ECOGREENMUMS  ARTICLES.

Santos facing $24m leak bill

Energy producer Santos says an oil leak at its Port Bonython plant in South Australia has so far cost the company $24 million.

The company noticed the toxic seepage into ground water under its plant at Point Lowly 20 months ago during routine monitoring.

Plant manager Warren Kruger says a trench has been built to stop oil leaking into the sea.

He told a meeting of Whyalla residents the company was doing remediation work, extracting the oil and treating the affected ground water.

"You have an assurance from Santos that we also consider Point Lowly a jewel in the crown and that we will continue our investigation until we have inspected all possible sources," he said.

read article   http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/29/2804634.htm?site=news

Modified Maize raises fears

MONSANTO, the giant of genetically modified crops, has for the first time been forced to release raw data from toxicology studies it carried out on three strains of its modified maize. An external analysis of the data claims it shows that eating the maize could result in damage to the liver and kidneys, but this has been dismissed as unsupportable by a government agency and independent toxicologists.

With legal help from Greenpeace and the Swedish Board of Agriculture, researchers at the Committee of Research and Information on Genetic Engineering, a French anti-GM lobby group, forced Monsanto to release the data from studies in which rats were fed with the three varieties of maize for three months.

read the full article www.newscientist.com

Preventing dangerous climate change by 2100 barely feasible

Fat chance then. Even with all the green power we muster, preventing dangerous climate change by the end of the century is "barely feasible". So says an analysis of how fast low-carbon energy sources can be introduced.

For a 50:50 chance of keeping a global temperature rise within 2 °C by 2100, we must halve emissions by 2050. This is the message of climate models by Keywan Riahi of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and colleagues. That means 70 per cent of global energy production must be zero-emissions by 2050.

read the full article  www.newscientist.com

In-car gizmos can result in less fuel efficiency

Instead of I-spy and guess-the-colour-of-the-next-car, in-car entertainment is now more likely to feature a plug-in games console or a passenger TV screen. Meanwhile, the badly folded map book has given way to intermittent commentary from a dashboard-mounted satnav. The extra energy demands of such devices, together with ever more powerful aircon systems, can result in fuel efficiency plummeting by more than 20 per cent.

from www.NewScientist.co