After years of opposing efforts to fight climate change, Europe’s biggest oil and gas corporations have made a stunning about-face.

In a letter addressed to the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the chief executives of Shell, BP, and four other energy giants asked the world’s political leaders to put a price on carbon.

Continued warming of the Earth’s oceans over the next century could trigger disruptions to marine life on a scale not seen in the last 3 million years, scientists warn in a study released in June.

The changes could include extinctions of some of the ocean’s keystone species as well as a widespread influx of “invasive” animals and plants that migrate to new territory because of changing environmental conditions, the report says.

The Norwegian Parliament voted early in June to order the country’s huge oil fund — at $890 billion, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — to pull billions of dollars of investments out of companies that derive 30 percent or more of their business from mining or burning coal. The move is a major boost to the three-year-old campaign to persuade large investors to divest their fossil fuel stocks. And it could add to the momentum toward concrete action at the climate-change summit conference to be held in Paris in December.

That much is good. There is, however, a problem. Norway is also Europe’s biggest producer of other fossil fuels, and the money that the country is pulling out of coal came from more than four decades of pumping oil and gas out of the North Sea. Coal may be a worse offender on the climate change front, and the Norwegian legislators may truly have the planet’s best interests at heart, but it is hard to avoid the perception of hypocrisy in Norway’s selective combat against carbon emitters.

MAJOR industrialized economies are far off track in helping the world meet the UN’s global warming target, a monitoring group said yesterday.

Carbon pledges made by 31 economies — members of the Group of Seven and the European Union — mean that by 2030 they will contribute only 30 percent of the effort they should, it said.

IKEA, the world's biggest furniture retailer, plans to spend 1 billion euros ($1.13 billion) on renewable energy and steps to help poor nations cope with climate change, the latest example of firms upstaging governments in efforts to slow warming.

Chief Executive Peter Agnefjall said the measures would "absolutely not" push up prices at the Swedish group's stores. The investments will be "good for customers, good for the climate and good for IKEA too," he told Reuters.

A new IRENA report released today at an event in Merida, Mexico finds the country can increase the amount of renewable energy in its energy mix from 4.4% in 2010 to 21% by 2030.

Renewable Energy Prospects: Mexico also finds that Mexico could generate up to 46 per cent of its electricity by 2030 from renewable sources including wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal and biomass – a six fold increase from today’s levels.

The actor Charlize Theron, who takes a leading role in the new Mad Max movie as a one-armed warrior driving five sex slaves to safety, has expressed her fears that a bleak future awaits the planet unless global warming is addressed.

Charlize Theron joins Hardy’s lone wolf ex-cop in George Miller’s deliriously strange action adventure, a rollicking Grand Theft Auto revamped by Hieronymus Bosch

The insurance company Axa has said it will remove around €500m (£355m) of coal investments from its portfolio, in a move that reflects long-term concerns in the insurance industry over climate change.

The company has also pledged to triple its investments in green technologies and services to more than €3bn by 2020 and provide investors with more information on the risk to its investments from climate change.

“Renewables will do close to nothing to contribute to overcoming unemployment.”

“Renewables will create massive job losses in other industries.”

An MIT report has found that regular solar panels like the ones used today could supply much of the world with power. They believe terawatts of energy could be produced by 2050 and say that investment, not technology, could be the biggest hurdle.

The world’s population currently consumes 15 terawatts of power from various energy sources, according to the Economist. Despite making up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, Americans use 26 percent of the world’s power.