When 10 of the largest U.S. corporations and four environmental groups joined forces last January to lobby for federal regulations to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions, it was seen as a watershed in corporate environmentalism. Behind the scenes, however, several companies that belong to USCAP are supporting efforts and organizations that oppose mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases.

An American power company with close financial links to President George Bush has been named as one of the world's top producers of global warming pollution. The enormous carbon footprint of Southern Company -- among the largest financiers of Republican Party politicians -- has raised eyebrows. Southern's employees handed George Bush $217,047 to help him get elected, and they and the company have contributed an extraordinary $6.2m to Republican campaigns since 1990.

An internal investigation into a fake news conference staged by the Federal Emergency Management Agency during last month's California wildfires found that the agency's press secretary directed aides to pose as reporters, secretly coached them during the briefing and ended the event after a final, scripted question was asked, according to a senior FEMA official.

Peabody Energy, the world's largest private coal company, did not sway from its support (financial or otherwise) for the controversial ads it placed in Kansas newspapers that said Iraqi, Venezuelan, and Russian leaders were smiling because of the governor's recent rejection of two applications for coal-burning power plants.

The school governor who challenged the screening of Al Gore's climate change documentary in secondary schools was funded by a Scottish quarrying magnate who established a controversial lobbying group to attack environmentalists' claims about global warming.

Chevron's new advertising campaign represents the oil giant's latest attempt to stake out a spot in the debate over future energy supplies. Although it touches on a topic the oil industry once hated to discuss, the ads never use the terms global warming or climate change.

The Bush administration has conducted a concerted, behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to try to generate opposition to California's request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, according to documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

court documents show. Michaels told the court some funders gave him money on the condition that their identities remain secret -- and he is largely dependent for his livelihood on the money they give him.

Virtually every piece of the 2,600-ton plant is being shipped to Guatemala to be rebuilt. It could last continue to pollute for another 50 years.

A federal court today issued a harsh rebuke of the Bush administration for its failure to issue long-delayed reports assessing the impacts and consequences of global warming in the United States. The judge in the case set a spring deadline for administration officials to comply. Plaintiffs say the Bush administration has been suppressing two reports intended to serve as a unifying guide for Congress and federal agencies on global warming threats.

If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again.  The denial machine is running at full throttleand continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.

Contradicting chief NASA scientist James Hansen, the agency's administrator, Michael Griffinm is downplaying the need to combat global warming. In an interview, Griffin said: "I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists," Griffin told Inskeep. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."

"The cycle of alarmist predictions is now well established. Not long before some new UN moot, a prominent fearmonger like James Hansen or Michael Mann will make a tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo of the warming crisis. The cry is headlined by the New York Times, with exactly the same lack of critical evaluation as that newspaper's recycling of the government's lies about Saddam's WMDs."

Exxon Mobil is "the only principled oil and gas company I know in the US." -- Richard S. Lindzen 

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

A group of US investors with more than $200 billion in assets have accused 10 companies, including the oil giant ExxonMobil, the financial services group Wells Fargo and the utility TXU, of not doing enough to respond to global warming and climate change, in a sign of increasing shareholder activism on environmental issues.

When it comes to the issue of climate change, Exxon Mobil says it has been misunderstood. The world's largest publicly traded oil company now contends "the appropriate debate isn't on whether the climate is changing but rather should be on what we should be doing about it."

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil to undermine the IPCC's 2007 report on climate science.

In one of the strongest signs yet that U.S. industry anticipates  government curbs on global-warming emissions, Exxon Mobil Corp., long a leading opponent of such rules, is starting to talk about how it would like them to be structured.

Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint has launched a fierce attack on "quasi-hysterical Europeans" and their "Chicken Little" attitudes to global warming.

ExxonMobil Chairman and chief executive Rex Tillerson told Wall Street  analysts that the company would not be changing its basic position on global warming - just explaining it better.

A federal climate scientist in Boulder says his boss told him never to utter the word Kyoto and tried to bar him from using the phrase "climate change at a conference". The allegations come as federal investigators probe whether Bush administration officials tried to block government scientists from speaking freely about global warming and attempted to censor their research.

An academic from a progressive Washingon, DC think tank  is furious that Environment Minister Rona Ambrose used recent remarks by her to attack the Kyoto protocol on climate change. "I certainly don't want to see Canada pulling out, did not want to the U.S. pulling out." said the researcher, Daphne Wysham, who added: "We want to see Kyoto strengthened."

Exxon Mobil Corp., which has sparked criticism -- most recently from Britain's Royal Society -- for funding groups that challenge the scientific validity of concerns about global warming, is reviewing whether it will continue to fund some of those groups.

