Wal-Mart Aims To Enlist Suppliers In "Green" Mission

"Wal-Mart announced yesterday that it will begin asking its suppliers to measure their carbon footprint and find ways to reduce it, part of an effort by the world's largest retailer to transform itself into a more environmentally friendly company.

Wal-Mart said it would start by looking at seven categories that are ubiquitous in its shoppers' lives: DVDs, toothpaste, soap, milk, beer, vacuum cleaners and soda. It will work with the Carbon Disclosure Project, a nonprofit group of 315 institutional investors that control $41 trillion in assets, to collect data on greenhouse gas emissions, emissions reduction targets and strategies for dealing with climate change for its suppliers in those product categories." |Read more|

At Summit, Tales Of Woe Are Personal

"More than 80 world leaders brought their own tales of the ravages of global warming to an unprecedented gathering yesterday at United Nations headquarters designed to spur international action on climate change.

Pakistani leaders said they are watching aghast as Himalayan glaciers recede faster than any others. Bulgarians are experiencing never-before-seen bouts of extreme weather. Greek leaders told of the suffering from raging wildfires that killed 65 people. Residents of Ghana face chronic food shortages from unwieldy cycles of floods and drought.

Individual stories relayed by dozens of leaders hammered home the point the effects of climate change are being felt worldwide. It also heralded an emerging political will to take action, leaders said." |Read more|

Gore Wants Regular Summits On Global Warming

"The world's top leaders should meet every three months, starting next year, until a plan is drawn up to reduce emissions blamed for global warming, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said on Monday.

Gore, who has made climate change his signature issue since leaving the White House, told a U.N. meeting that presidents and prime ministers should go to Bali this year for talks on a follow-up pact to the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.

Traditionally, environment ministers or lower-level negotiators attend the annual U.N. climate change talks, but Gore said leaders should go from now on and then have follow-up meetings." |Read more|

California Governor Urges The United Nations To Move On Global Warming

"California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking to the United Nations' General Assembly, today called on world leaders to move beyond recrimination over the causes of global warming and concentrate on finding solutions.

Schwarzenegger drew an unspoken but clear distinction between California's leadership on the issue and the reluctance of the Bush administration to fully recognize climate change as a looming crisis by opening the U.N. summit on global warming with a speech urging aggressive action on limiting greenhouse gas emissions." |Read more|

Treaty In Russia Could Allow Hunters To "Kill Polar Bears"

A new Russia-U.S. treaty could allow hunters in Russia to kill polar bears, a species already under threat from global warming, WWF said on Monday.

Russian and U.S. scientists and authorities drew up the treaty to improve cooperation and standardize treatment of polar bears living across the Bering Strait -- which stretches from Russia's Chukotka region to Alaska in the United States.

But it may force Russia to reintroduce polar bear hunting, 50 years after the Soviet Union banned it, to match legislation in Alaska, said Viktor Nikiforov, WWF Russia's polar bear expert.

"It's not a treaty about hunting, it's about cooperation and management but on the negative side it is a potential gate for the reintroduction of hunting into Russia," he said of the treaty enforced on Sunday but drawn up seven years ago when global warming was less topical." |Read more|

Rising Seas Will Likely Flood U.S. History

"Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming — through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding — is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation." |Read more|

Many of the World's Largest Companies are Addressing "Climate Change"

"A majority of the world's 500 largest publicly traded companies have implemented greenhouse-gas emission reduction plans, according to a study released Monday.


The yearly report, issued by a group of investors called the Carbon Disclosure Project, looks at the effect of climate change on company value and gauges what companies are doing to manage the associated risks." |Read more|

President Bush "Bails Out" On Talks To Fight Global Warming

"Dozens of world leaders are to gather at the United Nations on Monday for a full agenda of talks on how to fight global warming, and President Bush is skipping all the day’s events but the dinner.

His focus instead is on his own gathering of leaders in Washington later this week, a meeting with the same stated goal, a reduction in the emissions blamed for climate change, but a fundamentally different idea of how to achieve it.

Mr. Bush’s aides say that the parallel meeting does not compete against the United Nations’ process — hijacking it, as his critics charge. They say that Mr. Bush hopes to persuade the nations that produce 90 percent of the world’s emissions to come to a consensus that would allow each, including the United States, to set its own policies rather than having limits imposed by binding international treaty." |Read more|

Global Warming - "Coastal Nibbling"

"Global warming -- through melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding -- is expected to cause oceans to rise by 1 meter, or about 39 inches.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps created by scientists at the University of Arizona with data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Some scientists believe that it will happen in 50 years, others in 100, still others in 150.

