With Elections Near, Australia’s Rudd Backs Off Ambitious Carbon Trading Plan

In the last three years, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has often used his podium to talk to the nation about climate change. He has called it “the great moral and economic issue challenge of our time,” comparing global warming skeptics to gamblers who “happily play with our children’s future.” It’s not random that Australia’s leader has been vocal on the issue: Despite being one of the more sparsely populated nations, Australia’s 22 million inhabitants emit the third largest amount of carbon dioxide per capita in the world

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Time’s Person of the Year: You

The “Great Man” theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

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Kilimanjaro Receding Glaciers: Global Warming to Blame?

One of the criticisms most frequently lobbed at Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is that he has his facts wrong about the snows of Kilimanjaro. Yes, those immortal snows are vanishing , as Gore’s global-warming documentary contends, but they’ve been receding since the early 1900s at least — long before the planet began to warm

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Use toilet before boarding, Japan airline asks

To offset carbon dioxide, a Japanese airline is asking its passengers to go to the toilet before boarding. The unusual request by All Nippon Airways (ANA) is part of its “e-Flight” promotional program to reduce the amount of carbon expelled on 38 domestic routes and its twice daily international flights to Singapore.

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