Ecuador has become the first country to approve a constitution that, among other reforms, recognizes certain inalienable rights for nature.

Under five provisions in the new constitution’s Rights of Nature chapter, an ecosystem has the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution,” and “every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of [these] rights.”

An Australian immigrant from the Pacific island nation of Kiribati has asked the Australian government to assist her country in evacuating as it copes with rising sea levels.

Kiribati Australia Association member Wanita Limpus this weekend told the Climate Emergency Week rally outside Queensland’s Parliament House that climate change is destroying her home nation.

The Northeast carved a landmark path into the thorny effort to address climate change last week, attracting 59 utilities and traders to the nation’s first carbon auction, which raised $38 million for clean energy programs, organizers announced yesterday.

The auction overcame preliminary jitters to unload more than 12 million permits — the maiden maximum — that utilities will need to have for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit. Officials with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the 10-state consortium that made history with the event, were exuberant.

“It was really a flawless auction,” said Jonathan Schrag, executive director of the regional project.

With both presidential candidates vowing to proceed with aggressive climate agendas next year despite titanic economic woes, many experts are warning that those ambitious plans must be changed to reflect a diminished national appetite for new programs with hefty price tags.

“They have to keep it front and center in a way, but clearly the fiscal straitjacket already there will be strapped and pulled considerably tighter,” said Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Suddenly, a slew of Democratic governors and lawmakers are jumping on the T. Boone Pickens bandwagon, but their support for the billionaire’s ideas may be only skin-deep.

Within the past two weeks, the businessman and longtime Republican garnered support from Democratic Govs. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.), Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.), Brian Schweitzer (D-Mont.) and Brad Henry (D-Okla.). The governors, along with 30 Democratic and GOP members of Congress, signed the “Pickens Pledge,” a document calling for the United States to reduce its foreign oil dependence by a third.

BERKELEY, Calif. — China’s energy challenge is widely misunderstood by U.S. experts who wrongly view the country as an environmental disaster waiting to happen, said a leading scientist last week during a symposium on U.S.-China relations.

Mark Levine, a former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s environmental division, told a group of academics and visiting dignitaries from China that the United States views the rising Asian power through a prism of myths and half-truths that are often off the mark.

According to data released last week by an international team of scientists, China surpassed the United States in 2007 as the largest global contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

EIF 77 Eakin

The genome of a humble worm that dines on the microbial organisms covering the carcasses of dead beetles may provide clues to the evolution of parasitic worms, including those that infect humans,

People who follow genetics advances in the New York Times or similar newspapers might be forgiven for thinking that gene hunters have been on a remarkable run-that the genes that govern complex diseases have mostly been found or will be so shortly.

If you’ve seen images of it on the news or in the paper, you won’t soon forget it. Devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) causes bulging cancerous lumps and lesions to erupt around the face and neck