Reposted with permisson from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. The original article can be viewed at Denmark's COP15 website. By Marie Sauer-Johansen First priority is security – especially if Heads of States and Governments are going to participate. Unfortunately, there just aren't that many armoured limousines that are environmentally friendly. If, for example, Obama is here, it simply isn't safe enough to drive him around in a car like the Toyota Prius – although it's a great hybrid car. Secondly, practicalities must not stand in the way of achieving a good conference result. For example, some delegates prefer (more...)

By GreenerDesign Staff Wal-Mart and Kmart are adding full lines of organic jeans made by Washington-based Greensource to their private label clothing lines. Greensource provides T-shirts, jeans and other apparel made from a variety of greener sources, including organic cotton, bamboo and recycled polyester. The cotton Greensource uses is grown in accordance with organic standards, and how the company processes and manufactures the jeans meets the voluntary Global Organic Textile Standard. All five of the company's manufacturing facilities have been certified to the standard. Wal-Mart's Faded Glory label and Kmart's Route 66 brand will each offer men's, women's and children's (more...)

Climate Biz: By Tom Stoddard Offsetting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is like public education: Everyone is an expert on it, and opinions are posted all over the Internet like celebrity photos. In GHG compliance markets, governed by treaty and law, strict criteria are put in place to define what types of offset projects are acceptable and what conditions -- real, permanent, additional, etc. -- they must meet. Not everyone agrees with the rules. Discussions of additionality are tortuous. There are inevitable reports of imperfections in projects resulting from the protocols that are now in place. Nonetheless, projects designed to create (more...)

New York Times By STEFAN MILKOWSKI ~ TOKSOOK BAY, Alaska — Beyond the fishing boats, the snug homes and the tanks of diesel fuel marking this Eskimo village on the Bering Sea, three huge wind turbines tower over the tundra. Their blades spin slowly in a breeze cold enough to freeze skin. One of the nation’s harshest landscapes, it turns out, is becoming fertile ground for green power. As interest in cleaning up power generation grows around the country, Alaska is fast becoming a testing ground for new technologies and an unlikely experiment in oil-state support for renewable energy. Alaskans (more...)

Financial Times~ By Clive Cookson in Chicago The world is warming far more quickly than scientists forecast just two years ago when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its last reports, according to a series of assessments presented over the weekend. Chris Field of Stanford University, a senior member of the IPCC, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the unexpectedly rapid increase in the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, since 2000 would have dire consequences because of "feedback loops" in the global -climate. "We are looking now at a future (more...)

Reuters~ SOMETIMES it is worth looking at the big picture. That is the idea behind monitoring greenhouse gases from space. In January the Japanese space agency, JAXA, launched Ibuki, the first satellite dedicated to monitoring carbon dioxide and methane. Later this month the American space agency, NASA, is due to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which is also designed to monitor carbon dioxide. The new satellites will work as carbon accountants by keeping a close eye on how the Earth breathes and returning regular audits. Ibuki, which means “breath” in Japanese, orbits the Earth approximately every 100 minutes at (more...)