ScienceNews: The next generation of solar cells will be small. About the size of lint. But the anticipated impact: That's huge. Some of these emerging electricity-generating cells could be embedded in windows without obscuring the view. Engineers envision incorporating slightly larger ones into resins that would be molded onto the tops of cars or maybe the roofs of buildings. One team of materials scientists is developing microcells that could be rubber-stamped by the millions onto a yard of ...

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.8/55046?ns=guardianpageName=Oil+industry+safety+record+blown+open%3AArticle%3A1432973ch=Environmentc3=Guardianc4=BP+oil+spill+Deepwater+Horizon%2COil+%28business%29%2COil+%28environment%29%2COil+and+gas+companies+%28Business%29%2COil+spills+%28Environment%29%2CWildlife+%28Environment%29%2CEnvironment%2CUS+news%2CWorld+newsc5=Environment+Conservation%2CWildlife+Conservation%2CCredit+Crunch%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CBusiness+Markets%2CEnergy%2CEthical+Livingc6=Suzanne+Goldenbergc7=10-Jul-29c8=1432973c9=Articlec10=Newsc11=Environmentc13=c25=c30=contenth2=GU%2FEnvironment%2FBP+oil+spill" width="1" height="1" //divp class="standfirst"National Wildlife Federation says catalogue of oil industry accidents proves BP disaster in Gulf of Mexico is not a one-off/ppThe oil industry has been responsible for thousands of fires, explosions, and leaks over the last decade, killing dozens of people and destroying wildlife and the environment across America, according to a a href="http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/Media-Center/Reports/Archive/2010/Oil-Disasters-Report.aspx" title=""report published today/a./ppNone of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history. But the thousands of lesser offshore spills, pipeline leaks, refinery fires and other accidents demolish the industry argument that BP's ruptured well was a one-off, and that the oil and gas business has grown safer, the report's authors said./pp"These disasters make it clear that the BP disaster isn't a rare accident," said Tim Warman, who directs the global warming programme for NWF, which calls itself the country's largest conservation organisation. "These are daily occurrences. These are daily incidents of not paying attention."/ppIn a further grim reminder, the American midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster today, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River./ppEnbridge Energy, which is Canadian-owned but based in Houston, said the spill may have reached 1m gallons. Federal government officials in Washington and the state of Michigan were struggling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes./ppIn the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, while BP's oil well remains capped, a tugboat crashed into an abandoned well this week and set off a 100ft gusher of oil and gas./ppThe coastguard commander, Thad Allen, told reporters today that operations were switching from response to recovery, suggesting that equipment and personnel in the Gulf could be drastically scaled back in four to six weeks. "If you need fewer skimming vessels out there, there is going to be a levelling you need to consider," he said./ppThe report from the National Wildlife Federation drew on records from the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a figure of 1,440 offshore leaks, blowouts, and other accidents were reported between 2001-2007./ppIn addition to environmental damage, these caused 41 deaths and 302 injuries./ppThe safety record for onshore activities was even more dismal. Some 2,554 pipeline accidents occurred between 2001 and 2007, killing 161 people and injuring 576./pp"Oil and gas is being produced in 34 states across the country and it is just not being regulated to the extent it needs to be," said Lauren Pagel of Earthworks, which monitors extractive industries./ppAt times, the accidents occurred far from industrial installations such as offshore drilling rigs or refineries. In one particularly gruesome incident from August 2000, three families with young children on a camping trip in New Mexico were consumed by a 500ft fireball from a ruptured pipeline. All 12 people were killed, and an official investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board later blamed the pipeline company for failing to detect or repair severely corroded pipes./ppFour years later, a tanker truck lost control and crossed guard rails outside Washington DC, igniting 8,000 gallons of burning petrol on one of the country's busiest highways. "There was fire everywhere," the report quotes highway officials as saying. Four people were killed./pp/ppAmong the causes for the poor safety record was the industry's relentless costcutting, despite record profits, said the report's authors, describing equipment failures, tank corrosion, and other signs of poor maintenance. The poor safety and environmental records were not restricted to the so-called Big Oil companies./ppEnbridge Energy has had 400 separate spills between 2003 and 2008, spewing 1.3m gallons of crude into the environment, according to official records./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/bp-oil-spill"BP oil spill/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/oil"Oil/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/oil"Oil/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/oilandgascompanies"Oil and gas companies/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/oil-spills"Oil spills/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/wildlife"Wildlife/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa"United States/a/li/ul/divdiv class="author"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/suzannegoldenberg"Suzanne Goldenberg/a/divbr/div class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" /

