by Michael Conathan

If rhetoric from the Republican Presidential candidates is to be believed, the Environmental Protection Agency is “a tool to crush the private enterprise system” (Mitt Romney), “a cemetery for jobs” (Rick Perry), and “should be re-named the job-killing organization of America” (Michele Bachmann). But it’s a safe bet the tens of thousands of people who may soon find jobs implementing EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay would disagree with those assertions.

A new report released today by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation highlights the job creation numbers — 240,000 full-time jobs — expected to come from achieving new pollution goals set by the EPA’s “Total Maximum Daily Load” restrictions. Finalized in December 2010, these rules require a 25 percent reduction of pollution flowing into the Bay by 2025 and have already spurred state and federal investment in stormwater mitigation projects, upgrades at sewage treatment facilities, addition of power plant smokestack scrubbers, and improvements to management of agricultural runoff and livestock waste management.

The Bay’s watershed covers more than 64,000 square miles including all of Maryland and the District of Colombia, large areas of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and portions of Delaware, New York, and West Virginia. Therefore infrastructure projects to reduce pollution will encompass a massive region and provide a major boost to the economy.

Of course, the clock is already ticking on a newly minted, 60 day, congressional mandate for the President to issue a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that would carry dirty Canadian tar sands oil from the great white north across America’s heartland and endanger a critical aquifer. By setting up what one former pipeline inspector called a potential “disaster,” the pipeline would ultimately deliver massive quantities of oil to the Gulf Coast only to see the vast majority of it exported.

Keystone proponents, including House Speaker John Boehner, have asserted that the project would immediately create “tens of thousands” of American jobs. These claims seem just a tad hyperbolic now that the oil company itself has conceded that the actual number of jobs that would be created is closer to 6,000 to 6,500, and would only last for two years.

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The International Energy Agency was once a staid and conservative organization that people ignored because it was staid and conservative.

Now people ignore the IEA because it has become a blunt truth teller on oil and climate (see World’s top energy economist warns peak oil threatens recovery, urges immediate action: “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us”).

Last November, Climate Progress blogged on the IEA’s 2011 World Energy Outlook [WEO] bombshell warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy.”

Fatih Birol is the IEA’s chief economist, and later gave a great talk at the Carnegie endowment on the WEO’s implications.  You can watch it here (and view the transcript and download his PPT slides — I clipped the top image from the last slide).

Birol can’t really be considered a rabble-rouser — he worked for OPEC for 6 years before joining the IEA in 1995, so he was there during  extended period of time when nobody was much paying attention to the IEA.

He had some blunt remarks on climate and energy (starting around minute 56):

Another point on climate change is about the two degrees. With the current policies in place, the world is perfectly on track to six degrees Celsius increasing the temperature, which is very bad news. And everybody, even school children, know this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.

Of course he means school children in other countries where they are taught the basic science (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Birol continued:

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By Jessica Goad, manager of research and outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The Western Energy Alliance, one of the biggest and best-financed oil and drilling promoters in the Rocky Mountain West, has chosen former lobbyist Tim Wigley to be its new president, according to Greenwire today.

Wigley comes to WEA after a 10-year stint at Pac/West, a public relations and lobbying firm that counts the oil and gas industry as one of its clients. Pac/West previously employed disgraced former Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), who once attempted to sell off national parks to tackle national deficit woes. The group is also notable for having secured a $3 million contract from Alaska’s legislature to “educate” Americans on the benefits of drilling in the state’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Wigley has spent much of his career lobbying on behalf of corporate interests. But perhaps most interesting is his previous role as campaign manager for two “astroturf” groups — those that purport to be grassroots when really they are just front groups for industry. According to a 2007 investigation by Public Citizen, Wigley headed up two major astroturf campaigns while working for Pac/West:

- Project Protect (logging): “This group spent $2.9 million on media purchases and other efforts to lobby for President Bush’s ‘Healthy Forests’ initiative. The group, which billed itself as ‘a grassroots coalition of western communities, natural resource groups, labor organizations, and conservationists,’ refused to disclose its donors. It listed an address at Mailboxes, Etc., in 2003. In 2004, it listed an address identical to that of the American Forest Resource Council, a group that lobbies for public land management policies that favor industry.”

- Save Our Species Alliance (endangered species issues): “This group sought to gut the Endangered Species Act…The campaign manager for Save Our Species Alliance was Tim Wigley…[who] told a reporter that the Save Our Species Alliance was a grassroots group of farmers, labor groups and others. Wigley did not divulge the identities of the group’s funders. ‘I think this line of questioning is misleading,’ he said to the reporter who asked.”

The Western Energy Alliance is a trade group with lobbying and PAC arms whose “Blueprint for Western Prosperity” is a hit list against public health and environmental safeguards and calls for policies like a “moratorium on new federal regulations.” WEA is notorious for accusing the Obama administration for blocking drilling on public lands, despite evidence that oil and gas drilling in America is higher than ever before.