All advertising for new cars in the E.U. will have to carry cigarette-style “health warnings” about their environmental impact, as Parliament responds to the car industry’s failure to meet its own voluntary target on reducing CO₂ emissions. 

Advertisements in newspapers and magazines will have to devote at least 20% of the space to details about the fuel economy and CO₂ emissions of the car, and companies that produce the most polluting cars will also have to pay penalties of up to £5,000 per vehicle, with the proceeds used to reduce the cost of the most efficient cars. 

Read the full article at Times Online

U.K. supermarket giant Tesco has announced a plan to transport wine shipments along the Manchester Ship Canal as part of a plan to cut carbon emissions by 80%. The move will take 50 trucks a week off the roads and should help establish the commercial viability of shipping freight by canal.

Read the full article at BusinessGreen

BOSTON (Reuters) - British billionaire Richard Branson said on Monday his Virgin Group hopes to produce clean biofuels by around the start of the next decade and early next year will test a jet plane on renewable fuel.

Virgin hopes to provide clean fuel for buses, trains and cars within three or four years, Branson told a Mortgage Bankers Association meeting in Boston.

In the meantime, Virgin will be conducting a test jet flight on renewable fuels. "Early next year we will fly one of our 747s without passengers with one of the fuels that we have developed," Branson told the annual conference.

Illustration by John Ritter

Imagine a national transit system that runs on solar energy and wind power. Now imagine that it consists of recycled airplanes speeding along elevated tracks. It might sound like a vintage Disneyland ride updated for modern ecophiles, but an American company is working to make this vision a reality.

The company, Mass Tram America, is the brainchild of ex-Boeing engineer Ben Missler. He has set out to combat traffic congestion and pollution with a new mass transit monorail system that uses recycled airplane fuselages to transport people and cargo, creating a “highway in the skyway.” Though it currently exists only on paper, Missler hopes to launch a pilot project by 2011.

“The idea behind Mass Tram America is to provide a low-energy, low-cost elevated monorail system that adapts to the existing infrastructure and helps take some of the stress off of freeways and Amtrak,” Missler says.

The project will recycle decommissioned Boeing 727, 737, and 757 planes, which are normally scrapped for metal. After being stripped of their wings, engines, and tails, the converted passenger cars will, according to Missler’s design, be equipped with solar cells and battery storage and attached to a tram. The cars would travel beneath a single rail, suspended by cables that are connected every 1,000 feet by support towers housing wind turbines or photovoltaic cells. According to Missler, the system could be integrated with existing bridges and freeways.