Climate change

European power companies are making billions of euros in excess profits in the fight against global warming as consumers pay for it, economists say.

China will have trouble cutting its dependence on coal despite growing pressures to fight global warming, a leading Chinese official said.

China, the world's top emitter of sulphur dioxide, has managed to cut emissions of the acid-rain causing pollutant in first half of 2007, but the government said on Tuesday that meeting national targets would be tough.

Mankind's response to climate change will shift how the world gets its energy and is already making green barons out of early investors in renewable energy, clean technologies and carbon trading.

Homes and farmland drowned in increasingly severe floods are affecting some 500 million people a year and straining relief efforts, a senior U.N. official said on Thursday.

The high-level meeting would bring together the world's biggest polluters to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The world's electricity must be generated from zero or near zero-emission power plants by 2050 if a 50 percent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions is to be achieved by mid-century, Australia's Environment Minister said on Wednesday.

Most companies in China, the United States, Canada and Britain have not laid out plans to improve their energy efficiency, despite growing concerns about global warming, a survey showed on Tuesday.

Europe's plan to limit greenhouse gases by creating a carbon market may fall short. Dirty coal is cheaper than oil.

Google Inc. aims to cut or offset all of its greenhouse emissions by the end of the year, the Web search leader said on Tuesday .

As leaders from eight of the world's top industrialized countries meet this week, to speak about global development, one of the main issues on the agenda will be climate change.

Environment ministers from over 180 nations gathered on Friday in Nairobi to mark the end of a two-week UN climate summit. Delegates agreed to review the Kyoto Protocol in 2008 in order to expand the fight against global warming beyond 2012.

The German Chancellor urged security and trade co-work ahead of her nation's EU presidency.

Will the spending needed to prevent global warming cost the world more than just sitting back, or even enjoying the possible financial benefits of a hotter planet?

First Reserve Corporation, a private - equity firm specializing in the energy industry obtained on Tuesday a 50 percent interest in Blue Source LLC, a greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reducing firm.