Environmental Politics

"Dow Chemical Co hoped an Olympic sponsorship would boost its global cache, but the company's link to a gas leak tragedy 28 years ago threatens to curb some of the benefits from the $100 million advertising deal. As many as 25,000 residents of Bhopal, India, died in the aftermath of a 1984 gas leak at a pesticide factory that was owned by a subsidiary of Union Carbide, which sold the facility in 1994. Dow bought Union Carbide in 2001."

"The climate sceptic thinktank chaired by former chancellor Lord Lawson, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), has been ruled not 'influential' enough to warrant making the Charity Commission disclose its seed funder, an information rights tribunal ruled on Tuesday."

"VANCOUVER -- Amid revelations of a well-funded U.S. organisation's plans to deliberately distort climate science, scientists and journalists at a major scientific conference called on the Canadian government to stop its muzzling of scientists. For the past four years, the Canadian government has been denying timely access to government scientists even when their findings are published in leading scientific journals, said scientists and journalists in a special session of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science meeting here in Vancouver, British Columbia."

"Rising gasoline prices, trumpeted in foot-tall numbers on street corners across the country, are causing concern among advisers to President Obama that a budding sense of economic optimism could be undermined just as he heads into the general election.

White House officials are preparing for Republicans to use consumer angst about the cost of oil and gas to condemn his energy programs and buttress their argument that his economic policies are not working.

"Just four years ago, shale gas king Aubrey K. McClendon told shareholders of Chesapeake Energy that 'finally, we made some new friends this year.'"

"CHICAGO — The wind industry is predicting massive layoffs and stalled or abandoned projects after a deal to renew a tax credit for wind production failed Thursday in Washington."

"A Powerpoint presentation obtained by The Daily Caller shows that during a July 2008 meeting, the $789 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund proposed to coordinate and fund a dozen environmental and anti-corporate activist groups’ efforts to scuttle pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Canada to the United States."

"Climate scientist Peter Gleick has acknowledged that he was the person who convinced the Heartland Institute to hand over the contents of its January Board package, authenticating the documents beyond a doubt and further exposing the disinformation campaign Heartland has pursued in the last week, trying to discredit the information." [Gleick called his methods in obtaining the documents an ethical lapse, and the outpouring of criticism diverted media attention from the apparent deception campaign revealed in the Heartland documents themselves. The uproar raises important issues about what methods are legitimate for investigative journalists to use in obtaining information (Gleick was not a journalist), and where the solid ground of truthfulness may be found in today's escalating conflict between science and PR. -- Ed. note]

"The House by a wide margin [Thursday] night passed a bill to vastly expand oil and gas development off the nation's coasts, in an Alaskan reserve and on experimental shale tracts in the Intermountain West."

"Most scientists, on achieving high office, keep their public remarks to the bland and reassuring. Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), broke ranks in a spectacular manner. She confessed that she was now 'scared to death' by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world."