The BBC's speculatively-titled story "Chancellor looks to green budget" is pretty thread-bare, starting with the opening line:

Green taxes and measures to help people struggling to pay energy bills are likely to be among changes in the chancellor's first Budget on Wednesday.

It goes on to speculate that the chancellor, Alistair Darling, might put a levy on larger vehicles like people carriers, putting their price up by £2000.

And that's it!

After the little town of Modbury in Devon banned carrier bags last year, it has taken a long time for anyone else in England to catch up.

In fact nobody has caught up yet, there are just schemes to deter shoppers from using the dreaded polluting plastic bags, of which a staggering 13 billion are given away free every year across the country. Taking around 1000 years to decay, it's no wonder something needs to be done about the "white trash".

WRAP, the Waste and Recycling Action Programme, has withdrawn its scheme to help Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (Small businesses to you and me) do their recycling.

In a shock move, just four months after the scheme was launched, WRAP pulled the plug on their "Funding Support Scheme for Recycling Services to Business".

The scheme was introduced in October last year to give UK small businesses a boost in going green by supporting the groups that offer recycling services to small business.

Nokia's President and CEO unveiled a new concept Nokia mobile phone that is, at last, pretty environmentally friendly.

The new Nokia concept mobile, branded "Remade" is supposedly constructed from nothing new, thus reducing the carbon footprint of the device, using less raw materials, reducing landfill waste and making the whole production process more energy efficient.

The National Trust has a novel idea for environmental work this leap year with it's own Green Leap Day.

All of the Trust's 4800 staff are being encouraged to take February 29th off and focus their efforts into green projects. The idea is that staff will work on going green at home with numerous simple household tasks such as:

Globalisation is a fascinating concept: you buy goods that are cheap because they were made in a country where the production costs are lower and then you wonder why the company down the road making the same local goods at local prices goes out of business!

Japan's Oji Paper has admitted to lying "for decades" about the amount of recycled paper in their products.

The leading paper maker in Japan has come clean about the fact that, in one case, the amount of recycled fibre in their copy paper was not 50% as claimed but only between 5 and 10%.

Some of Oji Paper's envelopes were thought to contain as much as 70% recycled paper whereas the real content was just 30%.

It looks like the deadlock at the UN Bali summit has been broken.
After two weeks of intense talks it would have been a shambolic waste of time, money and effort for the summit to end without an agreement, without a clear path, no roadmap to a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
But which way did it go? What did the UN head, Ban Ki Moon, do to reach an agreement?

10 months ago the Confederation of British Industry set up a Climate Change Task Force to identify and assess climate change and its affect on British Business.

Last Monday the task force published its findings and it says that it's not just the realm of government and consumers to be doing their bit to go green but business should be actively involved too.

Even the FSB, the Federation of Small Businesses, are on our green bandwagon, but unlike the greenwash brigade they're genuinely into the "go green, shop local" mantra.