Reuters: Britain’s first major bioethanol plant is now up and running, a senior official at British Sugar said on Friday. "Just over two weeks ago the first tanker came to collect the very first load of fuel," Andy Bulman, head of biofuels for British Sugar, told a conference organised by the Renewable Energy Association. British Sugar, a unit of ABF (ABF.L: Quote, Profile , Research), built a bioethanol plant in Wissington in eastern England with a capacity of 55,000 tonnes a …

New York Times: The cap of floating sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, which retreats under summer’s warmth, this year shrank more than one million square miles – or six Californias – below the average minimum area reached in recent decades, scientists reported Thursday. The minimum ice area for this year, 1.59 million square miles, appeared to be reached Sunday. The ice is now spreading again under the influence of the deep Arctic chill that settles in as the sun drops below the horizon at the North Pole …

Seattle Times: Seattle is launching a public awareness campaign to educate individuals on how to reduce greenhouse emissions and slow global warming, Mayor Greg Nickels said this morning. The campaign, called Seattle Climate Action Now, includes a new Web site and several events beginning this weekend. At a news briefing at the Seattle Aquarium, Nickels cited a favorite quote: "Because we don’t think about future generations, they will never forget us. That’s a pretty lousy legacy to …

Radio Australia: Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, Sir Michael Somare, will hold talks in New York next week with the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. Our reporter in Port Moresby, Firmin Nanol, says Sir Michael is travelling to New York at the weekend with PNG’s environment minister, Benny Allen. Sir Michael says he will ask the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to push forward recommendations on climate change from a Coalition of Rainforest Nations. Its members want …

Agence France-Presse: Australia’s once-in-a-century drought has tightened its grip on the country’s major food growing zone and could kill off the region’s orchards and vineyards, Prime Minister John Howard said Friday. In his weekly radio address, Howard said that the continued lack of rain meant permanent plantings, such as fruit trees and grape vines, were dying. "We are dealing with a genuine crisis," he said of the extreme water shortage in the Murray-Darling …

Bloomberg:  Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record this year, covering 22 percent less of the ocean than the previous low in September 2005, U.S. scientists said. Sea ice covered 4.1 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles) on Sept. 16, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado said in a statement on its Web site, using a five-day rolling average. That’s 1.2 million square kilometers less ice than the previous record — or an area roughly the size …

AAP: Environment crusader Al Gore says Australia has the chance to put pressure on the United States to accept the Kyoto Protocol. The former vice president of the United States told an elite gathering that Americans would sit up and take notice if Australia embraced the Kyoto Protocol, which addresses climate change. "Australia has a chance to exert a lot of leverage right now," Mr Gore told the $1,000 a seat dinner in Melbourne’s Docklands. He said the fact that …

Physorg.com: Drought-stricken regions of the Amazon forest grew particularly vigorously during the 2005 drought, according to new research. The counterintuitive finding contradicts a prominent global climate model that predicts the Amazon forest would begin to "brown down" after just a month of drought and eventually collapse as the drought progressed. "Instead of ‘hunkering down’ during a drought as you might expect, the forest responded positively to drought, at least in the …

BBC: The Yasuni National Park in Ecuador is reckoned to be one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. Beneath it, though, lie an estimated one billion barrels of oil. The Ecuadorean government has begun negotiating with oil companies interested in bringing that oil to the surface, although President Rafael Correa says his preferred option would be to leave the reserves untouched. Earlier this year, Mr Correa announced a one-year moratorium on oil exploration in the area and …

Reuters: Talks on global warming in the United States next week may be complicated by differences among developing countries as their climate policy positions diverge. All agree that the rich should take a lead in tackling climate change after enjoying more than two centuries of economic growth fuelled by burning coal and oil. The differences will emerge on when and under what terms developing nations shoulder a greater burden in cutting their own growing greenhouse gas …