Three years ago, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig wrote an essay for The New Republic, “Against Transparency.” His argument was an uncommon one: Political transparency is not an unalloyed good. His core argument is well articulated here:

[R]esponses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response.

I am not a Harvard Law professor, so I will paraphrase the movie Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire version): With great amounts of information comes great opportunity for abuse.

We’ve all been in arguments during which our opponent cites a tangential piece of evidence as an indication that our entire point of view is wrong. This is, in part, Lessig’s point: legitimate debate getting mired in the ceaseless citation of trivia in an effort to call a debate a draw. Or, worse, that random information could be weakly strung together to imply wrongdoing. (It’s the stock-in-trade of Glenn Beck: minor links between unrelated things that give the appearance of conspiracies and nefariousness.) The bigger the pool of data you swim around in, the easier those links are to draw.

The legal profession’s version of this is the discovery process. All pertinent evidence is shared between sides; arguments are culled. The more evidence they have at their fingertips, the more they can build — or demolish — a case.

In 2010, British Petroleum asked two Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientists to assist in determining the rate at which the pipe severed by the Deepwater Horizon explosion was pumping oil into the Gulf of Mexico. They determined that amount to be about 57,000 barrels a day. The more that spilled, of course, the more that BP is liable. So, last week, the company subpoenaed the scientists’ private emails to prepare for a lawsuit against the government.

The scientists wrote an essay for the Boston Globe:

BP claimed that it needed to better understand our findings because billions of dollars in fines are potentially at stake. So we produced more than 50,000 pages of documents, raw data, reports, and algorithms used in our research — everything BP would need to analyze and confirm our findings. But BP still demanded access to our private communications. Our concern is not simply invasion of privacy, but the erosion of the scientific deliberative process.

Deliberation is an integral part of the scientific method that has existed for more than 2,000 years; e-mail is the 21st century medium by which these deliberations now often occur. During this process, researchers challenge each other and hone ideas. In reviewing our private documents, BP will probably find e-mail correspondence showing that during the course of our analysis, we hit dead-ends; that we remained skeptical and pushed one another to analyze data from various perspectives; that we discovered weaknesses in our methods (if only to find ways to make them stronger); or that we modified our course, especially when we received new information that provided additional insight and caused us to re-examine hypotheses and methods.

Their argument, in essence: BP can use our private deliberations to weaken our ultimate conclusions. And with billions of dollars hanging in the balance, that’s undoubtedly exactly what BP’s legal team intends to do: suss out instances in which the debate focused on different numbers and cite those as the examples that should be used. The scenario strongly echoes the infamous “Climategate” debacle which seems only now to be wrapping up. Emails stolen from university researchers were cherry-picked to present evidence contrary to established climate science. Sadly, it worked, further muddying the already gray waters of debate on global warming.

In nearly any debate, you can point to an instance that makes an argument counter to the weight of evidence. But it’s that weight — and its sources, and its derivatives — that are the desired outcome of rational deliberation. The scientists from Woods Hole applied that understood goal to their work for British Petroleum. BP, being motivated otherwise, seems prepared to use that intellectual rigor and honesty against them.

In the Northeast, power plants’ carbon emissions fell an average 23 percent during the three years of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s cap-and-trade program (compared to the previous three years).

By 2050, Latin American and Caribbean countries could be racking up $100 billion in damages from climate change each year.

China to foreign embassies: Stop monitoring our air quality. It’s against our law and “diplomatic conventions.” (Read: You’re making us look bad, so cut it out … OR ELSE.)

BP is bullying scientists who worked on the Deepwater Horizon spill by subpoenaing all their emails related to the blow-out.

Back in 2010, Greenpeace filed a Freedom of Information request covering endangered species affected by the Deepwater Horizon spill. They just received a response from NOAA, and it included more than 100 photos. They’re disturbing: The ones Greenpeace has released so far show endangered Kemp Ridley’s sea turtles, dead and covered in oil.

The photos below the jump are even worse.

Mother Jones has more, too. Kate Sheppard reports:

Most photos are missing dates and descriptions, though the FOIA request covered the period of April 20 to July 30, 2010. But they’re pretty shocking — which is probably why they weren’t made public at the height of the spill. “It just makes me furious,” said John Hocevar, a marine biologist who works for Greenpeace. “I had so many conversations with people in various government agencies working on the Gulf spill, and I feel like they were hiding things from all of us.”

