First-hand scientific data of the fast-vanishing Petermann Glacier in Greenland's remote North will soon be available, thanks to Greenpeace.

The organization set off on a three-month climate impacts expedition on June 23, just as a Manhattan-sized iceberg started hemorrhaging off the ancient Petermann mass.

The group, and its team of independent scientists, will document the disintegration of the world's northernmost glacier and conduct additional research on the accelerating polar melt.

"Travelling to Petermann Glacier is a rare opportunity to visit a remote, hard to reach location at the top of the world, and a chance to make observations usually well beyond the capabilities of conventional science," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University and member of the Greenpeace expedition.

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• Stacy Feldman's blog
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The first thing I noticed was that although we were just 20 miles south of where I started, the temperature was a good 15 degrees hotter.

The smells of tar and sulfur permeated the air. After a while, my eyes started to burn and itch.

I wasn’t in Nigeria or Iraq or Venezuela. My guide, Jesus Torres, otherwise known as JT, had taken me to Wilmington, Calif., in Los Angeles County, just 20 miles south of the L.A. beach town where I live.

Wilmington is home to 53,000 people – 45,000 of them Latino, 24 percent below the national poverty level – living in the midst of oil wells, oil refineries and the Port of Los Angeles. It was one of the stops on the Toxic Tour of Los Angeles that the organization, Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) leads. The group advocates around issues of environmental justice showcasing how our dependence on fossil fuels has impacted low income neighborhoods across the country.

Of the more than 2 million barrels of oil refined in California each day, 650,000 of them come from five refineries in the Wilmington area run by BP, ConocoPhillips, Tesoro and Valero.

Technological developments often are seen as the surest way to reduce society’s dependence on fossil fuels, but one young startup hopes to spur change with an innovative business model.

If successful, Metrus Energy's model could usher in a wave of investment in energy efficiency projects.

The idea is to enter into long-term contracts with commercial, industrial, and institutional facilities in which Metrus pays the upfront costs of installing energy efficiency measures, such as high-efficiency lighting or building energy management systems, and then shares the resulting savings from lower energy bills.

“We set the fee below what the customer is currently paying the electric utility,” said Bob Hinkle, chief executive of the San Francisco startup. “So the customer gets savings from the start.”

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Emissions Must Peak by 2020, US Says in G8 Draft (Bloomberg)

The U.S. is joining other developed countries for the first time in saying global greenhouse gases should peak by 2020 and the average worldwide temperature shouldn’t rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, according to a draft from the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

Canada, Japan Blocking Copenhagen Progress? (Business Green)

Sir David King, former UK science adviser, accused Canada and Japan of blocking progress towards a meaningful international climate deal. "Copenhagen is faltering at the moment," he said.

EPA Allows TVA to Dump Coal Ash in Alabama (AP)

The nation's largest utility can dump millions of tons of coal ash from a Tennessee spill into an Alabama landfill, federal regulators determined, despite criticism that the plan is unfair to one of Alabama's poorest counties.

Kennedy: President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia (Washington Post)

“If ever an issue deserved President Obama's promise of change, mountaintop mining is it,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. writes. “Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day – the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly – to blow up Appalachia's mountains.”

Carbon Chief Suspended Amid Reports of Dodgy Deals (Business Green)

Papua New Guinea's Office of Climate Change director was suspended following reports that he issued unofficial carbon credits from forestry projects worth millions of dollars.

Sen. Boxer Sets Hearings Starting Next Week on Climate (National Journal)

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer has scheduled a four-pack of hearings in the next two weeks to draft climate legislation this summer and continue an ambitious Democratic push to get a plan through Congress this year.

Green buildings have to operate efficiently to be truly “green,” and the U.S. Green Building Council is about to begin enforcing that simple rule.

The USGBC has had a busy week, announcing a couple of major changes to its Leadership in Energy and Efficiency Design (LEED) rating system.

First, it announced that as part of LEED v3, the latest version of the rating system, “buildings seeking LEED certification will begin submitting operational performance data on a recurring basis as a precondition to certification.”

The change gets at what has long been the primary complaint about LEED: That it stops once the building is built.

The new version, to be used by all new LEED applicants starting this week, also ties the green building rating system into the emergent smart grid, and it will likely increase demand for building energy monitoring systems.

