Environment

Record annual profits to be announced by Shell tomorrow should be used towards paying off a bill estimated at more than $20bn (£10bn) for the damage caused by its oil activities to local communities and the wider environment, according to an alliance of human rights and green groups including Friends of the Earth (FoE). Read More

Widespread use of GM crops remains limited worldwide, even as growing weed and pest issues are forcing farmers to use ever greater amounts of pesticides. Read More

Lawyers will today begin preparing the ground for one of the largest class actions heard in the UK over 400 tonnes of allegedly highly toxic waste dumped in the Ivory Coast from a cargo ship chartered by a London-based company. Read More

The biggest oil spill Exxon Mobil has to answer for is not the cargo that gushed from the Exxon Valdez tanker into Alaska's Prince William Sound. It is the fuel that soaked into the ground beneath a working class section of Brooklyn, New York. Read More

Like the tobacco industry that for decades denied a link between smoking and lung cancer, ExxonMobil has waged a "sophisticated and successful disinformation campaign" to mislead the public about global warming, according to a major new report by the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Read More

A US court has almost halved the damages oil giant Exxon Mobil must pay for a 1989 oil spill off Alaska. Read More

Owners of more than $278 million in shares of Dow Chemical field a shareholder resolution this week demanding the company address outstanding issues from a 1984 explosion at a pesticide plant in India. Read More

After drilling six exploratory holes by Mt. Taylor earlier this year in search of uranium, the Western Energy Development Corporation is asking for state and federal permission to drill 47 more. Read More

The world's largest energy company is still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund European organisations that seek to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming and undermine support for legislation to curb emission of greenhouse gases. Read More

Gold mining is Ghana�s most valuable export industry: in 2005, US$1.4 billion worth of gold was shipped from the country, dwarfing the value of its other major foreign currency earners - timber and cocoa. However, very little of the gold revenues stay in the country while damage to the physical environment by both large and small-scale mining is inflicting an incalculable cost to the economy with vast tracts of farming land permanently ruined, forests destroyed and water resources diverted and polluted. Read More