We know we should ignore this sort of campaign from Heartland, but seriously? Climate change advocates are like the Unabomber??

Could senior BP officials get caught in the Justice Department’s criminal probe?

Greenland’s glaciers aren’t melting as fast as predicted (though the pace at which glaciers melt is pretty inconsistent, and the melt rate is still speeding up overall).

The more species on a given plot of earth, the more total biomass there will be.

Also, species extinction could be a major driver of climate change and keep the environment from producing awesome resources like … food.

South Korea’s parliament approved a cap-and-trade plan. Kenya and Peru are also working on climate change laws.

A judge granted BP preliminary approval of its plan to settle Deepwater Horizon claims. The company could pay out nearly $8 billion to settle private claims for injury or economic loss from the spill.

In November, California voters could choose to require labeling of GMO foods.

Greenpeace has been busy. Activists boarded an icebreaker for the second time in a week and dropped a smoke bomb on a French nuclear plant.

Two of the last few northern white rhinos on earth have done it. (You know, IT.) No word yet if the pair’s expecting a little rhino, but there’s a video, if you want to see what rhino sex looks like.

The National Zoo’s panda bears were not doing it (not doing it competently, at least) so zookeepers decided to artificially inseminate Mei Xiang. They live-tweeted the operation. Now is your chance to check out the blurry pictures.

BP’s first quarter profits were down compared to 2011.

Climate skeptics think the clouds will save us. Most scientists are, uh, skeptical of that idea.

Here’s what a sunset looks like on Mars: blue!

Ever since the massive oil spill at the Deepwater Horizon well two years ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been investigating the spill. And the feds have finally filed the first criminal charges, for obstruction of justice, against an engineer named Kurt Mix who worked on the oil spill. Mix, it turns out, deleted 300 text messages that contained sensitive information about the extent of the spill, just before lawyers were going to collect that sort of information from him.

The DOJ’s case focuses on two incidents. In the first, “after Mix learned that his electronic files were to be collected by vendor working for BP’s lawyers,” he allegedly deleted a string of 200 text messages from his iPhone, the DOJ says. Those messages “included sensitive internal BP information collected in real-time as the Top Kill operation was occurring, which indicated that Top Kill was failing.”

In the second, a couple of weeks later, after Mix found out his iPhone was going to be imaged, he deleted another string of texts, this one 100 long, about how much oil was coming from the well.

In the aftermath of the oil spill, the estimates for its magnitude kept getting revised up. Part of what’s at issue here is if BP employees intentionally kept that information from the public. Mix’s lawyers say that he provided lawyers with information equivalent to what he deleted in different forms.

This round of legal blowback for BP and the other companies involved in the spill is just beginning. The DOJ has indicated that it’s still deep in this investigation and more arrests could be coming.

Federal prosecutors charged a former BP engineer with deleting text messages in order to keep information about the true size of the Deepwater Horizon spill from investigators.

The three cities with the most air pollution in the country are all in California, but L.A. only comes in third. A couple of inland metro areas come in first and second.

As often as the House tries to push through Keystone XL, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid steps up to shoot the proposal down.

In a new ad, the Obama super PAC brands Mitt Romney as the “$200 million man” who took millions from Big Oil. (Romney’s “in the [gas] tank” for Big Oil — get it?)

Bill Clinton has a message for sustainability advocates: “Chill out – sometimes this stuff takes years.” (Unless you’re in Mexico, apparently.)

Two years after the BP oil spill, offshore drilling for oil is still a risky business.

And BP is still fighting with the government over how much it will have to pay for damages.

Earth Day is coming up on Sunday. We’re gonna do it this year, guys! We’re gonna save the Earth in 24 hours!

On all other nights, we smoke only tobacco. Why, on this night, do we smoke weed?

In Illinois, two cars crashed into a major oil pipeline, shutting it down.

BP’s going to pay $7.8 billion to settle Deepwater Horizon claims, according to a settlement announced Friday.

Science says: Climate change made the Texas drought worse than it would have been otherwise.

Near Times Square, the sculpture “Manhattan Oil Project” portrays an oil drilling site — the destruction necessary to provide for energy hogs like Times Square billboards.

Climate change’s latest victim: outdoor ice skating rinks.