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The European commission will set out new laws next week to impose swingeing limits on greenhouse gas emissions from EU heavy industries in a move that could prompt some of these to relocate lock, stock and barrel overseas.

Climate change is used to justify the most insane political decisions, but for once it is used for a sensible decision. Although there is no direct link between climate change and the drought in Australia, the Aussies have decided to give plants bred with molecular plant breeding techniques (a.k.a. GMO's in politically correct greenspeak) a chance. The problem in Australia is that irrigation has led to droughts and high salinity, but we can blame global warming. As long as they give plant biotech a chance, I really don't care what reason they give.

With the Interior Department failing to meet Wednesday's deadline to decide whether to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, environmental groups say they are ready to take the federal government to court over the matter.

Scientists have discovered that glaciers survived for hundreds of thousands of years during an era when crocodiles roamed the Arctic, reports Roger Highfield.

Last week I asked if there were any good weather omens to look for. I raised a question originally posed by Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado: Are there any indicators in the next 1, 5 or 10 years that would be inconsistent with the consensus view on climate change?

Lab readers contributed some ideas (and much invective), but I think the most useful one came from a climate scientist who wrote directly to Dr. Pielke and suggested comparing what has happened since 2000 with the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It's not who you think. One report identifies a toymaker and cruise operator among firms most at risk for not telling shareholders enough.

Yesterday the Center for Climate Strategies finally got their standard stock of alleged greenhouse gas-reducing ideas evaluated by real economists, and it isn’t pretty.

In an apparent attempt to blunt criticisms from folks like the free-market, limited-government John Locke Foundation (until recently my employer) in Raleigh, CCS enlisted the Energy Center at Appalachian State University to do what they call an economic analysis of a batch of CCS’s recommendations in North Carolina. In 2005 ASU had come up with a study model – called the North Carolina Energy Scenario Economic Impact Model (NC-ESEIM) — to analyze effects on jobs, incomes, Gross State Product and energy use. This was not, as CCS executive director Tom Peterson recently said in a legislative committee meeting, a cost-benefit analysis, but simply a study to try to determine the impacts on employment and GSP.

CCS and ASU, thanks to their economic model, made ludicrous claims that forcing the use of huge energy inefficiencies would also add 23,500 jobs annually to the economy and raise Gross State Product by $1.47 billion. Knowing this was not possible, the Locke Foundation called upon the Beacon Hill Institute’s PhD economists to do a peer review of the ASU economic model, and not surprisingly, BHI found their methodology lacking:

The NC-ESEIM also makes unduly optimistic assumptions about the future course of cost reductions in the production of energy from renewable sources, and is too sanguine about the potential for state spending to trigger private investment, and influence individual behavior, in energy conservation.

We are just beginning the great debate about the extent to which, and how, state governments should pursue policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Appropriate formal models to measure the economic impact of such policies will have an important role to play in this process, but it is essential that such models be credible and testable. The NC-ESEIM model falls short of this standard.

This is what happens when, as ASU has done, you have a political science graduate student as the chief author of your economic study. The full BHI peer review is online at the Locke Foundation Web site.

Britain expects the cost of handling the waste and decommissioning of a new generation of nuclear reactors to add about one percent to the cost of power produced, a source familiar with government thinking said.

And the amount trickling down to consumers' bills will be smaller still.