China is putting its students to work this summer as climate ambassadors to spread the word about climate change and what people can do to stop it.

Through a new training program called “One Thousand Environment-Friendly Youth Ambassadors Action,” eight Chinese ministries, along with the UNDP, hope to educate 1 million people about the actions they can take to preserve the environment and limit climate change.

The program started last month with training for 1,000 high school and college students in Beijing (north China), Shanghai (east), Xi’an (northwest), Chengdu (southwest) and Guangzhou (south).

Each young ambassador is expected to train another 1,000 people, hence one million people around the nation will be informed of professional environmental knowledge.

While politicians around the world debate how to reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, scientists are making some unsettling discoveries about another developing greenhouse gas problem: nature’s own emissions.

A study published this week shows that the amount of carbon locked in the Arctic permafrost is more than double previous estimates. Additionally, other research shows that the permafrost is thawing, meaning this enormous amount of carbon could be released into the atmosphere as the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.

The thawing of the permafrost is especially dangerous because it could cause a domino effect of more warming that, for now, cannot be checked by human engineering or policy.

"We now estimate the deposits contain over 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere", said Dr. Charles Tarnocai, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, and lead author of the study, published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

As long as permafrost is frozen, the carbon in the soil is locked up.

But when it thaws, the carbon becomes exposed, and microbes called methanogens break down the carbon and release methane, a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

Southern Co. Dominates Climate Lobbying (Center for Public Integrity)

Southern Company, the nation’s largest electric power generator, also had the largest force of lobbyists among the hundreds of businesses and interest groups that were seeking to influence the landmark climate change legislation that just passed the House.

Records Show Exxon Continued Funding Climate Deniers (Guardian)

ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, continued to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

UN, WTO Call for Trade Shift to Slow Climate Change (EurActiv)

More open trade could lead to growing greenhouse gas emissions if nothing is done to shift "business as usual" trade practices and encourage the exchange of new low-carbon technologies, the WTO and UNEP said in a joint report.

Mayor’s Goal: Coal-Free Los Angeles by 2020 (Mercury News)

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, sworn in for a second term, said he would attempt to eliminate the city’s reliance on coal—which provides 40 percent of its power—by 2020.

U.S., California to Reduce Ship Emissions (Los Angeles Times)

Federal and California regulators are targeting one of the biggest sources of air pollution, big diesel-powered ships. Ocean-going vessels that enter California ports must now switch to fuel with lower sulfur content, and EPA proposed similar rules for U.S.-flagged ships.

WWF: US, Canada Last Among G8 in Curbing Warming (Boston Globe)

With only five months left before a summit on climate change, none of the Group of Eight nations is doing enough to curb global warming, WWF says.

The EPA issued a letter today stating that Sunflower Electric must restart the permit application process if it wants to build an 895 MW coal plant in Kansas, a permit the company thought it had already secured in a back room deal with the governor.

The move by the EPA's Region 7 administrator highlights the ability of the federal Clean Air Act to protect the public health and welfare, despite political horse trading.

Kansas Gov. Mark Parkinson had negotiated a private agreement with Sunflower for construction of the plant, and subsequently the state Legislature made the agreement part of a law that the governor signed on May 22.

Today, however, the EPA informed all stakeholders that the plant still must meet requirements of the Clean Air Act. The agency laid out in detail what those requirements are in a six-page letter (attached below).

"This means that the governor's back room deal will be forced into the light of day for the public to examine," said attorney Amanda Goodin of Earthjustice, a public interest law firm that has been representing the Sierra Club in the case.

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A new report claims the world can scale up eight clean technologies so massively and rapidly they could meet 60 percent of new energy demand and abate more CO2 than is necessary for climate stabilization in just 10 years.

Naturally, this scale-up won't come cheap. The report estimates that annual private investment worldwide would need to triple between now and 2020 to reach $500 billion to $800 billion per year:

At this scale, clean energy investments would be in line with fossil-fuel investments.

This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Current global investment plans for maintaining and expanding energy infrastructure are on the order of $13 trillion over the next 10 years. The United States alone has a planned investment of close to $1 trillion.

Shift a sizable chuck of that money into ready cleantech solutions, the authors argue, and the results would be world changing: climate mitigation, energy security and 5 million new jobs planetwide.