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Polluting companies do not "have any right to influence the environmental debate in Europe," the protestor added. "We need to get business around the table and we tell them they have to be ready for critical questions," De Becker said. "We are not doing any greenwashing, we are not giving companies a lobbying platform."

Airline chiefs immediately criticized the decision, saying it would cost the industry at least 3.5 billion euros ($4.4 billion) each year to comply. The Europeans are “acting in a bubble — even in the middle of a global economic crisis,” said Giovanni Bisignani, the director general of the International Air Transport Association.

Industries have complained bitterly about the costs of complying with the system, especially as the global economic situation has worsened. Many airlines also have fought hard to avoid inclusion in the system, saying they can ill afford the extra costs after a period of record high fuel costs.

ROWS of Lincoln Town Cars idling at the curbside, a scene as socially suspect as the old X-rated Times Square, will soon begin disappearing from New York City streets.

Ambitious city fuel economy rules, written to curb the thirst of black cars, will steadily sideline the big V-8 powered sedans that corporate New York has relied on for decades. The rules particularly threaten the future of the Lincoln Town Car, workhorse of a fleet that the Taxi and Limousine Commission numbers at roughly 10,000 vehicles.

Black cars are essentially small-scale limousines that serve mainly business customers who pay with vouchers or credit cards rather than cash.

If you felt that the atmosphere in the new hip Club Watt was somehow electric, you would be right:

Watt has a new type of dance floor that harvests the energy generated by jumps and gyrations and transforms it into electricity. It is one of a handful of energy-generating floors in the world, most still experimental.

With its human engineering, Watt partly powers itself: The better the music, the more people dance, the more electricity comes out of the floor.

“Our idea is that there’s enough energy in this world, you just have to use it the right way, If you have a full dance club, there’s lots there, you just have to turn it into a usable product.”

New analytical techniques show that about 5,400 metric tons of nitrogen trifluoride are in the atmosphere, with amounts increasing by about 11 percent per year.

Ray Weiss of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and colleagues said it had not been possible to accurately measure this gas before.

They said nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than an equal mass of carbon dioxide, although it does not yet contribute much to global warming.

In fact, inhaling the fumes from your new car can be toxic and are created from a literal soup of chemicals such as arsenic and formaldehyde, which can take years to completely be "out-gassed" from your new car's interior materials.

Unfortunately, with the auto industry slowdown on the minds of car execs and politicians, combating indoor air pollution in new cars is not getting much play. Interestingly, automakers in Europe and Japan are serious about making their cars less toxic, especially for those who suffer from environmental allergies

General Motor's vehicles, in fact, showed a 27 percent improvement in cleaning up indoor air pollution, so says findings from The Ecology Center's annual HealthyCar.org study.

Tusk, on a four-day visit to Shanghai and Beijing, said he had also discussed with Chinese officials and entrepreneurs the prospects for cooperation on clean coal technologies.

"I expect that in China we will find an ally for the global climate talks. We are in a similar situation due to our coal-based economies. We cannot allow fighting climate change to destroy them," he told a news conference in the Chinese capital.

Poland, the European Union's largest ex-communist member, derives more than 90 percent of its electricity from coal. It has no nuclear power plants and virtually no renewable energy sources. Poland is set to host this year's U.N.-led negotiations aimed at clinching a new worldwide climate deal.

Plastic recycling is the process of recovering scrap or waste plastics and reprocessing the material into useful products. Compared to glass or metallic materials, plastic poses unique challenges. Because of the massive number of types of plastic, they each carry a resin identification code, and must be sorted before they can be recycled. This can be costly; while metals can be sorted using electromagnets, no such 'easy sorting' capability exists for plastics. In addition to this, while labels do not need to be removed from bottles for recycling, lids are often made from a different kind of non-recyclable plastic.

To help in identifying the materials in various plastic items, resin identification code numbers 1-6 have been assigned to six common kinds of recyclable plastic resins, with the number 7 indicating any other kind of plastic, whether recyclable or not. Standardized symbols are available incorporating each of these resin codes.