Environmental Politics

"Closed-door meetings between a select group of environmentalists and a handful of electric utility executives may determine the fate of climate change legislation in the Senate."

"Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, pledged today to look into demands from a group of senators for an investigation into charges that BP lobbied for the release of the Lockerbie bomber as part of an oil-for-terrorist deal."

"There's 'no chance' that President Obama will rework the executive policies carried over from his predecessor that tell agencies how to write regulations and outline a White House oversight role, academics and activists say."

"As it works to reshape the oil industry's image, American Petroleum Institute's media shop has nabbed a former spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce."

"The latest skirmish in the decades-long scientific battle over the health risks of the most toxic form of dioxin is heating up."

Mainstream news media have given far less coverage to the five major panels that have debunked the "climategate" stolen-email flap kicked up by the fossil-fuel blogosphere than they did to the original charges now proven false.

The co-chairmen of a presidential commission probing the BP oil spill did not ask any probing questions of the one BP exec to testify at the panel's first hearing Monday.

"The Coast Guard has modified a policy on safety zones around boom deployed on oiled coastlines, a policy news organizations had said unnecessarily restricted coverage of the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and efforts to clean it up."

"For environmentalists, the BP oil spill may be disproving the maxim that great tragedies produce great change."

"Last March, President Obama promised he'd have a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to the federal government on hand by July 29. A full year later, federal agencies still have not received any new directives and some government scientists say that conditions have not improved noticeably since Obama took power."