But on this they agree: "We're going to get a meter, and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, held in Paris. "The question is when."

How would some of the best-known U.S. places look?

Galveston

Galveston Island survived the 1900 hurricane, which killed 6,000 people and is the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. But a sea level rise of 3 feet could bring a new form of fear to this sturdy little beach city of 57,000.

Water would cut Galveston off from the Texas mainland by submerging Interstate 45, and it would cover large portions of the bay side. In addition to flooding tourist shops and restaurants, water would make a mess of the University of Texas Medical Branch, future home of a U.S. lab for some of the world's most dangerous germs.

New Orleans

If the levees broke again and the nation gave up the fight to save the lowest parts of New Orleans, the Big Easy would be reduced to a sliver of land along the Mississippi River, leaving only the French Quarter and the oldest neighborhoods dry.

"It would be to a large extent the city of the mid-19th century," said Robert Tannen, an urban planner. "The original marsh and cypress groves of the city would perhaps prevail again.""

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New Ozone Deal Is A Boost To Fighting "Climate Change"

"A deal by 191 nations to eliminate ozone-depleting substances 10 years ahead of schedule is a "pivotal moment" in the fight against global warming, Canadian environment minister John Baird said yesterday.

Delegates at a UN conference in Montreal struck the deal late on Friday. The agreement will phase out production and use of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) for developed countries to 2020 from 2030 and to 2030 from 2040 for developing nations.

The United Nations also hailed the deal, saying it could cut billions of tons in greenhouse gas emissions." |Read more|

Firms Feel Heat On Climate Change

"Here's a weather forecast for boards of directors and executives at publicly traded companies: Climate change is coming. Get ready.

Pretty soon boards and CEOs may be talking publicly about the impact of global warming on their businesses in the same way they now disclose facts about a new chief financial officer or a pending acquisition.

The premise is that climate change isn't just an environmental, or, more broadly, a human issue for the multitudes fretting about what sort of planet we are leaving our children and grandchildren.

It's a here-and-now investment issue, the argument goes, because climate change is "material" to public companies and so related issues have to be disclosed more broadly and systematically. And it's not just about power generators and other energy companies." |Read more|

Silicon Valley Executives Join Push For Hybrid Cars

"By early next year, 100 Silicon Valley business executives will be driving high-mileage plug-in hybrids, a testament to the seriousness of global warming and the earnestness of local leaders to help fight it.

One hundred might sound like a small number, but it's actually a huge step: It would more than double the number of plug-ins, which get more power from electricity than a typical hybrid, on North American roads.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group and its chief executive, Carl Guardino, who organized the plug-in push, see the plug-ins as a starting point for their broader mission: to make the region a leader in conservation, in the use of alternative fuels and in reducing global warming; and to exert the valley's influence when it comes to pushing governments and big corporations to act to solve these problems.

That is a key part of the group's 11th annual projections report, due to be released Monday. The 52-page document, titled "Clean & Green," also suggests that if 3 percent of light-duty vehicles were replaced locally by plug-ins, about 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide would be eliminated each day. Getting rid of older vehicles, increasing transit ridership and encouraging more people to walk or bike might eliminate an additional 6,000 tons of pollution daily." |Read more|

President Bush To Be Active On Climate Front

"Amid a mounting sense of urgency about the need for action to slow climate change, President Bush this week will be playing what is, for him, an unusually prominent role in high-level diplomatic meetings on how to confront global warming.

What he will not do, officials said, is chart any shift in policies that have put him at odds with much of the world on the issue.

Monday, at a private dinner on climate change held by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Bush will join about two dozen other heads of state, several from countries most vulnerable to higher temperatures and rising seas. On Thursday, he will address a White House-hosted climate change conference that will include senior officials from rapidly developing nations such as China, India and Brazil, which have been reluctant to divert economic resources to curb their rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Top Bush administration officials said the president is not planning to alter his opposition to mandatory limits on greenhouse gases or to stray from his emphasis on promoting new technologies, especially for nuclear power and for the storage of carbon dioxide produced by coal plants." |Read more|

Global Warming Could Mean More "Heart Problems"

"Global warming may be melting glaciers and forcing polar bears onto land, but doctors warn it could also affect your heart.

"If it really is a few degrees warmer in the next 50 years, we could definitely have more cardiovascular disease," said Dr. Karin Schenck-Gustafsson, of the department of cardiology at Sweden's Karolinska Institute." |Read more|