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Farming would seem to be a horizontal occupation. Iowa corn or Kansas wheat pokes up from flat fields that stretch to the horizon. That's why the idea of "vertical farms" seems ripe for humor. When its biggest advocate appeared on the faux news show "The Colbert Report" earlier this year, comedian Stephen Colbert prefaced the interview by guessing it would have something to do with corn that grows sideways or perhaps "Chia blimps" that float overhead.

The government of Vietnam will decide on December 22 whether to penalize parents who have more than two children, reinitiating a coercive population policy it abandoned in 2003. "We are considering an adjustment to our policy appropriate to the circumstances of the country," Truong Thi Mai, chair of Vietnam's Parliamentary Committee of Social Affairs, confirmed on Saturday. "The Parliament Standing Committee will decide the week after next."

The election of Barack Obama promises a new era of eco-awareness in the US, says Sarah Wachter These are heady times for environmentalists in America. The initial euphoria of Barack Obama’s White House win hasn’t worn off yet. They say he is the American president with the most clearly-enunciated environmental platform of any in recent memory. Even though the financial crisis has taken centre stage, environmentalists think that’s good news, too, since Obama is talking about creating millions of green jobs to kickstart the spluttering US economy.

FOR centuries, grist-grinders and sailors have exploited the wind. Now, New York developers, homeowners and city leaders might be coming around. A handful of buildings are already drawing electricity from wind turbines, which typically resemble table fans, or mounted airplane propellers.

Carbon emissions are increasingly at the forefront of policy issues, and experts say agricultural practices could play a role in decreasing emissions while providing farmers with a new cash crop. "You can't go to a newsstand today without seeing major publications with sustainability, climate change or energy on the cover," said Jim Mulhern, a founding partner of Watson/Mulhern and veteran policy strategist and communicator with 20 years experience in Washington public policy issues.

Governments could slow global warming dramatically, and buy time to avert disastrous climate change, by slashing emissions of one of humanity's most familiar pollutants soot according to NASA scientists. A study by the space agency shows that cutting down on the pollutant can have an immediate cooling effect and prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution at the same time.

The United States will fall well short of biofuels mandates on the uncertain development of next-generation fuels made from grasses and wood chips, the government's top energy forecasting agency said on Wednesday. "The key risk factor is rate of development of cellulosic biofuels technology," Howard Gruenspecht, the Energy Information Administration's acting head, said at press conference in Washington introducing the agency's annual energy forecast. "Near term growth of cellulosic ... is certainly a question mark."

"Please erase your image of electric cars being like golf carts," a spokesman for Japan's fourth-biggest automaker said before taking a zero-emission vehicle out for a spin. As mass-produced electric cars come closer to reality, their makers are trying to polish the image of what experts say could be a hard sell in the current recession.

Generating clean electricity that's as cheap as power from fossil fuels is the Holy Grail of green-energy companies. A new solar project powering California homes appears to be closing in on that prize. Sempra Generation, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy in San Diego, just took the wraps off a 10-megawatt solar farm in Nevada. That's small by industry standards, enough to light just 6,400 homes. But the ramifications are potentially huge.

Manila, Philippines - The lifeless body of another baleen whale was found floating beside a passenger ship moored on Manila Bay’s Pier 13 two days before the end of the year, according to WWF-Philippines. Measuring 9.8 metres and weighing almost three tonnes, the whale, thought to be either a Minke (Balaenoptera acutorostata) or a Bryde's whale (Balaenoptera edeni) was brought to and buried in a local fish cemetery.

MEPs formally approved an unprecedented package of six new climate and energy laws in Strasbourg on Wednesday. A year of intense negotiations was wrapped up in a mere twenty minutes of voting. Over 550 MEPs backed the package, while fewer than 100 voted against. The package is designed to cut EU greenhouse gas emissions by twenty per cent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels, as pledged by European leaders at their spring summit in 2007. The EU will aim for a 30 per cent cut if other industrialised countries take on equivalent commitments in a new international climate treaty to be agreed at UN talks in Copenhagen next December.

New laws pertaining to 'green' issues are predicted to be the fourth most important legal trend in 2009. That's what the experts at the legal site Findlaw.com recently announced. The consultancy, owned by Reuters, released a top ten of legal hot topics for 2009 which also lists urban living, employee rights, military rights and legal issues impacting small business as hotly pursued.

The EU is "highly unlikely" to meet its objective of putting a stop to biodiversity loss by 2010, the European Commission admits. For the bloc to even come close to achieving the target, "intensive efforts" will have to be made by both the Commission and individual member states, according to the mid-term assessmentof progress on implementing the Biodiversity Action Plan to halt biodiversity loss in the EU.

A pair of Washington lawyers is hoping to brand a new kind of corporate executive: the CCO, or chief climate officer. A small but growing number of companies have been jumping on the climate bandwagon in recent years, trying to figure out how to make their products and processes greener. The trend has caught on in various industries, from apparel to technology to foodstuffs, and many companies have turned their strategies over to an in-house climate czar.

A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of "new fundamentals", according to a leading food expert. Tim Lang warned that the current system, designed in the 1940s, was showing "structural failures", such as "astronomic" environmental costs. The new approach needed to address key fundamentals like biodiversity, energy, water and urbanisation, he added.

The burning of fossil fuels - notably coal, oil and gas - has accounted for about 80 percent of the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial era. Now, NASA researchers have identified feasible emission scenarios that could keep carbon dioxide below levels that some scientists have called dangerous for climate. When and how global oil production will peak has been debated, making it difficult to anticipate emissions from the burning of fuel and to precisely estimate its impact on climate. To better understand how emissions might change in the future, Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York considered a wide range of fossil fuel consumption scenarios

The Interior Department announced a controversial decision late Wednesday to double the rate of logging on 2.6 million acres of federally owned forests in southwestern Oregon. In doing so, it brushed aside the objections of the governor and two federal agencies charged with guarding the quality of the area’s water and the health of the fish that depend on it. The decision, which was posted on the Web sites of the Bureau of Land Management’s Oregon offices, has revived the battle lines formed during the fight over the extensive logging of old-growth timber in the 1980s, a practice blamed for the rapid decline in populations of the northern spotted owl.

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

It's not surprising that the pages of Joel Makower's latest book, Strategies for the Green Economy, are printed on paper made from 100% post-consumer, de-inked fiber. That's paper that has been used by consumers and collected through various recycling programs. Makower, editor of GreenBiz.com, practices what he preaches. He's spent the last 20 years advising companies on green strategies and marketing, and has written books such as The Green Consumer and The E-Factor: The Bottom Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business.

Scientists fear the already declining growth rate of the Great Barrier Reef's corals will stop completely by 2050, killing off the reef and making way for algae. A new report shows the most robust corals on the reef have slowed in growth by more than 14 per cent since the "tipping point" in 1990.