Two years into its "Ecomagination" environmental campaign, General Electric "continues to sell coal-fired steam turbines and is delving deeper into oil-and-gas production. Meanwhile, its finance unit seeks out coal-related investments including power plants. ... Yet these limitations haven't stopped GE from making a big marketing to-do of its commitment to the environment," notes Kathryn Kranhold. "The primary focus of the conglomerate's marketing efforts these days is a $1 million-a-year campaign to publicize its search for 'innovative solutions to environmental challenges.'" As part of Ecomagination, GE says it will sell $14 billion of "self-described environmentally friendly products" in 2007. It also claims to have reduced "its own greenhouse-gas emission by 4% between 2004 and 2006," though GE does not count emissions from many power plants part-owned by the company. Kranhold describes the discounted emissions as "an unknown but unquestionably significant amount."

Nuclear Energy Institute coaster"If we are going to seriously address our energy needs as well as our concerns about global climate change, one source stands out -- nuclear," writes Christine Todd Whitman in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's one of two recent op/eds by the former EPA administrator (the other was in BusinessWeek) that fail to disclose that Whitman is a paid consultant for the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). Patrick Moore, Whitman's co-chair of the NEI-funded "Clean and Safe Energy Coalition," has also been busy, promoting nuclear power in Michigan. "Nuclear energy is the key," Moore told a Grand Rapids audience. Meanwhile, in Britain, environmental groups have dismissed a public consultation on nuclear power as a "public relations stitch-up" by the pro-nuclear government. This is the second consultation on the issue; Greenpeace won a legal challenge against the first. Liberal Democrat Sir Menzies Campbell accused the UK government of "making up its mind on nuclear power long before this latest consultation had even begun," reports the BBC.

"Americans for American Energy," a front group for oil and gas companies, sent around an email incorrectly claiming that Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal supports its agenda. Freudenthal, who previously supported some "public education efforts" of AAE, told the Casper Star-Tribune that the group's recent email was "highly inappropriate" and "contains a description of initiatives which I wholeheartedly disagree with on a number of levels." AAE opposes environmental regulation of extractive industries, and the AAE website attempts to link environmental concerns to terrorism. A petition on its website states, "America is at War! And The U.S. Naval Oil Shale Reserve is Under Attack! While Americans fight overseas defending America's access to vital energy supplies, we are under attack here at home. Liberal lawyers and environmental extremists are attacking the U.S. Naval Oil Shale Reserve, trying to prevent America from producing American energy there."

Media Matters for America, the liberal media watchdog organization, has conducted a systematic study of the commentary sections in U.S. newspapers. "The results show that in paper after paper, state after state, and region after region, conservative syndicated columnists get more space than their progressive counterparts," they conclude. "Sixty percent of the nation's daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists."