All of you out there in America and across the globe who have fought so hard to tackle the hideous enemy of our planet, namely carbon emissions, you know ....that bogus god you worship of "Climate Change" or "global warming" .....well, I feel it is necessary to inform you of some bad news. It really does pain me to have to bring you this disappointing information. 
Are you sitting down? 
Okay, here's the bombshell. The current volcanic eruption going on in Iceland, since its first spewing of volcanic ash this past week, has, to this point, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet. 
I know, I know.... (group hug)...it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of: driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kid's "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, going on vacation to a city park instead of Yosemite, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your $1 light bulbs with $10 light bulbs ....well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just the past four days.
 
 
The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in the past four days has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon.  And, those hundreds of thousands of American jobs you helped move to Asia with expensive emissions demands on businesses... you know, the ones that are creating even more emissions than when they were creating American jobs, well I just know that seems worthwhile now.
 
 
I'm so sorry. And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud but the fact of the matter is that the brush fire season across the western U.S.A. will start in about two months and those fires will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two years.

The UK's new coalition government has cancelled controversial plans to build a third runway at London Heathrow airport. It will also refuse extra runways at London's other two main airports, Gatwick and Stansted.

The leaders of the new government pledged that they would work together to build a new low-carbon economy. And they have agreed a deal to allow a new generation of nuclear power stations to be built. But this will be subject to certain conditions being met.

Campaigners responded with joy to the airport news. Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "This is fantastic news that will be met with great relief. "A third runway at Heathrow was always a bizarre proposal that made no sense to anybody who understood the impact aviation has on our climate. "The politicians who promised they would do this have been good to their word."

The policy may send birds in the Thames Estuary flapping for cover, though. If demand for flying in the South-East continues to increase, operators may look eastwards for a new airport. Today's announcement reveals that air passenger duty will be scrapped and replaced by a tax on the plane, not passenger. This is likely to mean that full flights (often budget airlines) will get cheaper and poorly-used flights more expensive.

There are several ramifications to this policy, which will play out in time. The pressure on South-East airports will be eased if the new government keeps its word to build a high speed rail network. But some Tories have been worrying about the cost of this at the current time, and that will surely be a factor in the timing of any plans.

On nuclear, the parties have agreed a deal which is supposed to allow the Conservative majority to push through new nuclear stations through the energy department which will be run by Chris Huhne from the Liberal Democrats who have an historic opposition to nuclear. It is likely the Tories will frame policy and the Liberal Democrats will be allowed to abstain on the nuclear vote, although they may speak against.

Labour will support nuclear, though, so the stations will get built - if conditions are met. This is a key proviso. The Conservative leadership is not so quite so firmly wedded to nuclear as Labour (The nuclear industry had direct access to Gordon Brown through his brother, head of media for the French firm EDF.)

Today's agreement says there will be no public subsidy, and Liberal Democrats will be inside government offices to ensure that no hidden inducements are sneaked through. It is by no means certain that firms will want to go ahead with nuclear stations unless they are offered better incentives.

The Liberal Democrats will have to tread carefully with their own supporters on this issue. The Green Party has already been angling for disaffected Liberal Democrat environmentalists for the next election. For Mr Cameron, the coalition is something of an environmental God-send.

The Liberal Democrats were judged by far the greenest of the main parties by Friends of the Earth, and their presence in government gives weight to Mr Cameron's Vote Blue, Go Green slogan. The Liberal Democrat cohort also buffers the Prime Minister from his own back-benchers, many of whom are sceptical about man-made climate change. Mark Kenber, international policy director for The Climate Group said: "It is good news that this new coalition government will reinforce the UK's bold international leadership on climate change.

"Today's commitments will accelerate a clean industrial revolution, creating green jobs and a prosperous low carbon economy for Britain." In their first press conference Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg both pledged a low-carbon economy, but there will be doubts about whether low-carbon energy targets will be met and whether Conservatives will be prepared at this time to continue to underpin low-carbon jobs.

Before the election, they indicated a determination to cut funds to the North-East, for instance, a major low-carbon hub. This may be a source of future tension. On broad energy policy there is, though, wide agreement on policy. Ministers will commit to a "huge" increase in energy from waste digestion by bacteria and the roll-out of "smart" interactive local electricity grids.

They will mandate a national recharging network for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, though it is not clear what "mandating" means and who is to be mandated. No new coal power stations will be built unless they pass a carbon emissions standard, though the standard is still to be decided. This will mean any power stations will have to have at least partial carbon capture and storage.

The government will continue Labour plans for four carbon capture and storage demonstrations in which power station emissions will be pumped into underground rocks. Finally, a measure that might affect many people's lives - if it is implemented.

The government will adopt measures to promote green corridors and wildlife, although there are no more details and it is hard to imagine this policy will be a priority in the short term. And what of the Liberal Democrat manifesto promise of a broader right for people to roam in the countryside in the Scandinavian fashion? There is no mention of that in the joint statement and it may be that Conservative landowners have barred the gate.

