GreenerPolitics

From Bloomberg.com

By Dara Doyle

May 27 (Bloomberg) — Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern may seek his party’s first-ever national coalition with the Green Party to cement a third straight term running one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies.

Ahern’s Fianna Fail party won 78 seats in the 166-member parliament, according to the final results of the May 24 general election. That’s short of the 83 needed for it to govern alone.

Ahern, 55, may have to find a new partner to secure a parliamentary majority after a slump in support for his current coalition ally, the Progressive Democrats. The Green Party, which wants to limit road building, end corporate donations to political parties and invest more in buses and trains, won 6 seats.

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From the CBC

John Baird defended his handling of the environment portfolio Tuesday as a leading environmental group filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing the Conservative government to live up to its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

Facing an at-times hostile parliamentary environment committee on Tuesday, Baird said the Tories’ plan was an “ambitious policy package” that balanced Canadians’ demands for action on climate change with the need to safeguard the country’s economy.

“No one else is doing as much as we are,” Baird said of the Tories’ Turning the Corner plan, which sees Canada reaching its Kyoto emissions targets between 2020 and 2025, instead of 2012, the year laid out in the international plan to curb climate change.

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From the CBC

Air Canada on Monday said it was introducing a carbon credits program to meet the needs of green-minded consumers concerned about climate change.

The Montreal-based airline will be working with Zerofootprint to offer the carbon offsets, a type of voucher used to sponsor clean-energy research and projects in an effort to counterbalance carbon emissions produced by human activities, such as flying.

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