storm's eye helped diminish Hurricane Earl's intensity as it roared toward North Carolina's Outer Banks (map) Thursday morning, meteorologists say. Earl was a very intense storm with winds exceeding 140 miles (225 kilometers) an hour as it moved northward along the U.S. East Coast. But as of Friday morning, Earl had diminished to a Category 1 hurricane with peak winds of about 85 miles (137 kilometers) an ...

AP: A weakening Hurricane Earl swiped past North Carolina on Friday on its way to New England, where officials urged residents to stay vigilant even as the area threatened by storm's full force was shrinking. The storm blew sustained winds of 85 mph, a Category 1 storm, and was 350 miles south-southwest of Nantucket as of 11 a.m., according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. The storm was expected to pass about 50 to 75 miles southeast of Nantucket on Friday ...