By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian's U.S. environment correspondent What is the state of play for climate change legislation in America? Barack Obama put his reputation on the line at Copenhagen by saying America would act on climate change. Now it's up to Congress. The House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey bill last June which would set a price on carbon, and would put progressively tighter limits on greenhouse gas emissions with a 17 percent cut from 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, passed a nearly identical version of the bill out of …

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency. Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question …

Ask Chris Rapley, the ebullient physicist and director of the Science Museum in London, why he seems more sanguine about our prospects of taming climate change than many of his peers, and he'll tell you about the day he first toured the museum's library and archives. Surrounded by the thousands of designs and patent applications that traced the great Victorian lurch into modernity, he was struck by the power of human ingenuity. "It seemed clear that if we could somehow focus all that creativity and energy on clean energy then we'll be OK." Anyone watching an hour or two of …

This piece was written for The Guardian by Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation in Britain. Ten months have passed since pointing out that we have, at best, 100 left before a new, far more dangerous phase of global warming begins. The "chatter" of concern is getting louder. But at the same time, the political system in Britain has been wracked and absorbed more by its own inadequacies than by this fundamental threat to civilisation. The fall of the Roman Empire was due to a large extent, writes the historian Adrian Goldsworthy, to a system of government …

The following post was written by The Guardian's Dunan Clark The climate change debate often seems to focus more on the problems than on the solutions. It's not hard to understand why: almost every week brings another scientific report predicting impacts sooner and more devastating than we were previously expecting. With so many gloomy headlines, it would be easy to believe that irreversible runaway climate change is now inevitable. But that's not true – at least, not yet. The world is packed full of ingenious people with ideas for tackling global warming, either through emissions cuts, the removal of CO2 …

Reported by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian's U.S. environment correspondent America's oil, gas and coal industry has increased its lobbying budget by 50%, with key players spending $44.5m in the first three months of this year in an intense effort to cut off support for Barack Obama's plan to build a clean energy economy. The spoiler campaign runs to hundreds of millions of dollars and involves industry front groups, lobbying firms, television, print and radio advertising, and donations to pivotal members of Congress. Its intention is to water down or kill off plans by the Democratic leadership to pass "cap and …