Oops! US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has rapidly backtracked on his suggestion US consumers should pay for the cost of foreign carbon emissions in the goods they buy by claiming what he meant to say was that developing nations must help pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Is this a case of one statement offshore and another for domestic ears?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says its next assessment of global warming, due in 2014, will concentrate on the impacts on the poorest developing countries. In particular it is critical that Africa develops the capacity to be able to assess climate change there, chairman Rajendra Pachauri says. 

Another nail in the myth of “clean” coal: Harvard’s Belfer Center has released an analysis of costs of carbon capture and storage which suggests that even with proven technology CCS will double the cost of coal generation in the short-to-mid term, and add up to 50% to its cost in the longer term – so if its going to always be more expensive, why not switch to renewables?

IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri has both praised and damned the G8 for their mixed performance at the recent summit, saying while G8 nations had taken a “big step forward” by agreeing to limit global warming to +2C, they had “clearly ignored” what the IPCC had advised in order to attain that goal by failing to agree to peak emissions by 2015 and a reduction of between 25 and 40 percent by 2020. .

Odd Spot: From the South Korean lab that made Snuppy, the first cloned dog, comes Toppy – all six of him. Now trained, the sextuplet cloned Labradors have reported for duty as customs drug-sniffer dogs – the reason they were cloned, from top Canadian sniffer-dog Chase in 2007. 

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