In the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean, the tiny island nation of Kiribati is creating a very large laboratory to study climate change.

The country has set aside one of the world’s largest marine protected areas, covering more than 158,000 square miles off the Phoenix Islands, an archipelago of coral reefs and atolls sandwiched between Hawaii and Fiji. The project — established by Kiribati with help from Conservation International and the New England Aquarium — is an attempt to safeguard one of the world’s last pristine coral ecosystems.

A bipartisan group of 13 House members floated legislation today pairing increased offshore drilling with a boost for energy conservation and renewable energy.

The bill would relax current bans on offshore drilling, lifting the federal moratorium on leases more than 50 miles offshore. Drilling would be prohibited within 25 miles of land, and states would have a chance to opt out of allowing leasing between 25 and 50 miles of their coasts.

The package would also lift bans on the development of oil shale, allow for the use of woody biomass from federal land and lift restrictions on military purchases of alternative fuels.

NEW YORK — A New York-based green energy fuel supplier is betting big that the practice of burning urban wood wastes to generate electricity will continue to grow in popularity in the United States, and that the Northeast’s major metropolitan areas can provide the fuel it profits from for a long time.

And in announcing its latest moves yesterday, the firm is also counting on the coming Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and a pending federal carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program to further enhance the popularity and profitability of city wood scrap.

EIF 70 NOAA

Vulnerable coral reefs off the coasts of Panama and the Galapagos Islands offer a snapshot of how reefs worldwide may respond to rising carbon dioxide levels, according to a new study.

The reefs grow in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, an area where waters are rich in dissolved carbon dioxide, which acidifies water and makes it harder for coral polyps to build their chalky shells.

As a result, the analysis found, coral reefs there are more porous — and vulnerable to erosion — than reefs that grow in other areas where water contains less CO2.

The Princeton Review released its first-ever green ratings yesterday, adding its influence to a growing list of organizations that judge campuses on their environmental friendliness.

“This is going to be a big deal, because many schools want to be recognized as the greenest of them all,” said Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, which is working on its own rating system.

“Green” ratings examine everything from promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions to efficient building standards to the percentage of dining hall food that comes from local sources. Yet a slew of top 10 lists and ratings are producing widely varied results in some cases, raising questions about what they are measuring and how they are compiled. The differing and often embarrassing results are prompting contentious commentary and new promises by college and universities to change their behavior.

India’s Green Revolution led the subcontinent out of cycles of famine and toward food self-sufficiency, but activists and scientists now say that the heavy use of fertilizers has caused a spike in cancer and other illnesses in some areas.

Punjab state — where the Green Revolution began in 1965 — consumes 18 percent of the nation’s fertilizers, although it contains only 1.5 percent of the land used for cultivation. Residents have seen a spike in cancer cases, lower sperm counts, earlier onsets of menstruation and an increase in still births in recent years.

A national law that fueled a solar boom in Germany has problems as a policy model for the United States, according to two utility representatives who recently returned from a five-day tour of the European country.

A different business and political culture in America makes the idea of a federal feed-in tariff, which would require utilities to buy renewable electricity from private developers at premium rates set by the government, a challenging prospect, the executives from Duke Energy Corp. and Puget Sound Energy Inc. explained.

As drylands get drier and violence grows, new crises resembling Darfur will arise.

The United Nations reports global warming is reducing rainfall and increasing temperatures in most and the world’s deserts.