European countries will be able to use money from a key EU scheme for reducing climate-changing carbon emissions to build new coal-fired power stations, documents leaked to The Independent newspaper suggest.

Billions of pounds in revenues from the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – under which power plants have to buy "permits to pollute" so they have an incentive to drive their emissions down – may find their way into state aid for new coal-fired power station construction across the continent.

The bizarre situation of a climate policy pulling in two directions at once arises from concessions made to new and poorer EU member states such as Poland, when the EU was drawing up its current "20-20-20"climate change regime, seeking to cut emissions by 20 per cent, and secure 20 per cent of energy from renewable sources, by 2020.

With more than 90 per cent of its energy coming from coal-fired electricity, Poland feared it would find the ETS especially burdensome, so the EU agreed that some of the trading scheme's revenues could be used as state aid for construction in the energy generation sector.

But rather than applying the rule to Poland in isolation, it was decided that it would apply to every country to ensure a "level playing field" across the EU. At the moment not all permits are sold – some are given away. Britain currently sells about 7 per cent of its carbon permits, for which it receives just over £50m annually. But after 2013, 100 per cent of permits will be sold, and the revenues generated across Europe will be enormous, with Britain alone set to raise £40bn by 2020. Sales of pollution permits will raise tens of billions of pounds between now and 2020 for almost every country in Europe.

The unpublished guidelines for how this mountain of cash may be used in state aid for power station construction have been seen by The Independent. They say the funds could be used to provide up to 15 per cent of the costs of "highly-efficient CCS-ready power plants". But environmental campaigners are critical. "CCS-ready" means a power station ready to be fitted with carbon capture and storage, the new technology which, some time after 2020, it is hoped, will extract the CO2 from a plant's waste gases and store it under the sea bed. CCS may offer real hope for bringing emissions down, but "CCS-ready" can merely mean that a power station has an adjacent site on which a CCS plant could be built.

"Highly efficient" is a similarly relative term. Under current EU guidelines, values could be used for a coal plant which is only 44 per cent efficient – that is, it loses 56 per cent of the energy it produces in transmission.

Green campaigners say this means there could be massive government subsidies across the continent for building what are in effect old-fashioned "dirty coal" power stations – the sort that the EU's climate policy is supposed to be phasing out. There are currently 68 new coal plants in the planning stage in the EU, the highest number of which are in Germany.

"What these documents show is that billions of pounds raised through a scheme that was meant to help reduce pollution could be handed to massive German energy companies to actually increase pollution by helping them to build the most polluting power stations that exist," said Joss Garman, energy campaigner for Greenpeace.

"It's exactly like taking money from Weight Watchers and handing it to McDonald's to run advertising campaigns for Big Macs in schools. It's utterly perverse and it requires Gordon Brown to step in and stop this madness."

A typical coal-fired power station might cost £2bn to build – so a 15 per cent subsidy could amount to a £300m state handout, for burning more coal.

Emissions trading

*The European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is the principal instrument by which climate-changing carbon emissions will be driven down across the EU.

*Emissions trading is a way of offering a financial carrot to polluting companies to persuade them to clean up their act, at the same time as threatening them with a financial stick. Heavy plants are allocated permits to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide in the course of their operations, one permit being equivalent to a tonne of CO2.

*Once they reach the end of their allocation, they have to buy more permits, which in theory ought to be very expensive. But if they cut their emissions to below their limit and have permits left over, they can sell them on the "carbon market" to other companies that may be emitting too much.

The UK faces £300m in fines after failing to meet EU pollution targets, but Britons also pay the price with heart disease, asthma and cancer Britain's air pollution contributes to 50,000 deaths every year, More than 50,000 people are dying prematurely in the UK every year, and thousands more suffer serious illness because of man-made air pollution, according to a parliamentary report published tomorrow.

The UK now faces the threat of £300m in fines after it failed to meet legally binding EU targets to reduce pollution to safe levels. Air pollution is cutting life expectancy by as many as nine years in the worst-affected city areas. On average, Britons die eight months too soon because of dirty air.

Pollutants from cars, factories, houses and agriculture cause childhood health problems such as premature births, asthma and poor lung development. They play a major role in the development of chronic and life-shortening adult diseases affecting the heart and lungs, which can lead to repeated hospital admissions.

Treating victims of Britain's poor air quality costs the country up to £20bn each year.Nearly 5.5 million people receive NHS treatment for asthma, and more than 90,000 people were admitted to hospital as a result of the disease in England in 2008/09.

US research has found that the lungs of children who live in highly polluted areas fail to develop fully. Poor air quality is caused by three key pollutants – nitrogen oxides; particulate matter and ozone – where Britain fails to meet European safety targets.Britain is Europe's worst emitter of nitrogen oxides and exposed 1.5 million people to unsafe levels in 2007, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Long-term exposure can cause breathing problems, worsen asthma and bronchitis in children and aggravate allergies. They are by-products of burning fuel, and contribute to acid rain and make plants more susceptible to disease. Despite almost halving emissions since 1990,

Britain is widely expected to fall short of the 2010 EU target for nitrogen oxides, which are a precursor to particulate matter (PM), the most dangerous of all pollutants. They play a major role in the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in adults which will affect more people than heart disease by 2020.

