Yet Haley Barbour, right wing try to blame Obama for high prices, still push policies that EIA says will have no impact on price

US oil production last year rose to its highest level in almost a decade….

As a result, analysts believe the US was the largest contributor to the increase in global oil supplies last year over 2009, and is on track to increase domestic production by 25 per cent by the second half of the decade.

Domestic oil production is soaring, but so are global prices.  It should be obvious that yet more drilling can’t have any significant impact on oil prices — particularly since the U.S. Energy Information Administration has been making that precise point for years now (see EIA: Full offshore drilling will not lower gasoline prices at all in 2020 and only 3 cents in 2030!).

The only thing that can protect Americans from the inevitably increasing oil shocks of Peak Oil is an aggressive strategy to reduce the country’s oil intensity (oil/GDP), including a steady increase the fuel efficiency of our vehicles — policies that conservatives have fought for decades.

But that doesn’t stop those same conservatives — including former Big Oil lobbyist Haley Barbour — from trying to blame Obama for high oil prices.  ThinkProgress has a rundown of all the absurd attacks:

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Let’s see if any of the serial disinformers have the minimal human decency to put up a full retraction of their falsehoods [so far the answer is no].  I have Mann’s response at the end.

Last month we saw the umpteenth exhaustive investigation of the stolen emails that ended up vindicating the science and the scientists, this time by NOAA’s IG.   “Inspector General’s Review of Stolen Emails Confirms No Evidence of Wrong-Doing by NOAA Climate Scientists,” as NOAA’s release put it.

A bunch of widely discredited pro-pollution scientist-smearers — Anthony “shout them down” Watts, Chris Horner, Marc Morano, Steve McIntyre — have spun a partially leaked transcript from the IG investigation into a bunch of libelous falsehoods.  Sen. Inhofe has now reposted those stories on the Senate EPW website (here).   The most plausible theory is that Inhofe himself leaked the information to right-wing fabricators so he could quote those stories (see below).

Sadly, no matter how many times Dr. Michael Mann has been vindicated, there will always be those who think libelous smears against one of the country’s leading climate scientists is their best strategy.  Such people deserve to be widely condemned — especially since their lies are primarily aimed at undermining efforts to preserve the health and well-being of billions of human beings.

UPDATE:  The disinformers almost made me forget that the whole point of their smears is to distract attention from the science, specifically the increasingly strong scientific vindication of Mann’s original Hockey Stick analysis.  Multiple independent analyses reveal that recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause. The rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more.  And warming this century on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century.  As WAG notes, within a few decades, nobody is going to be talking about hockey sticks, they will be talking about right angles (or hockey skates, see figure above) “” when they are done cursing our greed and myopia and gullibility in the face of polluter-funded disinformation, that is.

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The causes are not temporary, but fundamental trends

By Jake Caldwell, CAP’s Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade & Energy

Renowned environmental analyst, Lester Brown, is predicting long term tight global food supplies and rising prices for the foreseeable future.

Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, made the comments and proffered his analysis of the present global food situation during a media call today to assess the prospects for the 2011 world grain harvest.

The Earth Policy Institute is scheduled to post a recording of the news conference and you can listen here.  A summary follows.

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E.U. proposes to spend $375 billion a year to ‘decarbonize’ economy by 2050

The European Union will spend ‚¬270 billion ($375 billion) a year to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050 compared to 1990 levels, the European Commission said yesterday in releasing its “road map” for moving to a low-carbon economy.

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Marta Cook and Annelisa Steeber, in A CAP cross-post.

“As a person of faith, I stand in support of God’s creation and the Environmental Protection Agency’s actions to protect it.” If this statement sounds surprising, it shouldn’t. It was issued in February from United Methodist Women as they urged Congress not to cut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and to support legal protections against pollution. Many religious groups across the country share their concern and are connecting their faith to action in support of the EPA.

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Speaking at the Center for American Progress Action Fund this week, House energy committee ranking member Henry Waxman (D-CA) railed against the toxic influence of Koch Industries on efforts to fight global warming. Brad Johnson has the story and video.

Waxman, who fought polluters to pass the Clean Air Act of 1990, is dismayed by the level of outright science denial among the Republican Party today, exemplified by their votes to slash and burn environmental protection, and the Upton-Inhofe bill to reverse the scientific finding that carbon pollution threatens public health:

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Pete Altman, in a NRDC Switchboard repost.

Senator James Inhofe is teaming up with Chairman Fred Upton to introduce a bill to allow America’s biggest polluters to continue dumping unlimited amounts of carbon emissions into the air….

Just about every major health group in the United States is now telling Chairman Upton that he is putting the welfare of millions of Americans at risk who suffer from asthma (that’s 24 million people right there – including seven million children!) and other respiratory diseases.

Consider this from the  American Lung Association:

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