Environment Minister Siri Bjerke said that the government wanted Norway to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. To do this, Oslo would promote new pollution-free technology in power plants to help it keep a promise to limit a rise in emissions of "greenhouse gases" to 1% by 2008 - 2012 from 1990 levels.

The number of measures to be undertaken by the government include:

• To invite industry to cooperate on such technology
• To support construction of a demonstration plant for a pollution-free gas power plant to be ready by 2005
• To continue tax emissions of CO₂ by industry until an international system for trading emissions quotas is in place
• To shift from the use of oil to natural gas in buses, ferries and ships supplying the offshore oil and gas industry
• To promote ways of supplying electricity to offshore oil and gas platforms, now among the biggest sources of greenhouse gases in Norway.

In light of a new legislation put forth by NY Governor George E. Pataki, school districts, state and local governments, colleges and universities, and other public and private entities can more easily cut the amount of energy they use and introduce clean energy technologies.

The legislation calls for allowing public entities to be able to benefit from the energy efficiency services and clean-energy technologies procurement procedures already used by the New York Power Authority (NYPA) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). This would allow public entities to contract directly with NYPA and NYSERDA to secure such services and technologies.

Right now, such an arrangement is not allowed, as each agency or public entity is obligated to use its own procurement procedures to select energy efficiency service providers.

Agriculture Minister, Richard Amery said that the state government of New South Wales (NSW) supported the promotion of an industry using vegetable oils as an alternative fuel.

The Biodiesel Association of Australia hoped to supply 10% of the 11.56 billion litres per annum of diesel fuel currently consumed in Australia over the next 10 years. This would require one million tonnes of vegetable oil to be produced by Australian farmers.

By 2005, NSW production was predicted to reach about 750,000 tonnes a year.

Mr Amery said that waste oils from restaurants and kitchens could also be used for biodiesel, with the McDonald's restaurant chain alone producing about 1,100 tonnes of recycled frying oil in Australia each year.

Biodiesel is environment-friendly as it contains no sulphur, has low toxicity and emits 80% less greenhouse gases than diesel fuel.

Research has shown that vegetable oils could be also be used to power motor vehicles.

British businesses are being urged to increase threefold the levels and quantities of recycled materials to prompt a major change in recycling capacity.

Government-backed company WRAP has called for a 300% increase in the use of recycled plastics and a 50% rise in recycled paper. The Government has invested £40m in the campaign.

WRAP, a non-profit company set up to overcome market barriers to recycling, has identified paper, plastics, wood and glass as the materials where increases are most achievable.

Along with promoting a series of products - such as fleece jackets made from glass fibre and pencils made from recycled vending cups - WRAP is urging more than half of Britain's local authorities to adopt "buy recycled" campaigns.

To quell a growing controversy, the National Research Council (NRC) in the US has begun a second high-level scientific review of the standards that should apply for arsenic levels in drinking water.

The review, which started in May 01, is expected to close with a new drinking water standard for arsenic in public water systems by early 2002.

The US EPA adopted a standard of 10 parts per billion (ppb) for arsenic in Jan 01. The previous standard, in effect since 1977, was 50 ppb, which is considered not adequate to protect public health from arsenic, a known human carcinogen.

The 10 ppb standard was to be legislated in Mar 01, and to become legally enforceable in Jan 06 for America's 54,000 water systems. But the EPA announced on 20 Mar 01 that the agency would reassess the scientific evidence and the cost of implementing the 10 ppb standard.

In a paper presented to the EPA and the NRC in Apr 01, Robert G. Arnold and Wendell Ela of the University of Arizona said that the scientific evidence does not warrant an immediate reduction of the arsenic level to 10 ppb. The paper calls for an arsenic maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 20 ppb. The authors explained that the EPA might have overestimated the benefits of the 10 ppb arsenic rule because it relied on a linear dose-response curve in determining the results of low-level exposure. In fact, there may be a threshold beyond which greater exposure does not increase risk or there may be a nonlinear relationship between low-level arsenic exposure and cancer incidence.

Researchers at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi found that fireworks lit during India's Diwali celebrations last year released a burst of ozone, a greenhouse gas.

They discovered an increase in night-time ozone levels on festival dates that could not have been due to the normal reactions responsible for ground level ozone, which involve sunlight and nitrogen oxides.

