Highlights of Noah Diffenbaugh and Naomi Oreskes on Ethics of Climate Research (May 20, 2012) - YouTube

[note the planet-killing bottled water]

Agency's decision on beetle could affect Keystone XL pipeline - Omaha.com

LINCOLN — A federal agency's recent decision involving the endangered American burying beetle could cause up to a year's delay in construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, if the project wins federal approval, an environmental group said Tuesday.

This plastic bag conspiracy is a truly deadly distraction | Tanya Gold | Comment is free | The Guardian

We are using more carrier bags, news that turns this column, on a cloudy Saturday, into a prophecy of death. Look at the data from Wrap, an organisation that promotes recycling, and learn that, after a fall in the number of carrier bags used by British consumers since 2006, prompted by a sort of existential national hysteria, we now see a gentle rise of 5.4%. In 2010 we used 7.6bn; in 2011 we used 8bn for onions, old socks, and other carrier bags...
This rhetoric is rubbish too because, as the environmental catastrophe mounts, we are doing less, not more, to preserve ourselves. The British Social Attitudes Survey, which is as good a measure as any of what we are not thinking about, reports that anxiety about the environment has lessened, even as the threat has grown – 37% think environmental threats are exaggerated, up from 24% in 2000. The proportion that believe fossil fuels contribute to climate change is down from 35% to 20%. I am no statistician but I think this means that ignorance has almost doubled in the last decade. We should be proud.

NZ vents $170m under Emissions Trading Scheme | Stuff.co.nz

More than 70 per cent of carbon credits surrendered under the Emissions Trading Scheme in 2011 by New Zealand carbon emitters were bought in from overseas.

That means we're exporting a lot of cash in order to meet our carbon-reduction commitments without any compelling evidence we are getting any cleaner.

Even worse, a lot of those overseas credits purchased included ones dubbed dubious "hot air" units that have since been banned. The environmental robustness of the projects that generated them is considered dubious.