Particulate matter is airborne and comes from materials ranging from sulphates, ammonia, carbon and water to mineral dust. Sources include coal burning, exhaust emissions, tyre wear, quarrying and construction. There is no safe level of PM; some people are affected by very low concentrations over a long period. It is also linked to heart disease and cancer.

Reduced coal use in the 1990s led to a 20 per cent reduction in PM, but a big increase in diesel vehicles on the road has seen progress stall since 2000. Eight areas, including Greater London, Swansea, and Yorkshire and Humberside have exceeded 2005 EU limits at least once.

Last December, the EU rejected an application from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to give Greater London more time to meet the target after it was unable to prove the city had worked hard to meet the target.Britain is also doing badly on ozone in the lower atmosphere, a toxin formed from chemical reactions between various air pollutants and sunlight.

Ozone concentrations are rising in UK cities, though, generally, rural areas and sunnier climates fare worse. Ozone causes eye and skin irritations, reduces lung function and damages airways and can be deadly; ozone-related summer smog caused an additional 800 deaths in 2003.

There is no legally binding EU limit but, in 2007, nearly 90 per cent of the UK population were exposed to levels above WHO recommendations. The Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) will tomorrow issue damning criticism of the UK's failure to prioritise air quality despite more than a decade of pressure from scientists and the EU. Ministers from all departments will be told that our air quality is "shameful", and they must "drive this from the top... and accept responsibility for policies that conflict with air quality".

The Government will also be asked to explain why millions of pounds have been spent raising awareness about obesity, passive smoking and alcohol, but not air quality – even though the costs to human life and the NHS are similar.

The Government will also face pressure to instigate immediate cross-departmental action to address the country's air quality, in order to meet EU pollution targets, avoid spiralling fines and ultimately reduce the unnecessary deaths and illness that disproportionately affect people from lower socio-economic groups. Frank Kelly, professor of environmental health at King's College London, who gave evidence to the committee, said: "We have been banging this drum in the scientific community for 10 years and it now must be taken more seriously by the Government because this really is a damning report.

We must have an immediate major education campaign, because if people had an inkling about the impact of poor air quality on their children, then they would stop sitting outside the school gates in their big cars and would be much more likely to help. Maybe the threat of enormous fines from the EU will finally get the Government's attention." While the air quality in the UK has improved significantly over recent decades because of cleaner fuels, vehicles and improved industrial processes required by national and European laws, these improvements have levelled off or slowed down.

Londoners live with the worst air quality in Britain. Eight million people live amid millions of vehicles and close to several airports. But some policies targeted at improving air quality have been scrapped or delayed since the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London.

These include plans to charge £25 per day for the biggest, heavy-polluting vehicles, and a westerly extension of the congestion charge. Professor Kelly said: "Instead of tightening up our policies, they have been dismantled instead."Environmental Protection UK, an influential campaign group, condemned what it called the Government's "wait and see" approach to air quality, which has meant pinning too much hope on the impact of European standards for cleaner vehicles.Ed Dearnley, the group's policy officer, said yesterday: "Resources dedicated to air quality have been tiny in comparison to other areas of public health work such as obesity and passive smoking.

Defra has struggled to get other departments, such as transport and health, to understand the problem and to act. The failure to get to grips with [more] vehicles on the roads, and the well-intentioned but counter-productive policies that have encouraged more diesel vehicles, means their 'wait and see' policy has failed."A Defra spokeswoman said the EAC report described fines as "potential" not "expected". She added that the Government intends to avoid them by asking for more time to meet the limits. "Over the last few years there have been a range of measures introduced which demonstrate close working between departments.

These include substantial investment in public transport and incentives through vehicle excise duty for less polluting vehicles," she said. "Of course, we accept that further measures are needed, and discussion is continuing on some of these."Britain has never exceeded the EU lead target since it was set in 2007.The introduction of unleaded petrol in 1986 eradicated the main source of the highly toxic chemical.

Carbon monoxide emissions have decreased by 75 per cent since 1990, largely as a result of catalytic converters in machinery and vehicles. Britain produced 16,800 tonnes of the cancer-causing benzene in 2007 – a 72 per cent decrease since 1990. The EU target was met well in advance of the 2010 deadline. Where we failNitrogen oxides levels in some cities are 20 per cent higher than the European average. The 2010 target will not be met unless new national and local strategies are introduced.

Although EU ambient air targets for ozone have been achieved, nearly 90 per cent of the country is exposed to levels considered too high by the World Health Organisation. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons increase risk of cancers. High levels were found in Scunthorpe in 2007, but the rest of the UK meets targets.