Further investigation revealed that the ozone had been generated by colored sparklers. They believe that the ozone is formed by ultraviolet light released by chemicals in the sparklers.

Much of the light emitted by the fireworks was at the right wavelength to split apart oxygen molecules in the air. Oxygen atoms liberated then combine with other normal molecules to form ozone.

The Ontario Medical Association says that smog not only worsens health problems like asthma and heart conditions, it actually causes them.

Smog increases the number of people with asthma and also increases the number and severity of attacks they have. A recent study released by the Heart and Stroke Foundation said that there is a direct relation between poor air quality and heart attacks. It showed that pollution could trigger heart attacks within two hours of exposure.

Smog is a poison even at very low levels. People are injured or made ill on days when no smog advisory is given and when the threshold has not been exceeded.

CO[2] Solution has developed a new technology to remove carbon dioxide - the leading cause of ozone depletion in the earth's atmosphere - from air.

The bioreactor, which revolves around an enzyme found in all living things, including humans, is able to break down carbon dioxide through a series of steps into a harmless powder called calcium carbonate.

In the bioreactor, CO₂-rich air is forced into a chamber and diluted with water. Enzymes within the chamber break down the CO₂ into calcium carbonate, which is then flushed from the bioreactor. Any air that leaves the chamber is CO₂-free.

Although CO[2] Solution is still in the research stage, DND's Defence Industrial Research Program is already investing $250,000 in the new technology for its fleet of submarines. The company is also targeting a more lucrative market - hospitals, schools and office towers, where indoor air has to be replaced up to 20 times an hour, as well as industries which emit large amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

Researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) have developed a process for using wastewater sludge from municipal treatment plants and paper mills to produce activated carbon, a material that can remove the toxic components from industrial emissions, typically nitrogen oxides (NOx).

The process developed at the IIT has resulted in the production of a carbon-based catalyst for treating NOx and a biocatalyst for treating phenol in wastewater.

The laboratory tests using the carbon-based catalyst produced from municipal wastewater sludge have been able to reduce 1,000 ppm of NOx to about 50 ppm in less than 5 minutes.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have discovered an easily produced and cost-effective synthetic clay which can trap radium ions in water. Besides cleaning drinking water, the synthetic clay could be used to line ponds that hold radium-contaminated mine tailings.

The researchers tested several clays and found that a synthetic mica clay known as sodium-4 mica was able to separate the radium ions from water.

The number of natural gas vehicles (NGVs) run by compressed natural gas (CNG) in Egypt will exceed 30,000 before the end of this year. The number will continue to increase in the coming years because the cost of CNG is much lower than those of gasoline and diesel. In addition, import of diesel-fuelled school and public transport buses is also banned in Egypt.

Earlier this year, the government issued a decision that all taxis and microbuses in the Greater Cairo region must convert to CNG within the next three years. The government is financing the conversions, partly through US aid.

The cost of CNG is less than half that of gasoline. Although a typical vehicle conversion is about $1,500, owners of high-use vehicles, such as taxis, could recover the conversion costs from fuel savings in as little as six months.

Egypt is one of the world's top ten countries using NGVs. It has 46 refueling stations and 16 conversion centres.

Corona, California, is proposing to transform sewage into power via cogeneration.

The city would establish a cogeneration facility that would take organic sewage from its wastewater plant and create 3 MW of generating capacity from 72 tonnes of waste each day, which is enough power to light approximately 3,000 homes.

The method uses methane gas obtained from heated waste to generate electricity.

At present, about 2% of the power in California is derived from biomass and waste.

The city of Redlands is considering a power scheme that would involve the use of landfill debris and wastewater. Riverside County currently uses waste to generate power.

Britain's emissions of greenhouse gases, blamed by many scientists for global warming, have fallen to a 10-year low mainly as a result of a drop in pollution from power stations.

Emissions from the electricity industry dropped after new clean-burning gas power stations replaced older plants fueled by coal and oil.

Gas use in power generation has grown from zero in1990 to around 30% now.

However, the National Statistics Office said that while emissions from industry fell between 1990 and 1999, pollution from households rose by 6.5% over the same period, due to increased energy use at home.

Pollution from road transport increased by 8% between 1990 and 1999, mainly from commercial vehicles, despite a fall of 0.5% in the most recent year.