Agence France-Presse: BP was to come face-to-face Thursday with the victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill during a first court hearing into the case, which is likely to become the trial of the century. The hearings in Boise, Idaho, will examine whether complaints submitted by some 200 plaintiffs can be consolidated in the wake of the three-month crisis, which has been called the worst environmental disaster in US history. A decision is expected around two weeks after the hearing, but the session ...

Yale Environment 360: Following the rocky path of climate legislation in the U.S. Congress these past years brought me back to the 1980s, and my time as a crime reporter in New York City. After a shooting in those days, a homicide detective named Marty Davin would go to the hospital and intercept the gunshot victim on a gurney outside the emergency room. If the victim was conscious, Davin would lean over and ask, quot;Who killed you?quot; That usually got the victim's attention, along with an I'm-not-dead-yet ...

CBC: Ocean warming such as that due to climate change may rearrange the distribution of marine life, harming some species, according to a new study conducted by researchers from Dalhousie University in Halifax. A newly discovered species and genus of the burrower loriciferan, found at 4,141 metres depth in the Atlantic's Guinea Basin south of Cote d'Ivoire, Africa, is seen in this photo taken during the Census of Marine Life. (Census of Marine Life) However, the study published ...

Star: Some 90% of Malaysia's corals are dead due to global warming, and the reefs may never recover unless the people switch to a greener lifestyle. Universiti Sains Malaysia marine biologist Prof Dr Zulfigar Yassin said the lack of coral reefs, which provide a home to many marine species, would lead to fewer fishes in the ocean and hurt the fishing industry. Noting that coral life depends on how long it has been exposed to bleaching and its frequency, he said that even with measures ...

CNN: The oceans have become so depleted by over-fishing, pollution and climate change that they can only be saved by a large global network of reserves, according to a growing consensus among marine scientists. Campaigners say that sea life -- particularly at the top of the food chain -- is suffering to such an extent that there will eventually be no fish left if action drastic action is not taken to protect the oceans. More than 70 percent of the world is covered by oceans. There ...

ClimateWire: What appears to be a bonfire of low-carbon energy subsidies has been lit in Europe as cash-strapped countries grapple with their empty coffers and start to cut back on what many see as over-generous support for industries from wind to solar that has created a green energy bubble. Spain, Germany, France, Italy and the Czech Republic have all announced subsidy cuts, and there are fears that the United Kingdom, making budget cuts across the board as it desperately seeks to reduce a ...

LA Times: The world's phytoplankton appear to have been disappearing at a rate of about 1% a year for the last century, researchers announced Wednesday, a disturbing long-term trend for the microscopic algae that form the basis of the marine food chain and produce much of the world's oxygen. In reporting their findings in the journal Nature, the Canadian team said that, since 1950, phytoplankton biomass has shrunk about 40%. Scientists had known the population was shrinking, but the long-term ...

LA Times: As peat fires raged on the outskirts of town, shrouding Moscow in a thick cloud of smog, residents Wednesday sought to cope with a record-breaking heat wave that is expected to intensify further. Public health officials urged workers in non-essential jobs to stay home and people not to drive their cars as weather forecasters predicted temperatures exceeding 102 degrees Thursday, in a city more used to icy spells than such heat. With more than 1,480 fires in two weeks, the smog ...

