CARBON emissions vary hugely between countries. That is well known, as is the finding that rich people emit more than poor ones. But a newly revised paper* by Emilio Zagheni of the Max Planck Institute in Rostock, Germany also shows how carbon footprints vary by age—and the worrying implications of this.

Power is essential for India’s long-term growth. But electricity is unlikely to flow fast enough

Tighter regulation, bountiful natural gas and declining installation costs for renewable energy herald the end of America’s coal era
A FREIGHT train, its dozen cars loaded with coal covered in a light dusting of snow, snaked through the narrow valley, sometimes following the two-lane highway and sometimes crossing it. The valley was silent and snowy, and though it was two days into 2012 it could easily have been 1982, 1942 or 1922: coal has been mined in Appalachia and carried out by rail for well over a century.

The green image of the Dutch is at odds with the reality .
ON A cold morning, when the mist rises over the canals that criss-cross the countryside, spreading over the woods and flatlands, the Netherlands does not feel like a sink-hole of pollution. But the ice-encrusted water is brimming with nitrates and phosphates, and the air is clogged with particulate matter.

GLOBAL health campaigns like grand goals. On January 30th Bill Gates joined the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), 13 drug-company executives and others in pledging to eradicate or control by 2020 ten of the world’s nastiest diseases, which afflict more than a billion people. Guinea worm, sleeping sickness, bilharzia (which doctors call schistosomiasis) and the others rot tissue and cripple the organs. Even if they do not kill, they stunt children and sap adults’ energies.

For the first time ever, the number of poor people is declining everywhere. The past four years have seen the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and the biggest food-price increases since the 1970s. That must surely have swollen the ranks of the poor. Wrong. The best estimates for global poverty come from the World Bank’s Development Research Group, which has just updated from 2005 its figures for those living in absolute poverty (not be confused with the relative measure commonly used in rich countries).

Last year’s triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown—has shattered Japanese faith in many of the country’s institutions.
ON MARCH 11th, the first anniversary of the day that turned her world upside down, 13-year-old Wakana Yokoyama will be performing a rice-planting dance for her fellow villagers. It will be a happy occasion, because she will be with old school friends she rarely sees any more. But it will be tinged with sadness, too; because although there are still villagers, there is no longer a village.

Gene banks represent an overdue push to preserve crop biodiversity. It also needs conserving on farms. WITH a heavy clunk, the steel outer doors of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault closed on February 28th, shutting out a howling Arctic gale and entombing a tonne of new arrivals: 25,000 seed samples from America, Colombia, Costa Rica, Tajikistan, Armenia and Syria. For Cary Fowler, the vault’s American architect, the Syrian chickpeas and fava beans were especially welcome.

Last year was dreadful for African elephants. This year may be worse. IT IS a bad time to be an elephant, particularly in Africa. Almost 24 tonnes of illegally harvested ivory were seized by investigators in 2011—the largest haul since records began in 1990 and more than twice the amount in 2010. Traffic, a wildlife watchdog, reckons around 2,500 elephants must have died to produce so much ivory. This year could be worse. More than 200 elephants were killed in a single state of Cameroon in the first six weeks of 2012.

ELECTRICITY producers in Germany are in disarray. The cause of the chaos is the government: in June it decided to shut all the country’s nuclear power stations by 2022, after Japan’s struggles to contain radiation leaks from its reactors following an earthquake and tsunami in March.

A study commissioned by the economics ministry has estimated the cost of that decision, in lost jobs and higher energy and carbon prices, at around €32 billion ($46 billion). The government had planned to extend the life of nuclear plants by an average of 12 years.