CRAIG BROWN (crbrown@scotsman.com)

THOUSANDS of offshore workers could be in for a change to their holiday rights after a series of tribunal claims on behalf of oil and gas employees.

More than 300 oil industry workers have brought claims against their employers in a long-running dispute over annual leave entitlement. If successful, it will have a knock-on effect on up to 7,000 workers.

The claimants - caterers and drillers - say that their typical two weeks on, two weeks off rota does not meet European Union laws that guarantee employees four weeks paid holiday a year.

They insist they are due four weeks of paid holiday on top of their time off between shift rotations, and that these holidays should be taken during times when they would normally be working offshore.

But Oil and Gas UK, which represents the employers, argues the staff already get "generous" time off.

Yesterday, seven test cases were heard at the Aberdeen tribunal and, if these are successful, the remaining claims could be heard.

Oil industry employers said the test tribunals would provide much-needed clarity on how the EU's working-time legislation should be applied to offshore workers.

Chris Allen, a director at Oil & Gas UK, said: "It is time that everyone in the industry had certainty on this issue, which deals with holiday entitlement and other matters.

"Everyone knows that offshore workers in the UK oil and gas industry enjoy above-average employment terms and conditions, and typically have at least 26 weeks off a year.

"We believe this amount of time off more than meets the legal amount of annual leave that employers must provide their employees, which is four weeks. Unfortunately, the way the legislation has been drafted for the offshore sector has allowed this view to be challenged and all sides need complete clarity."

The employers claim any change would create safety issues that would give large sections of North Sea production "no option but to close down".

But Graham Tran,of the union United Amicus, said: "We are in the business of job stability for our workers, and there's just no way that we, as a trade union, would go down a road that would lead to the closure of the fields. It's scaremongering and, quite frankly, the employers should be ashamed of themselves."

Google funds drive to turn green energy into gold

Google has announced plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make renewable energy cheaper than using coal.

The internet giant said that it was hiring dozens of engineers and seeking investment to improve the technology to harness solar, wind and geothermal energy.

Google will use the power to run its offices in Silicon Valley, California. Excess energy will be sold back to the US electricity grid.

Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, said: "We see a plausible path to much lower energy costs and we just want to get people working on that now."

The plan comes as oil prices reach £50 a barrel and coal - which generates 40 per cent of the world's electricity - faces regulatory and environmental pressures that could make it more expensive. Google also plans to license any resulting technologies worldwide.

Larry Brilliant, the head of its philanthropic arm, said: "As Google grows, we don't want our core business to be part of the problem. We want to be part of the solution."

JAPAN: March 14, 2008

TOKYO - The world's top greenhouse gas polluters will try to work out ways to curb carbon emissions from industries and fund cleaner energy projects for poorer nations when they gather in Japan from Friday.

The G20, ranging from top polluters the United States and China to Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa, emit about 80 percent of mankind's greenhouse gases.

Pressure is growing on these nations to work out a global pact to halt and then reverse growing emissions of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming.

"I think that all countries want to move this process forward. All countries want to see an advance in the negotiations," said Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official, of UN-led talks.

The three-day G20 meeting of environment and energy officials in Chiba, near Tokyo, comes after world nations agreed on the Indonesian island of Bali last December to launch two years of UN-led talks on a global climate pact.

The deal must be agreed by the end of 2009 to replace the Kyoto Protocol and is aimed at fighting more intense droughts, rising seas and crop failures.

"If the G20 meeting could agree on the 2020 emission reductions range for the group of industrialised countries as a whole, that would really help the process move forward," de Boer said."

At a meeting in Vienna last August, rich nations agreed to consider emissions cuts of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels as a non-binding starting point for their work on the global pact to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.

Japan, also host of the Group of Eight leading nations' summit this year, backs a 50 percent cut in emissions by 2050.

But last year's G8 host Germany failed to convince other members to make firm numerical commitments and de Boer said mid-century emissions targets were of little help to industries wanting to make clean-energy investments soon.

Many countries, particularly poorer nations, balk at the idea of fixed emissions targets. They say rich nations must take the lead by cutting their own emissions more deeply and paying for cleaner energy projects the developing world can't afford.

INDUSTRY CAPS

G20 talks host Japan, the world's fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter, believes part of the solution is backing sectoral caps for industries such as steel makers and power firms.

But this has had a mixed response.

"If you dig a little deeper, then there is still quite a fundamentally different understanding as to how those kinds of sectoral approaches could work," de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters.

"Japan perhaps much more favours the model whereby you take the most efficient plant of a certain kind as a benchmark and expect the rest of the sector to work towards that.

"Whereas countries like China and India are much more interested in an incremental approach, whereby you look at the situation as it is at the moment and then try and build and improve on that."

China, the world's second-largest greenhouse gas emitter after the United States, in the past has opposed sectoral caps.

But an industry source who declined to be named said recent meetings with officials suggested Beijing was preparing for the possible introduction of some kind of sectoral cap scheme.

The meeting is also set to discuss a multilateral fund to help developing nations fight climate change. The United States, Britain and Japan have already pledged support for the fund, and Japan also announced its own $10 billion scheme in January.

Global conservation group WWF said the United States, the only industrialised nation not to have ratified Kyoto, remained an obstacle.

"The US is the biggest roadblock and a new government will be a big help," said Stephan Singer, head of WWF's energy policy in Europe, adding: "I still think this year, the G8 may not come out with a groundbreaking agreement."

The Bush administration, though, has recently said it backed binding emissions goals if everyone supported them, a shift from once refusing to even discuss such goals.

-- For Reuters latest environment blogs go to: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/

(Additional reporting by Chisa Fujioka in Tokyo and Emma Graham-Harrison in Beijing; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Story by David Fogarty