Britain said on Saturday it was still looking into the possibility of introducing a car scrappage scheme to boost the recession-hit vehicle industry, despite a report that the Treasury was blocking the idea.
Under the proposed scheme, cars more than nine years old could be scrapped in return for a 2,000 pound ($2,946) discount on a new car.
The amount of litter dumped on beaches across Britain has more than doubled in the last 15 years to its highest ever level, endangering the health of wildlife and humans, according to a survey on Wednesday.
The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) said its beachwatch 2008 annual survey had found an average of 2,195 items of litter per kilometer of beach, a rise of 110 percent since 1994.
Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Wednesday the upcoming budget will contain environmental measures to aid recovery from recession, including creating thousands of "green" jobs.
The government launched a campaign on Tuesday to get the public to reuse carrier bags, saying each shopper got through 13,000 bags in a lifetime.
"We simply can't continue using the billions of new plastic bags we do each year, it's such a huge waste and a visible symbol of our throwaway society," said Environment Minister Jane Kennedy.
Netherlands-based carbon project developer OneCarbon is seeking an equity injection of tens of millions of euros, including a possible takeover, the company told Reuters on Friday. OneCarbon wants to generate carbon offsets more cheaply under the UN's clean development mechanism, a strategy made more urgent by falling carbon prices and margins, said Chief Executive Jan Willem Bode.
This week the G-20 leaders met in London to discuss the global financial crisis, which is set to dominate the international agenda for some time. A parallel debate has been under way here in Bonn on another financial question, which affects an even greater systemic crisis: the funding required to tackle global climate change.
World leaders at the G20 summit disappointed environmental groups on Thursday who said their commitment to fight climate change had been vague.
The leaders reaffirmed a previous commitment to sign a U.N. climate deal this year, a step the U.N. climate-change chief said was useful, though action would be better.
The European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme was at least 40 million tons short of carbon permits in 2008, analysts said after reviewing preliminary EU data on Wednesday.
Carbon market analysts said discounting incomplete data and comparing like-for-like figures between 2007 and 2008 showed companies emitted between 40 and 100 million tons over their allocated quota of emissions permits.
The stage is set for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other world leaders to gather here on Thursday for the G-20 summit, amid high expectations that the meet would evolve a global financial rescue strategy to deal with not only the current situation but also to prevent the recurrence of such a crisis.
The summit of the Group of 20 leading high-income and emerging countries in London on Thursday seems set to achieve progress. But achievement must be measured not just against past performances, but against
