HYANNIS, Massachusetts (Reuters) – A weakened but still dangerous Hurricane Earl churned toward the Massachusetts coast on Friday, en route to Canada’s Maritime provinces, after slapping North Carolina with heavy wind and rain but causing less damage than feared.

LIMA (Reuters) – Drought has cut Peru’s Amazon River to its lowest level in 40 years and it is already below the minimum set in 2005, when a devastating dry spell damaged vast swaths of South American rainforest in the worst drought in decades.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Friday he cannot predict whether Royal Dutch Shell, which has invested $3.5 billion in an offshore Arctic oil-development program, will be allowed to drill the five wells it plans next year in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Almost 50 nations made progress on Friday toward a “Green Fund” to help poor countries fight global warming but hosts Mexico and Switzerland said a full U.N. climate treaty was out of reach for 2010.

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United States reiterated on Friday that it was committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 even though the Senate has failed to pass legislation.

HATTERAS ISLAND, North Carolina (Reuters) – Hurricane Earl began to strafe North Carolina’s barrier islands with dangerous winds and surf on Thursday as it spun parallel to the U.S. East Coast on a northward trek toward New England and Canada.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will roll out more regulations on greenhouse gases and other pollution to help fight climate change, but they will not be as strong as action by Congress, a senior administration official said.

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – A fuel tanker loaded with 9 million liters (2.4 million gallons) of diesel fuel has run aground in Canada’s Far North but none of the fuel has spilled, the Canadian Coast Guard said on Thursday.

GENEVA (Reuters) – About 45 nations met on Thursday to seek ways to raise billions of dollars in aid to help the poor combat climate change as the United Nations warned them of a long haul to slow global warming.

With half a million signatures backing it up, Greenpeace fired off a letter to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg today calling for the world’s largest social network to cut ties to coal-fired power at its new data center in Oregon.

“Other cloud-based companies face similar choices and challenges as you do in building data centers, yet many are making smarter and cleaner investments,” executive director of Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo, writes. He points to Google and its a recent agreement to buy wind power from NextEra Energy for the next 20 years to power its data centers.

The letter adds to what’s turning into a miserable week for Zuckerberg, who is also fighting a civil lawsuit by a man who claims to own a huge chunk of the social network site and is seeking to uncover “unnecessary details” about Zuckerberg’s private life.

Greenpeace’s “Unfriend Coal” drive targeting Facebook falls under the environmental group’s larger Cool IT campaign, which aims to influence infrastructure choices behind the cloud-computing boom.

When Facebook broke ground on its center in Prineville, Oregon, last January, it blogged about energy-efficient technologies at the new facility, including cooling the air by bringing in cooler air from outside in an “airside economizer” and re-use of server heat during the colder months.

But Greenpeace says since then Facebook signed a deal to source its energy from PacificCorp, which it says uses 83 percent coal in its energy mix, the Associated Press reports.

An increase in the use of coal over the past four years was linked to a record 3 percent per year rise in global CO2 emissions,  a recent IPCC report showed.

And Greenpeace is predicting that the rise in data centers and telecommunication networks will mean an increase to 1,963 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2020.

Yes it would be better for acid rain and air pollution if nobody burned coal for electricity.

But with 500 million members propping it up, should Facebook care how its users think its infrastructure should be powered? It’s a free service, after all, one that those 500 million people choose to use. Is the threat of their non-participation in FB networking enough to prompt any action?