With military forces increasingly having to consider their environmental impact, QinetiQ has been awarded a £1.5 million, three year Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to develop and deliver PyTEC™ – an ISO containerised Pyrolysis Waste Disposal System – to the US Army.

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Taiwan coral reefs “turn black” with disease
Reuters | 06 Feb 2009
TAIPEI (Reuters) – Coral reefs off the southeast coast of Taiwan have turned black with disease possibly due to sewage discharge, threatening fragile undersea ecosystems and tourism, a study released Friday said.

Extreme weather events (It’s a global thing – not just a blizzard in Scunthorpe)
The [...]

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Trees in the western United States are dying twice as quickly as they did three decades ago and scientists think global warming is to blame.
In their surveys, ecologists found that a wide range of tree species were dying including pines, firs and hemlocks and at a variety of altitudes. The changes can have serious long-term [...]

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Is global climate leadership about to pass from Europe to the United States? It seems so. And Barack Obama’s plans to rejoin international climate negotiations, green American energy policy, and build an electricity super-grid to bring renewable energy out of the West could be a planet-saver.
Europe’s leadership on fighting climate change seemed unassailable until just [...]

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U.S. beaches were in poor health last year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, which said Tuesday that pollution in 2007 led to the second-highest number of beach closings and advisory days in 18 years.
Human and animal fecal matter were to blame for much of the pollution, the council said in its annual report, [...]

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With Hurricane Gustav on course to hit the US Gulf of Mexico coast, the damage it does to the region’s oil facilities could be a “worst case scenario”.
The stark warning comes from extreme weather impact analyst Jim Roullier, who says Gustav may be more damaging than 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

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US scientists say Britain’s new generation of coal-fired power stations would undermine climate change efforts. Photograph: Charles O’Rear/Corbis

The British government will lose its leadership position on climate change and risk scuppering a global deal to cut emissions if it presses ahead with a new generation of dirty coal power, say leading US scientists and environmental [...]

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Here in a 13,700-year-old peat bog, ecologist Ed Berg reaches into the moss and pulls out more evidence of the drastic changes afoot due to the Earth’s warming climate.
Rooting through a handful of mossy duff, Berg, an ecologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, shows remains of shrubs and other plants taking hold over [...]

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A U.S. Coast Guard cutter will embark on an Arctic voyage this week to determine the extent of the continental shelf north of Alaska and map the ocean floor, data that could be used for oil and natural gas exploration.
U.S. and University of New Hampshire scientists on the Coast Guard Cutter Healy will leave Barrow, [...]

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An operator displays a handful of corn at an ethanol plant. Photograph: Mark Blinch/Reuters

The moment of truth is at hand for US biofuels this week as environmental regulators prepare to rule on one state’s request to halve the steep national target for blending ethanol into fuel.
Texas governor Rick Perry asked the US environmental protection agency [...]

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