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China is burning as much as 17% more coal than had previously been thought, adding about a billion tons a year to its national carbon footprint. The new figure is troubling for climatologists but could make it easier to create momentum for changes in China's energy and climate policies. 

The Christmas gifts have been delivered, and Secret Santa is done. Now, the work begins for Optoro, a start-up company that aims to reduce the financial and environmental costs of another great holiday tradition: returns. Little known to shoppers, however, is that a majority of returned items never make it back to retailers' shelves. Instead, the items wind their way through liquidators, wholesalers and resellers, many of the purchases ending up in landfills. According to some estimates, as much as two million tons of returned items - most of it undamaged merchandise - are thrown away each year, enough to fill over 200,000 garbage trucks.

Sixteen hotels, including the Waldorf and Pierre, have joined the NYC Carbon Challenge -- a city program aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 30% over the next decade.

A $10-per-barrel tax on oil companies will be part of the Obama administration's budget proposal for fiscal 2017. Proceeds would fund alternative transportation and infrastructure. Congress is not expected to include the measure in spending legislation. The proposal is significant, however, because it reflects Obama's increased focus on climate change.

The Paris climate accord heralds a new era for the global economy, with a wide range of investors and industries now likely to seek ways to avoid carbon risks and adopt less carbon-intensive ways of doing business, experts say. Secretary of State John Kerry says the deal will be a net job creator and sends a powerful message to the marketplace. Nancy Pfund, managing partner of DBL Partners, agrees. "It's very hard to go backward from something like this. People are boarding this train, and it's time to hop on if you want to have a thriving, 21st-century economy," she says. 

The non-GMO labeling movement received a big boost last week when PepsiCo announced that it would begin including the Non-GMO Project's butterfly seal on the Tropicana juice line. "Tropicana Pure Premium is non-GMO, and it always has been," said brand chief Björn Bernemann. "Some consumers, however, are expressing a desire to get beyond what brands are actually telling them, and we felt having external verification would give our consumers assurance." 

The recycling industry is wasteful and ineffectual, and it will prove neither economically nor environmentally sustainable, writes John Tierney. You'd have to recycle 100,000 plastic bottles to offset the emissions from a single business-class transatlantic flight, and you probably wouldn't turn a profit in the process, Tierney notes. "How can you build a sustainable city with a strategy that can't even sustain itself?" he asks. 

Clean Edge recently released a new benchmarking index of corporations that take the lead in clean energy. The list of Corporate Clean Energy Leaders includes more than a dozen members of RMI's BRC, who make up nearly half Clean Edge's inaugural list.

Warming ocean waters are bleaching the world's corals to an unprecedented degree and could destroy huge swaths of coral reefs in areas ranging from Australia to Africa. "This is a huge, looming planetary crisis, and we are sticking our heads in the sand about it," says Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland in Australia.

Extreme heat can kill, as it did by the dozens in Pakistan in May. But as many of South Asia's already-scorching cities get even hotter, scientists and economists are warning of a quieter, more far-reaching danger: Extreme heat is devastating the health and livelihoods of tens of millions more.

ExxonMobil and other major oil companies, as well as several multinational firms in other sectors, are set to announce support for a tax on carbon emissions as a practical tool for fighting global warming. The firms argue that if energy produced from fossil fuels costs more, it will accelerate the market-driven transition to renewable energy and other sources that produce low carbon emissions.

WASHINGTON - The Trump administration announced Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama's signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America's efforts to tackle global warming.

Volvo Cars on Wednesday became the first mainstream automaker to sound the death knell of the internal combustion engine, saying that all the models it introduces starting in 2019 will be either hybrids or powered solely by batteries.

In the Arctic Ocean, some ice stays frozen year-round, lasting for many years before melting. But this winter, the region hit a record low for ice older than five years.

Alaska, a major oil and gas producer, is crafting its own plan to address climate change. Ideas under discussion include cuts in state emissions by 2025 and a tax on companies that emit carbon dioxide.

"The effect of long-term warming is to make it harder to count on snowmelt runoff in wet times," said David S. Gutzler, a climate scientist at the University of New Mexico. "And it makes the dry times much harder than they used to be."