Commerce Department officials may have tried to stop a government scientist from speaking to reporters because of his views on global warming, a California congressman says. The officials "tried to suppress a federal scientist from discussing the link between global warming and hurricanes," according to a letter sent Tuesday from Rep. Henry Waxman to Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

Britain's national academy of science, the Royal Society, has accused US oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. of misleading the public into thinking that the role of humans in climate change is still open to doubt. Royal Society spokesman Bob Ward described Exxon's assessment of mankind's contribution to global warming as inaccurate and misleading on Wednesday.

The governor's office has asked Virginia's climatologist to refrain from using his title when conducting non-state business because of fears his views on global warming will be perceived as an official state position.

A recent statement by evangelical Christians downplaying the potential problems of global climate change includes eight signers whose six organizations have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.

Big coal -- in the form of the National Rural Electric Association, Koch    Industries, American Electric Power, the Southern Company, the National Association of Manufacturers and others are planning a major blitz against efforts to fight global warming. The plan is a retread of a similar campaign launched in the early 1990s by coal interests. The latest version is spelled out in what is dubbed a "Vampire Memo" because it resurrects an earlier campaign which was discredited and abandoned in the mid 1990s. Read the memo.

"I wonder whether Attorney-General Lockyer disclosed to the judge that Gelbspan is a rather dubious character -- for example, he misrepresented himself as a Pulitzer Prize winner on the jacket of The Heat Is On. Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer, nor was he ever even nominated." (Click here for a response to Milloy's slander.)

The Rev. Pat Robertson said he hasn't been a believer in global warming in the past, but this summer's record-breaking heat is "making a convert out of me."

The field of global warming skeptics is thinning as rapidly as Greenland's glaciers, but it hasn't stopped them from rallying for a counterattack every now and then. The most recent target of their ire was an Associated Press report by Seth Borenstein, reprinted in the Washington Post among other outlets on June 27, entitled "Scientists

OK Gore's Movie for Accuracy." (By Jim Motavalli, editor of "E/the Environmental Magazine.")

James Titus, an Environmental Protection Agency project manager for sea level rise, wrote an essay for a law review in which he argued that the nation needed to make decisions on whether or how wetlands and beaches should be allowed to migrate inland.  Reached by telephone, Mr. Titus said he was no longer allowed to discuss such issues publicly and referred questions to the agency's press office, which would not allow him to speak about it on the record. Instead, requests for on-the-record information were referred to Bill Wehrum, the agency's acting assistant administrator for air and radiation.

Frank Luntz, the Republican  message massager, recently enjoyed a fruitful meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper as well as with a group of Canadian conservatives, advising them how to win  elections.

The visibility of climate impacts  is part of the emerging, solidifying scientific consensus on global warming -- a consensus that raises the urgent political and economic issue of climate change. This isn't a theory anymore. This is happening now.  But when you step into the realm of the skeptics, you find yourself on a parallel Earth. (An extensive article in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, May 28, 2006)

A senior scientist has condemned as a "deliberate effort to mislead" a series of television adverts produced by an oil industry-funded loyying group that seeks to portray concern over global warming as alarmism.

"It is clear that a number of well-funded and well-orchestrated media campaigns were carried out by groups that are opposed to the Kyoto protocol and measures to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. There are signs that these groups are preparing similar media and political offensives ahead of the publication of the IPCC fourth assessment report in 2007." -- British Royal Society

"The scientific community did not complain when Al Gore tried to [start] a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists. They were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled [skeptical] scientists &as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry&.[and] when [a European skeptic] was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism."   -- Richard Lindzen

Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.

MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has charged the federal government's top science agency with ignoring the growing research linking global warming to stronger hurricanes. But instead of telling the public the truth, he said, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials are insisting that hurricanes are worse because of a natural cycle.

Just days after President George W. Bush announced the U.S. would invest more in R&D for renewable energy technologies, one of  the  world's largest investment firms, the Carlyle Group, said it would substantially boost its stake in renewables. Coincidentally, former President George H. W. Bush was a special consultant to the Carlyle Group for 10 years before his retirement two years ago.

A former CSIRO senior scientist in Australia and internationally recognised expert on climate change claims he was reprimanded and encouraged to resign after he spoke out on global warming. Graeme Pearman said he believed there was increasing pressure in Australia on researchers whose work or professional opinions were not in line with the Federal Government's ideology.

George C. Deutsch, a Bush appointee to NASA who was involved in the alleged censorship of a leading climate scientist,  resigned in the wake of disclosures he had falsified his resume and never, as claimed, graduated from a Texas university.

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

One reason why Western governments have been slow to respond to the climate crisis is that they are under constant pressure from lobbying groups that defend the interests of eco-unfriendly industry. The Independent identifies a selection of the most influential groups.