Pre-release Jan 2012
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A number of UK business leaders have called for "urgent and comprehensive" measures from the main political parties to tackle climate change.
UK | Bosses urge climate change action
Why are we asking this now? Two hugely ambitious power-generating schemes have been launched in recent weeks, one offering to create the world's largest solar farm and the other to create the biggest hydroelectric dam on the planet. In both cases the location for the mega-projects is Africa: the solar-power scheme envisages harnessing the sun in the Moroccan and/or Algerian Sahara; while the hydroelectric plan centres on damming the mighty Congo River.
The Big Question: Should Africa be generating much of Europe's power? - Africa - World
Decoupling Report
Decoupling natural resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth “People believe environmental ‘bads’ are the price we must pay for economic ‘goods.’ However, we cannot, and need not, continue to act as if this trade-off is inevitable"
Political parties have been vying to offer the biggest tax cuts as the credit crunch tightens its grip on Britain. In their view, low taxes are now the best way to get the economy going and to help out families. Cutting or keeping taxes low has always proved popular with the electorate: in 1992 the Conservatives' election campaign slogan 'Labour's tax bombshell' made the most of the then shadow Chancellor John Smith's intention to increase the higher rate of tax from 40 to 50 per cent.
Sweden: Where tax goes up to 60 per cent, and everybody's happy paying it | Money | The Observer
Why Scandinavia can teach us a thing or two about surviving a recession | Society
High numbers of Swedes are employed in the public sector, such as this nurse in a Stockholm hospital. Photograph: Graham Turner According to liberal thinkers, Scandinavian countries should have drowned in the current economic crisis with their bloated public sectors and a nanny-state mentality that stifles individual creativity.
What does Canada's withdrawal from Kyoto protocol mean? | Adam Vaughan | Environment
Canada's environment minister, Peter Kent, announces that Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto accord, outside the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario. Photograph: Fred Chartrand/AP It's been four years in the offing, but Canada on Monday finally and formally withdrew from the world's only existing legal treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the Kyoto protocol .Sweden's carbon-tax solution to climate change puts it top of the green list | Environment
If there's a paradise for environmentalists, this Nordic nation of 9.2 million people must be it.
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Facebook is to build a new server farm on the edge of the Arctic Circle — its first outside the United States — to improve performance for European users, officials of the social networking site said Thursday. It will also expose them to potential eavesdropping from a Swedish intelligence agency, according to Sweden 's Pirate Party , a group opposing government interference with the Internet.