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This week:

• Jordan Poppenk speaks with Andreas Marouchos, engineer and Director of the Bluesky solar racing team at the University of Toronto, about the present and future of solar cell technology as an energy source.
• Environment Minister Rona Ambrose gets shuffled out of the federal Conservative environment portfolio to be replaced by former Treasury President John Baird. Jordan Poppenk and Scott Hansen discuss the implications.
• Scott Hansen delivers his predictions for the top environmental stories of 2007.

The headlines in brief:

• Prime Minister Stephen Harper is dumping Environment Minister Rona Ambrose and replacing her with his Ontario political minister, John Baird;
• Prime Minister Stephen Harper has dismissed a special environmental adviser the former Liberal government named to kick-start Canada’s attempts at curbing greenhouse-gas emissions under the Kyoto accord;
• The new year has been welcomed by bizarre weather across the country;
• Environmental Defence identified harmful pollutants in the bodies of four federal politicians who volunteered to have their blood tested;
• According to a Decima Research poll released this week to The Canadian Press, environmental policy is both the top priority of Canadian voters and the subject of the most dissatisfaction with government performance;
• British climate scientists are predicting that 2007 may be the world’s hottest year ever recorded;
• Researchers have found that the plants in the Amazon rainforest rely on nutrient-rich dust from a valley in the Sahara desert;
• The Union of Concerned Scientists has accused energy giant ExxonMobil of ‘manufacturing uncertainty’ about climate change by donating large sums of money to climate change skeptic groups;
• Melting sea ice in the Arctic is helping ocean waters soak up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere;
• The scimitar-horned oryx, an antelope that had been wiped out of its native habitat in Tunisia is being reintroduced into the wild.

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