In a Wall Street Journal column today, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) rails against “massive salaries” the executives at NPR and PBS are “raking” in, and how cutting their subsidies would save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars:

While executives at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) are raking in massive salaries, the organizations are participating in an aggressive lobbying effort to prevent Congress from saving hundreds of millions of dollars each year by cutting their subsidies.

The salaries he finds so egregious? PBS President Paula Kerger earned $632,233, NPR former President Kevin Klose $1.2 million, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting CEO Patricia de Stacy Harrison earned $298,884, plus $70,630 in additional compensation. While those numbers are not exactly chump change, it’s pennies compared to the salaries of another industry the U.S. taxpayers subsidize at much higher cost — Big Oil.

While DeMint takes aim at the $451 million budget proposal for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Big Oil continues to rake in billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies — $4 billion of which his fellow Republicans voted to maintain a few days ago — while its CEOs report multi-million dollar pay packages. In 2009 alone, the CEOs of the big five oil companies made a combined $67.3 million dollars:

– Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson: $27.2 million
– Chevron’s CEO David J. O’Reilly: $15.2 million
– ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva: $14.4 million
– BP former CEO Tony Hayward: $6.03 million
– Shell CEO Peter Voser: $4.4 million

Unrest in the Middle East has driven oil prices to their highest level since 2008. While Americans are paying at the pump, Republicans continue to protect not millions but billions of dollars in subsidies to oil companies, even in the face of nearly trillion dollar profits. Additionally, when gas prices increase, so do Big Oil’s bottom line.

An NBC/WSJ poll on Wednesday found that 74 percent of voters support cutting subsidies to big oil, so to quote Jim DeMint’s attack on Public Broadcasting, “There’s no reason taxpayers need to subsidize them anymore.” I couldn’t agree more.

Yes, discredited former TV weatherman Anthony Watts can’t stomach even a couple of scientists posting reasonable comments about an error-riddled piece from Heartland on a blog already over-run by the pro-pollution crowd.  He must marshall his readership to “shout them down in the comments section.”

Watts has, perhaps more than any other leading anti-science blogger, viciously smeared scientists — and tried to get his followers to game online voting  and pile onto other people’s comments sections (see Scientific American “horrified” by “the co-opting of the poll” by users of “the well-known climate denier site, Watts Up With That”).

In a new post, he reprints another piece smearing climate scientists by Joe D’Aleo.  By way of history, Watts and D’Aleo coauthored a “report” accusing top U.S. scientists of various kinds of misfeasance and malfeasance in the global temperature record.  It was utterly debunked last March (see Wattergate: Tamino debunks “just plain wrong” Anthony Watts).  As Tamino wrote, “your use of false claims to accuse NOAA scientists of deliberate deception was not just mistaken, it was unethical.”

Watts never retracted the attacks.  Instead, last Memorial Day, Watts directly questioned the patriotism of both Tamino and Rabett (see “Peak readership for anti-science blogs?“) leading Tamino to write, “This just might be the most loathsome thing Watts has yet done with his blog.”

Watts often feigns a demeanor of reasonableness, as when he had the chutzpah to write in June:

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Carbon Nation is a terrific documentary that is opening today for one week in:

• Portland, OR – Regal Fox Tower Stadium
• Seattle, WA - SIFF Cinema

And it is opening next Friday for one week  in San Francisco, at the Landmark Opera Plaza Cinema.  The DVD will be out next month.

You can see the trailer — which I’m not entirely thrilled with — here:

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Climate activist Tim DeChristopher was found guilty this week for disrupting a Bush administration oil lease auction, in a trial even the judge admitted was flawed. As bidder 70, DeChristopher competed with oil companies for the tracts of pristine Utah wilderness, winning $1.7 million worth of bids in an auction held during the waning days of the Bush administration. The auction, which included land within site of Arches National Park, was found later to have been in violation of federal law and withdrawn by the Obama administration. DeChristopher was not allowed to explain that — or his concerns about the destruction of our planet’s atmosphere from fossil fuel pollution — at his trial.

“We’re not here about why he did it,” federal judge Dee Vance Benson said, explaining why he prevented the jury from hearing DeChristopher’s motives. “I don’t see any basis that Mr. DeChristopher is not guilty because the auction may not have been a perfect auction,” Benson said. “This trial is not a perfect trial, but it is still a trial.”

Likewise, the U.S. attorneys who prosecuted DeChristopher — Scott Romney and John Huber — claimed that the trial had nothing to do with Big Oil or the Bush administration, as they said he “derailed, disrupted and sabotaged” the auction.

Speaking on the steps of the Utah courthouse after he was found guilty, DeChristopher explained why he refused a plea bargain and is ready to go to jail on behalf of our planet’s future:

And we know that now I’ll have to go prison, we know that now that’s the reality. But that’s just the job that I have to do. That’s the role that I face. And many before me have gone to jail for justice, and if we are going to achieve our vision many after me will have to join me as well.

Nobody ever told us that this battle would be easy. Nobody ever told us that we wouldn’t have to make sacrifices. We knew that when we started this fight.

Every wave on the ocean that has ever risen up and refused to lay back down has been dashed on the shore, but it is the very purpose of a wave to rise up, because once it rises above the horizon it finally has the perspective to see that it’s not just a wave, that it’s a part of a mighty ocean. And the sharpest rock on the wildest shore can never break that ocean apart, they can never wear that ocean down, because it’s the ocean that shapes the shore.

Watch it:

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In 2008 a young environmental activist named Tim DeChristopher bid on 13 parcels of land quietly put up for auction by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the waning days of the Bush Administration. This land was part of a larger offering by the BLM of federal public land in an attempt to open it up to oil and gas exploration. The majority of the land was near national parks in southern Utah.

In an effort to derail any number of oil, gas, and mining interests from getting their claws into this land and endangering some of the last great places on earth, DeChristopher risked going to jail to stop it. [Yesterday]  afternoon he was found guilty and jail seems more of a potential reality than ever.

That’s Robert Redford writing on HuffPost.  He notes, “To donate to the Tim DeChristopher legal defense fund, go to: www.bidder70.org.”   DeChristopher, of course, “had no intention of paying the $1.8 million tab he ran up at the auction.”

Guest blogger David Stockbridge Smith has some thoughts on DeChristopher, that I repost below.

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CALIFORNIA: Private utilities reached 18 percent renewables in 2010, using mostly geothermal and wind

It’s official: California’s investor-owned utilities did not meet their 20 percent renewable energy target by 2010.Together, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric got about 18 percent of their power from geothermal, wind, solar, small hydroelectric, biomass and biogas sources in 2010. That’s up from 15 percent in 2009, overall.

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The Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program leverages federal dollars by allowing the DOE to guarantee the debt of privately owned clean energy developers and manufacturing companies instead of investing directly into these companies through grants or tax subsidies.

Richard W. Caperton, in a CAP cross-post on what the House GOP’s proposal to slash the program would mean for clean energy.

The United States stands at a crossroads between two energy futures.

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Kate Gordon and Brian Katulis in a CAP cross-post.

The popular uprisings in the Middle East are yet another wakeup call on two fronts””the fragility of our world’s energy security and the inherent structural weakness in Middle East governments that lack popular legitimacy. While all eyes are on Libya and the growing threat of civil war, the coming eye of the storm may be Saudi Arabia, a critical player in the geopolitics of energy currently on the State Department travel warning list as a “dangerous and unstable” country.

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