Search Results for: Environmental Health⊂mit=Search

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A PETITION from the US states of California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, plus the District of Columbia and New York City has called for a cap-and-trade system on aviation emissions from flights to US airports.…

BY MARK ROWE

WHICHEVER way you look, the oil and gas sector is investing in biofuels. The larger energy companies – driven by an eye for a new and potentially lucrative market as well as shareholder concern and governmental and international political pressure – are investigating both first and second generation biofuels.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL and MONICA DOBIE

THE EUROPEAN Parliament’s environment committee wants European Union (EU) rules to insist that biofuel production is environmentally sustainable. The call was made in amendments tabled to proposed reforms from the European Commission to the EU’s fuel quality directive, which insists on certain standards for petrol and diesel.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

THE INTERNATIONAL Formula Council (IFC) has dismissed safety fears about liquid infant formula following claims by the Washington DC-based Environmental Working Group (EWG) that the food is sold in cans lined with bisphenol A (BPA) a chemical that mimics the hormone estrogen, posing a potential health threat to infants.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

MEMBERS of the European Parliament have called for a "common-sense" easing of "complicated" spot-checks on food industry suppliers, required for the payments of European Union (EU) subsidies. These checks cover food health standards, livestock welfare, environmental production controls and others, but a parliament motion agreed that since they were introduced in 2003, they have "proved very complicated to manage", especially for local regulators and small-scale farmers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

SPACE maybe called the final frontier on TV, but for mining industry and environmentalists, bragging rights must surely go to the ocean deeps – the most inaccessible and unexplored regions on Earth. Speculation has been continuing for decades about the potential mineral riches on ocean floors, however there have always been four obvious problems about extracting them: noone really knows what is down there; the expense of prospecting for such minerals could be prohibitive; there is yet no comprehensive internationally agreed legal regime covering potential work in international waters; and there are risks it could cause irreparable damage to ecosystems that are barely understood.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

GERMAN scientists have warned that European Union (EU) water pollution controls could be undermined by growing energy crop production, because of the resulting additional load of pesticides into watercourses. The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), of Leipzig, Halle and Magdeburg, has called for reforms to the EU’s water framework directive to help.…

BY LARS RUGAARD, in Copenhagen

REPUTEDLY immense riches looming below the glaciated surface of the Arctic Ocean have come within human reach because climate change is gradually thawing the world’s previously frozen-stiff polar regions. But this consequence of a milder physical climate has provoked tension between the countries with an Arctic Ocean, creating echoes of the long defunct cold war, and indicating a long and tough legal and political fight for what could be an important addition to the Earth’s undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

ACTIVE European Commission support and stubbornness in foreign trade talks is required to defend Europe’s shaky clothing and textile sector against a flood of foreign imports, the European Parliament has said.

In a comprehensive policy statement, MEPs effectively said textile and clothing manufacturers should not be offered as sacrificial lambs to strike an agreement at the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Doha Development Round.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

AN EXPERT group including the Federation of European Publishers is pressing towards the launch next November of a prototype European digital library, giving access online to records of Europe’s cultural treasures. The aim is to include digitised versions of at least 2 million digital books, photographs, maps, archival records, and film material from Europe’s libraries, archives and museums.…