Reuters: An oil price spike, or for that matter carbon taxes meant to curb fossil fuel use, will trigger cuts in consumption but only over several years, said Lehman Brothers <LEH.N> policy adviser John Llewellyn. Lehman published on Wednesday a climate change report which attempted to predict the likely future climate change policies, seen creating big business winners and losers. World oil prices hit a record on Wednesday at $82.5 per barrel, and there’s no evidence of a dent …

Reuters: Low sugar and ethanol prices have been fueling the debate in Brazil on how this will affect investments and the forthcoming growth in the industry, which intends to lead the world’s rush for biofuels. Projected investments in new mills are seen around 17 billion reais, but the market suffers from poor regulatory structure and a lack of long-term planning, officials said. "The industry is growing faster than a sustainable rate. That is why prices are falling so …

Scientific American: The Bush administration and a consortium of tech companies Tuesday vowed to drive down government and corporate data center energy use by 10 percent by 2011, saving about 10 billion kilowatt-hours, or roughly the amount of energy consumed by one million U.S. households annually. The forests of monolithic computer servers that comprise today’s data centers have grown into an indispensable component of modern life, crunching volumes of information and ensuring that Google or Yahoo …

Brisbane Times: The ballooning world population and the dizzying pace of technological change have helped turn mankind into an environmental "bull in a china shop", says climate crusader Al Gore. The former US vice-president said the world population has quadrupled in 100 years. Though it is now stabilising, it is still increasing in developing countries with high rates of poverty. "But it’s an important part of the explanation as to why we are suddenly the bull in the …

Agence France-Presse: UN talks to hasten a ban on ozone-depleting chemicals were mired in the nitty-gritty Wednesday, as countries tried to fix the economic costs of meeting a new timetable and funding, a UN Environment Program spokesman said. "The central aspect of the negotiations now is the envelope on the amount of money that is needed to accelerate the freezing (and) phase-out of HCFCs (Hydrochlorofluorocarbons)," UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall told AFP. "I would not characterize it …

Times (UK): Climate change is so far advanced that serious damage to the environment is inevitable, scientists told a conference yesterday. Action to limit the impact can only make the difference between moderate and severe damage rather than preventing it altogether. Scientists who a decade ago were warning that climate change would first be felt significantly by their grandchildren said they expected it to have a major impact within their own lifetimes. Some regions of the world, …

Reuters: The chairman of the U.S. Congressional Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency administrator saying the EPA erred in approving a new coal-fired power plant in Utah three weeks ago. The EPA granted on August 30 a permit for a 110-megawatt coal-fired plant to Deseret Power for the proposed Bonanza Power Plant in Uintah County, Utah. It was the first time the EPA ruled on a coal-fired power plant since the U.S. …

Guardian: The effects of climate change will be felt sooner than scientists realised and the world must learn to live with the effects, experts said yesterday. Martin Parry, a climate scientist with the Met Office, said destructive changes in temperature, rainfall and agriculture were now forecast to occur several decades earlier than thought. He said vulnerable people such as the old and poor would be the worst affected, and that world leaders had not yet accepted their countries would have …

Reuters: As rain fell in torrents onto her dirt-walled home in northern Ghana, Asubonga Apebani tried desperately to staunch the leaks in her roof. But when floodwaters swirled through her village, her house collapsed, leaving her homeless and hungry along with hundreds of thousands of other hapless Africans who have suffered a similar drenching fate across the continent’s Sub-Saharan belt. "I have no sleeping place and the grain stores also fell down. All of our crops have …

Christian Science Monitor: Can Californians cope with a court-ordered drought on top of a natural one? They’ll soon find out as they’re forced to reduce their water use for the sake of a three-inch silvery fish, the delta smelt. A federal judge ruled last month that the state must reduce its water draw on the West’s largest delta by up to 37 percent. This is to save the delta’s smelt, which was declared endangered in 1993. It can’t outswim the pumps that export trillions of gallons of water from the Sacramento …