Bailiffs and police are currently at the site of Brighton's Lewes Road community garden.

The bailiffs attempted to execute a court-order to seize the garden at about 2am today.

But protesters who have made it into a community garden are reluctant to give it up to developers Alburn Minos who hope to build seven flats and two shops, one of which is set to be leased to Tesco.

Germany's coalition government has decided to extend the life span of the country's nuclear power plants by an average of 12 years, officials say.

Under the agreement, some plants will now remain in production until the 2030s, instead of being phased out by 2021 as the previous government wanted.

There will also be new fees on utility companies to fund renewable energy.

A massive expansion is to take place at Europe's largest onshore wind farm, which is situated in East Renfrewshire.

ScottishPower Renewables is to add another 75 turbines to Whitelee wind farm on Eaglesham Moor by 2012.

This will bring the number of turbines on site to 215 - raising electricity generating capacity by two thirds.

The 140 turbines currently at the wind farm, to the south of Glasgow, can produce enough electricity to power 180,000 homes.

The expansion will see its generating capacity increase from 322MW to 539MW - enough to power about 300,000 homes.

Julia Gillard's new minority government in Australia means that the country's green party will take a pivotal position in the nation's politics for the first time.

Like the UK and Germany, a surge in popularity has given the environmental movement an unprecedented parliamentary presence in Australia this year, prompting suggestions that electorates are punishing mainstream parties for failing to act decisively on climate change.

The story is painful even to consider. This panel went up on the White House roof in 1979, with then-president Jimmy Carter (in a wide tie, and with a bushy haircut) promising that it would still be there in the year 2000, producing hot water from the sun for whoever was then president. In fact, it didn't make it through the next decade -- it came down in the Reagan years, a symbol of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits and veer sharply down the path we've trod ever since.

But not everyone went along. Frugal folks at Unity College in Maine salvaged the panels, and put them up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. Meanwhile, around the world other nations took the technology and went to work. Germany and Japan took over the lead in photovoltaic panels, but solar thermal technology like this became the special province of the Chinese.

I sat not long ago with Huang Ming, China's leading solar entrepreneur, in his space-age Sun Moon Mansion in Shandong Province looking over the stats: his HiMin Solar Energy Group has put up 60 million such systems across China--he estimated that when 250 million Chinese take a shower, the hot water is coming off their roofs. In a biting symbol of that passed torch, he keeps one of the Carter panels in his private museum.

China overtook of the U.S. to lead a quarterly index of the most attractive countries for renewable energy projects for the first time, according to the the global accounting firm Ernst & Young, which compiles the list.

China, which shared the lead with the U.S. in the first quarter, moved ahead of the world's largest economy and ranked the most attractive for investment in wind and solar projects. The move followed the failure of a proposed energy bill in the U.S. to include a clean energy standard, the company said today.

A zero-carbon heating initiative in Paris plans to harness hot air generated by underground travel to warm up nearby homes

Warmth generated by sweaty passengers as they commute on the Paris Mètro may be used to heat a block of low-income flats located near the Pompidou Centre in the city centre. This could slash the building's energy bill and carbon footprint by a third, according to the property's owner.

The temperature in nearby Rambuteau Mètro station stays at a toasty 14-20C degrees all year round thanks to the heat generated by passengers, trains and other machinery. Paris Habitat-OPH, the owners of the building, plan to use the underground heat to warm up water as it courses through pipes. It will then be pumped to the surface into an underfloor heating system in the block of flats.

BP says a "sequence of failures" involving "multiple companies" led to the explosion and fire that killed 11 people and caused a massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

In a 193-page report released Wednesday and posted on its website, the company said the accident arose from "a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces."

...

The internal report was prepared by a team led by BP's head of safety and operations, Mark Bly.

I reiterate that if a set of people with equal access to the factors used in producing food and to other sorts of fuel increased in numbers to the point that food supply was insufficient for everybody and food was offered in the market, the food raiser could command the product of all the other energy produced in that society.

But such conditions rarely if ever exist. Two things make their appearance unlikely. First, population will be limited. There is a great deal of evidence that over a long period of time the culture of a given people living in a particular environment will sanction practices that produce a steady state, sometimes only at subsistence, but sometimes as I have shown, at a level far above that which is strictly a result of food shortage. Secondly, a "free market" for food rarely exists. There are claims of kinship, religion, government, and other social controls that limit the market in low-energy societies. Neither is the free market for food likely to be allowed where the transition to high-energy culture has been made. As I pointed out earlier, energy can be used not only to induce people through reward, seduction, and corruption to choose a new way of life. It can be and has often been used to coerce physically those who have only their bodies and its product with which to resist the much greater physical power of those using high-energy fuels and their converters. So those who dominate permit the market to function only within the limits they impose.

In feudal times in the West, population was limited by the fact that productivity was a function of organic converters. The worker's share was a fixed amount of goods or a fixed fraction of what was produced; it did not necessarily increase as his family increased. As a consequence, population could increase during years of plenty, but weaker individuals, children and old people were bound to die off in the years of scarcity. The feudal lord sought the maximum surplus; beyond a given point, increased numbers of laborers yielded less than the food consumed by that labor. Those landlords too "humane" to recognize this fact were frequently conquered by those who restricted the number of laborers, raised draft animals, which produced greater surplus, and used that surplus to overrun their weaker neighbors.

The feudal lord was usually the only man who controlled food in excess of his personal needs; he was in control of more political and military power than those who might otherwise have forced him to disgorge that food on their own terms. He commanded the loyalty of those whom he protected and owned the land on which their animals fed. Since with low-energy techniques the greater portion of the population must be attached to the land, he was able to subordinate other men and their values to those which he favored. The balance between population and resources was kept at a point above subsistence, and the landlord did not have to enter a free market.