"Increasing misuse of chemicals is causing health and environmental damage especially in emerging economies and governments must do more to carry out a promised clean-up by 2020, a United Nations report said on Wednesday."

"Ice fields in southern South America are rapidly losing volume and in most cases thinning at even the highest elevations, contributing to sea-level rise at 'substantially higher' rates than observed from the 1970s through the 1990s, according to a study published Wednesday."

"BAGHDAD -- Iraq's Oil Ministry says crude oil exports have averaged 2.565 million barrels a day in August, the highest level in more than three decades."

"With the worst drought in half a century withering corn across the Midwest, agricultural experts on Tuesday urged international action to prevent the global spike in food prices from causing global hunger."

Tony Hayward, the BP America CEO during the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2012, after being pilloried by environmentalists and pounded by the press, made it worse by saying he wanted his life back. Now he does -- working to produce more oil from the promising fields of northern Iraq.

"A vast reservoir of the potent greenhouse gas methane may be locked beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, a study suggests. Scientists say the gas could be released into the atmosphere if enough of the ice melts away, adding to global warming."

The dramatic drop in the price of natural gas as a result of the U.S. fracking boom may doom the profitability of future coal-burning power plants. It is just one example of how imperfect information about the future makes energy markets uncertain and risky.

"ERDOS, China -- Shenhua Group Corp., one of China's coal giants, has built much of its success at the cost of climate change. Every year, the company digs hundreds of million of tons of coal out of the ground and sells this carbon-intensive energy source throughout China."

"The U.S., Japan and the EU will come under pressure this week to pledge billions of dollars a year from 2013 to help the world's poorest nations fight climate change, as negotiators from more than 190 countries meet to advance talks on a new global climate pact."