United Press International: Defiling the nameplate of Saudi Arabia at a U.N. climate change summit in Germany in June was unacceptable, environmental group WWF said. An unnamed employee of the World Wide Fund for Nature at the June meeting of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change caused a stir when the employee broke the nameplate of Saudi Arabia, dropped it into a toilet and distributed photographs of the defilement, the BBC reported. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is often the target of environmental ...

Agence France Presse: A new oil spill is sullying US waters in the northern state of Michigan after a pipeline leak sent more than a million gallons of crude into a river tributary, officials said Wednesday. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the spill began Monday when a 30-inch (76-centimeter) pipe in Marshall, Michigan burst, spewing the crude into Talmadge Creek, a waterway which feeds into the Kalamazoo River. Officials said the pipeline belongs to the Canadian company Enbridge ...

Associated Press: More than 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a federal judicial panel in Idaho is being asked to consolidate more than 300 spill-related lawsuits against BP and other companies before a single court. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation holds a hearing Thursday in Boise on whether and where to centralize the lawsuits for key pretrial rulings. Idaho is the next scheduled stop for the roving seven-judge panel. Gulf Coast residents and businesses are ...

Guardian: Ecotourism and western-style conservation projects are harming wildlife, damaging the environment, and displacing and criminalising local people, according to a controversial new book. The pristine beaches and wildlife tours demanded by overseas tourists has led to developments that do not benefit wildlife, such as beaches being built, mangroves stripped out, waterholes drilled and forests cleared, says Rosaleen Duffy, a world expert on the ethical dimensions of wildlife conservation ...

Reuters: The tide of lawsuits unleashed by BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico breaks into an Idaho courtroom on Thursday, just as the company's rivals are counting the cost of a ban on offshore drilling. Attorneys hoping to lead the legal fight against BP are set to descend on Boise, Idaho, to address a special judicial panel considering how to bring order to the hundreds of civil lawsuits spawned by the spill after a rig explosion on April 20. quot;There will be more lawyers in that ...

Washington Post: Scientists from around the world are providing even more evidence of global warming, one day after President Barack Obama renewed his call for climate legislation. quot;A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record,quot; the annual State of the Climate report declares. Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, the report said its analysis of 10 indicators that are quot;clearly and directly related ...

One News: Foreign-owned quot;carbon forestersquot; have ambitions to turn a fifth of New Zealand sheep and beef farmland into forests and that will devastate many rural towns, the national farmers' lobby says. Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson said the organisation strongly believed that farm forestry was integral to farms where suited. This made the government's axing of the Afforestation Grants Scheme (AGS) in preference to the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) quot;incredibly ...

Agence France-Presse: The first lawsuits linked to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill go to court Thursday, as BP prepared -- after months of trying -- to permanently seal its ruptured well. As the Gulf of Mexico disaster this week reached the 100-day mark with hopes high that the endgame may be under way, families of those killed in the rig explosion that sparked the disaster, and fishermen who lost their livelihoods because of it, were to face BP in court for the first time. Thursday's proceedings in ...

New York Times: What a difference an oil spill makes. Californians, whose dislike of offshore drilling dates back to the Santa Barbara spill of 1969, had begun to see virtue in new sources of oil as gasoline prices soared in 2008, polls showed. That year, for the first time since 2000, when the first poll of the state`s environmental attitudes was taken by the Public Policy Institute of California, a majority -- albeit a bare one, 51 percent -- was willing to allow more drilling off the California ...

Associated Press: An expert on marine sciences and coastal circulation says it's unlikely oil from BP's massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico will reach the East Coast. Roy He of North Carolina State University said Thursday the chances are low in part because the well is capped for now. BP expects to permanently kill it soon. He also says large amounts of oil haven't been observed in the Loop Current, which could carry oil around Florida and into East Coast waters. He also points to the ongoing ...