- Urine is mostly sterile, and safe to add to plants. A person's yearly output can fertilize more than one quarter acre. Dilute the urine in a 10 to one ratio and use it on your garden.

A series of raids have prompted the Ottery St Mary allotment committee in Devon to launch evening patrols, with members visiting the set to keep an eye out for suspicious characters.

A Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) came into force on April 15. It requires suppliers of motor fuels to ensure a proportion, initially 2.5 percent, comes from renewable souces.

Ocean freight rates, the U.S. dollar and other factors behind the big jump have begun to ease. Meanwhile, analysts are questioning whether a global slowdown has begun to hurt the steel industry, which uses high-priced metallurgical coal to fire blast furnaces.

Now even some peak oil people are changing their tune.

Local but poor populations in many parts of Africa are increasingly being driven deeper into economic obscurity yet 60% of them still depend on agriculture for survival. Another 60% of that eke out a living by subsistence farming and animal husbandry.

In comments Tuesday at the Motor Press Guild in Los Angeles, Chrysler Vice Chairman and President Jim Press said the vehicles are being developed by Chrysler's Envi unit, which the automaker created last year to create electric vehicles and other advanced propulsion technologies.

The monthly survey showed new registrations fell an annual 18.6 percent to record the weakest August since 1966, as the credit crunch and high fuel costs kept buyers out of the showrooms.

Gas-powered engines in lawn and garden equipment will be required to cut smog-forming emissions by 35 percent, while engines in personal watercraft will have to cut smog-forming emissions by 70 percent and reduce carbon monoxide emissions by 20 percent.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a group of 10 states in the U.S. Northeast that formed the first U.S. greenhouse market, will regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants starting next year. It will hold its first auction for permits to pollute more than 12 million tons of emissions on September 25.

The environment group said on Wednesday the grid would build on existing infrastructure to link tens of thousands of turbines located offshore, helping to smooth out power fluctuations caused by turbulent weather around the stormy North Sea.

Despite a long-running drought, Kingwill, who runs the vast Tandou farm, 142km southeast of the mining town of Broken Hill, has just sold his property's critical water on a national market rather than pump it into irrigated cereal crops.

...Gustav was one of those rare moments when political arguments are made by reality, not rhetoric. It was the time to simply point and say: "This is why we oppose more drilling." It was also the time to recall that during hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the official Minerals Management Service report found more than 100 accidents leading to a total of 743,400 gallons of oil spilled throughout the region. To put that in perspective, 100,000 gallons is classified as a "major spill". If one is feeling particularly bold, a category five hurricane is also an opportune time to mention that scientists see a link between heavier storms and warming ocean temperatures - warmed in part by the fossil fuels being extracted from those fallible platforms.

But for these bans, we would have wasted the reserves without a strategic plan. Leasing and drilling would have lowered world oil prices by a few cents, benefiting more foreign consumers than Americans. The federal revenue from royalties, lease payments and taxes would have been used to meet current federal expenditures. And our remaining publicly owned oil and natural gas would be substantially depleted. Consequently, our dependence on foreign energy sources would be even greater than it is -- and it is likely that the current commodity price crisis would be worse.

… is the question people have been putting a lot of thought into since the IPCC AR4 report came out. We analysed what was in the report quite carefully at the time and pointed out that the allowance for dynamic ice sheet processes was very uncertain, and actually precluded setting a upper limit on what might be expected. The numbers that appeared in some headlines (up to 59 cm by 2100) did not take that uncertainty into account.