There's little doubt that free-market capitalism helped to get us into the mess we're in. As Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, puts it: climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen". The question now is whether capitalism is able to make amends. Can it provide a mechanism that rewards people for reducing their carbon emissions instead of increasing them? Or will it simply give big polluters a way of dodging their responsibilities?

The European Union may boost efforts to capture climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) and store it underground by pushing forward proposals for a dozen demonstration projects, EU officials said on Thursday. Carbon capture and storage (CCS), designed to trap CO2 emissions from power plants and heavy industry, is seen as a possible silver bullet in the fight against climate change, but it has not yet been proven on an industrial scale.

The European Commission urged US President George W Bush on Thursday to be more ambitious in tackling climate change while welcoming his acceptance that the United States would need to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A spokesman for the European Union executive said Bush's plan to halt the growth of US greenhouse emissions by 2025, announced on Wednesday, fell far short of the action needed by developed countries to save the planet from potentially catastrophic global warming.

With carbon markets worth more than

Patrick Getreide is an entrepreneur with a big ambition: to build the world's greenest office block. Energy Plus, his projected 70,000 square metre Paris block, will be carbon neutral and generate more electricity than it uses, saving tenants

Contrary to expectations, a microscopic plant that lives in oceans around the world may thrive in the changing ocean conditions of the coming decades, a team of scientists reported Thursday.

Although carbon-offsetting has gathered momentum as a way for companies to reduce their environmental impact, the best way to cut emissions is still to use less energy. And with oil trading at above $100 a barrel and energy bills continuing to rise, being more efficient makes financial as well as environmental sense. But many companies have yet to change fundamentally the way they operate in order to embrace energy efficiency.

The list of businesses going "green" lengthens by the day. Household names such as Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and L'Orealboast programmes to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, use natural resources more efficiently, recycle more and clear up pollution. These initiatives have gained approval from consumers and praise from environmental groups, but what will happen if the economy slows? Will companies continue to put efforts into improving their environmental credentials? Or will these green buds wither in the chill wind blowing through the markets?

Ocean acidification in response to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures is widely expected to reduce calcification by marine organisms. From the mid-Mesozoic, coccolithophores have been major calcium carbonate producers in the world's oceans, today accounting for about a third of the total marine CaCO3 production. Here, the researchers present laboratory evidence that calcification and net primary production in the coccolithophore species Emiliania huxleyi are significantly increased by high CO2 partial pressures.

The UK government has set a target for every new home to be "zero-carbon' by 2016. Given that it intends the industry to be building 240,000 new homes a year by that date, it is an ambitious target

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