When he ran for president, Barack Obama attacked the George W. Bush administration for putting political concerns ahead of science on such issues as climate change and public health. And during his first weeks in the White House, President Obama ordered his advisors to develop rules to "guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch."

The Interior Department is under attack from a former department chief who said it is incapable of overseeing offshore drilling and from a group of scientists and environmental groups calling for its current head to be fired.

Last week, it seemed, environmentalists were finally ready to let loose on President Barack Obama over the Gulf oil spill.

What De Leon didn't know was that the Nature Conservancy lists BP as one of its business partners. The Conservancy also has given BP a seat on its International Leadership Council and has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years.

Federal regulators gave clearance Wednesday for a large and controversial field test of genetically engineered trees planned for seven states stretching from Florida to Texas.

Animal and plant species are being killed off faster than ever before as human populations surge and people consume more, a United Nations report is expected to say this week.

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

But recent findings by Kremer and other agricultural scientists are raising fresh concerns about Monsanto's products and the Washington agencies that oversee them. The same seeds and chemicals spread across millions of acres of U.S. farmland could be creating unforeseen problems in the plants and soil, this body of research shows.

Below is a timeline with snapshots of Koch’s long running campaign to distort science, orchestrate fake grassroots campaigns, and defeat environmental protections.

JPMorgan backstops one of the most destructive mining practices in the world: mountaintop removal coal mining. And it continues to do so even as other major banks have cut ties to this practice.

Humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes on the planet that we may be ushering in a new period of geological history. Through pollution, population growth, urbanisation, travel, mining and use of fossil fuels we have altered the planet in ways which will be felt for millions of years, experts believe.

The disappearance of coral reefs could mean more hunger, poverty, political instability.

In 2008, Americans generated nearly 32 million tons of food waste, and less than 3 percent of that was composted, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Americans' worries about environmental issues have hit a 20-year low, largely because of economic concerns, according to a Gallup Poll released Tuesday.