Mongabay: A new online magazine will take a "biocentric" perspective to the planet’s environmental problems. Ecological Internet, a pioneering environmental campaign group, published its first issue of New Earth Rising on Sunday. The issue includes original essays on climate change, water scarcity, over-consumption of Earth’s resources, and deforestation. "New Earth Rising intends to be at the vanguard of bright green thought and a movement committed to ecological truth-telling that …

Mongabay: The Maldives will establish a trust fund to buy a homeland abroad once rising sea levels swamp the island nation, says Mohamed Nasheed, president-elect of the Maldives. The funds would come from the country’s revenue from tourism. "Global warming and environmental issues are issues of major concern to the Maldivian people. We are just about three feet above sea level," Ibrahim Hussein Zaki, Mr Nasheed’s spokesman, told the BBC’s World Today program. "So any sea level rise could have a …

Reuters: A U.S. utility group announced on Monday a plan to test adding solar thermal energy to natural gas and coal-fired power plants in a move designed to cut fuel costs and greenhouse gas emissions. The Electric Power Research Institute said Dynegy Inc and NV Energy will host case studies of the technology at natural gas plants in Arizona and Nevada, respectively. Both projects will add steam generated by a solar thermal field to a conventional natural gas-powered steam cycle, EPRI …

Scientific American: Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there’s more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth’s polar environments host rich webs of plants and animals–and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime. A warming global climate may favor species that don’t intimately depend on ice that floats on the sea to hunt or are more versatile in what they can eat as well as those able to thrive in higher temperatures. …

Reuters: As the United States attempts to lower carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation, it needs a national policy on climate change to help ensure reliable power delivery, said the U.S. watchdog for electric reliability. Included in such a plan is the need to smoothly develop a transmission grid backbone that can handle new types of power generation such as wind-generated power. "Inadequate attention to the transmission grid will undermine all efforts to address climate …

Guardian: We seem to know less about methane emissions than we thought. After a decade of stability, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising strongly in the last 18 months. Early research work suggested that this rise was concentrated in the northern latitudes of the northern hemisphere and was consistent with greater emissions from decaying organic matter in melting permafrost or from the melting of Arctic sea ice. Now this result has been called into question by the …

Business Green: BP has delivered another significant blow to the UK government’s clean energy strategy, confirming that it has pulled out of the bidding to build a demonstration carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant. The oil giant announced last week that it would not be investing in the UK’s wind energy sector in the foreseeable future and would instead focus on projects in the US where it claims projects offer better returns. Now it has confirmed that it is pulling out of the competition to …

Scientific American: It is said that the Inuit have many words for snow, but when it comes to the Northwest Passage only one type of frozen water matters: multiyear ice. It can slice through the hull of a ship like a knife through butter and it persists in the passage’s waters despite unprecedented warming in the Arctic Ocean, thwarting shippers in search of a shortcut between Europe and Asia. The fabled Northwest Passage has made headlines ever since it thawed last year for the first time. For three …

Business Green: US scientists have identified a technique that could trap up to four billion tonnes of carbon emissions a year underground by harnessing a natural reaction between carbon dioxide and the rock peridotite that converts the gas into minerals such as calcite. Geologists have known for some time that peridotite — a naturally occurring rock that makes up most of the Earth’s mantle and has been forced to the surface by tectonic activity in Oman, Papua New Guinea, Caledonia, and some areas …

Reuters: Environmentalists on Monday applauded an announcement that U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama would consider curtailing oil and gas drilling in some areas, and expressed hope future energy policy decisions would contain more environmental protections. The co-chair of Obama’s transition team, John Podesta, said on Sunday that Obama probably would reverse an executive order by President George W. Bush allowing drilling in fragile lands in Utah. Mike Daulton, legislative director …