It "was one of the most vicious attacks I have ever seen on the integrity of a scientist," says one scientist on how the energy industry used to treat federal global climate expert Ben Santer. Santer's "heresy" was a 1995 report, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Second Assessment and the following words: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." At that time, more than 70 groups from the American Petroleum Institute to Union Carbide, painted their target (and rhetoric) on Santer. The Global Climate Coalition set an early standard for front groups and astroturf, and accused Santer of "scientific cleansing" when the world was reeling from Bosnia's "ethnic cleansing." Now the GCC is defunct and Santer's work has been afffirmed by sophisticated new testing, models and technology. Santer reflects: "I was a messenger bearing news that some very powerful people did not want to hear. So they went after the messenger. ... I just happened to get in the way and had to be discredited." Today, says Santer, "All of us--policymakers, public, media, and scientists--have important roles in [climate change] debate. Let's hope it takes place sooner rather than later."

BP is the most successful oil company at greenwashing its own image. Unfortunately for BP, the recent news about its massive oil leak in Alaska and the shutting down of its corrosive pipelines have revealed the truth -- it really is all about oil profits. In the New York Times , a BP adman admits that even he was suckered. John Kenney writes, "Six years ago I helped create BP’s current advertising campaign, the man-in-the-street television commercials. I can’t take credit for changing the company’s name from 'British Petroleum' to 'beyond petroleum' (lower case is cooler); my boss at the time came up with it. ... I believed wholeheartedly in BP’s message, that we could go -- or at least work toward going -- beyond petroleum." Now Kenney sees it differently: "They didn’t go beyond petroleum. They are petroleum."

Amid the growing media attention surrounding the Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah conflict in the Middle East, dozens of independent blogs are providing eyewitness accounts and describing what life is like in the middle of a war. Crawford Kilian offers a rundown of a number of blogs whose views range from pro-Hezbollah to pro-Israel. According to Lisa Goldman, the war in Lebanon may be "the first conflict to be blogged from day one" and "the first time that residents of 'enemy' countries engaged in an ongoing conversation while missiles were falling."