The “candidacy” of huckster billionaire Donald Trump raises many questions — especially about the sorry state of the GOP field of candidates and media coverage of U.S. politics.

Democratic strategist James Carville thinks Trump is such a liability to the Republicans that he wonders:

Was the posting of the birth certificate an intentional move to bolster the political standing of Donald Trump? This is one Democrat that hopes it was, as it would demonstrate a political move of great sophistication and overall strategic brilliance.

It is hard to believe Trump is actually going to run, but Salon has warned that Trump may be talking himself into a corner and  “might be serious” in his candidacy.

But even getting beyond his birtherism, it is hard to take him seriously when he drops multiple f-bombs during a stump speech, including one aimed directly at the Chinese, and declares his energy strategy is old-fashioned imperialism, “We go in.  We take the oil.”

Please put your head-vises on for this video:

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A cyber-penny for your thoughts “¦ and links.

At a time when oil companies are posting record profits, Republican congressmen across the country are being challenged by constituents about their support for roughly $4 billion in annual tax incentives for the oil industry. Last month, every single Republican voted to preserve these subsidies, but under pressure, several GOP leaders, including Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), have admitted that Big Oil shouldn’t continue to receive taxpayer-funded subsidies.

But yesterday Congressman Lou Barletta (R-PA) took at different approach: scoffing at the idea.  ThinkProgress has the story (and amazing video).

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There are a number of great opportunities to save money on your taxes while helping to reduce your energy consumption.  CAP has the story.

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Throughout human history, the climate system has been a source of life and death, the sun and rain capable of feeding our crops and bringing us comfort, or unleashing terrible devastation in wind, fire, drought, storm, and flood. Each tragedy that occurs — such as the terrible outbreak of tornadoes and flooding storms this week in the South — reminds us of that awesome power, which is beyond our control and at the limits of our comprehension. We have also learned that humanity is meddling with that power, primarily through the burning of coal and oil that increases the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere and oceans. Scientists have been warning our leaders for decades that this interference with the climate system is dangerous, and have worked tirelessly to explain how these threats are now coming to pass.

However, the Republican Party is now dominated by ideologues who deny the threat of polluting our climate, even when faced with direct evidence of what the climate system can do to the people they are sworn to protect.

Conservatives attack any discussion of climate policy within the context of the killer tornadoes as “grotesque,” saying that to do so is blaming the victims.

In an email interview with ThinkProgress, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s top climate scientists, who has been exploring for years how greenhouse pollution influences extreme weather, said he believes that it is “irresponsible not to mention climate change” in the context of these extreme tornadoes. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, added that the scientific understanding of how polluting our atmosphere with billions of tons of greenhouse gases affects tornadic activity is still ongoing:

It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. … The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With global warming the low level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level air is 1 deg F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, explains further that “climate change is present in every single meteorological event”:

The fact remains that there is 4 percent more water vapor–and associated additional moist energy–available both to power individual storms and to produce intense rainfall from them. Climate change is present in every single meteorological event, in that these events are occurring within a baseline atmospheric environment that has shifted in favor of more intense weather events.

Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, concurred:

It is a truism to say that everything has been affected by climate change so far and therefore this latest outbreak must in some sense have been affected, but attribution is hard and the further down the chain the causality is supposed to go, the harder this is. For heat waves it is easier, for statistics on precipitation intensity it easier – there are multiple levels of good modelling, theory and observations to back it up. But we have much less to go on with tornadoes.

Those who deny the threat of polluting our climate system are not to blame for its fury — but none of us can shirk our responsibility to end our interference with the weather.

To find out if loved ones are okay, use safeandwell.org. Text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 to relief efforts.

Dave Roberts of Grist has a worthy follow-up to his brilliant breakthrough-bunch-busting post from Tuesday.  It riffs off of my post Ezra Klein: “Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s.”

It speaks to what happens when the referees — the media — don’t call balls and strikes anymore but mainly report the play-by-play.

Rather than just linking to the piece, this time I’ll excerpt it at length:
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“April is the cruelest month.” — T. S. Eliot

CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss, Valeri Vasquez, and Ben Kaldunski have written an excellent 34–page report, “The Year of Living Dangerously.”  Its conclusion begins, “The extreme weather in 2010 could be a preview of a not-too-distant future should we fail to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.”

Here is an overview of that report by the authors.

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Total Bids $1.4 Billion for Control of SunPower

Total, the French oil giant, offered up to $1.4 billion on Thursday for a controlling stake in SunPower, an American solar energy firm.

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The Nobel-prize-winning former vice president has redefined the digital book.  He and Push Pop Press have put out what is easily the best interactive e-book on climate solutions — an iPhone and iPad app of his best-seller Our Choice:  A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

I was able to interview Gore yesterday and will report on what he said over the course of three posts — one on this App, one on solutions, and one on his current thinking about climate action and messaging.  Climate hawks will be happy to know that he is as committed to delivering the science and solution message as ever.

When I reviewed Our Choice in November 2009, I called it “The must-read solutions book,” and said:  Besides being informative, Our Choice is a truly beautiful book page after page, and I highly recommend it, particularly for those who want a broad overview of the key strategies for preserving a livable climate.

In interactive App form, Our Choice is as superior to the original book as an iPhone was to the previous generation of cell phones.  I would say this App is reason enough to get an iPad, since the tiny iPhone screen simply doesn’t do justice to the spectacular graphics, interactive charts, and stunning videos.

If you want to become knowledgeable on the full range of climate solutions from efficiency to biochar — or you know someone who does — then this is the digital book for you. This would be a terrific educational tool for a student of almost any age.

The best interactive overview of this App is on Push Pop’s website.   Here is a video overview:

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ThinkProgress filed this report from Wisconsin.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) agreed to end subsidies to oil companies during a town hall in Waterford, Wisconsin, this morning, eliciting great applause from an overflow crowd in a very conservative section of his district. “We also want to get rid of corporate welfare,” Ryan insisted. “So we propose to repeal all that”:

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CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss and Valeri Vasquez explain strategies for minimizing speculation in this CAP repost.

The oil shock of 2008 helped drive the U.S. economy into the Great Recession. Oil at that time cost a record $147 per barrel, and gasoline prices surged to $4.11 per gallon in July 2008″”the highest price ever. This squeezed families’ budgets because it is very difficult for most people to significantly reduce driving in the short run when prices rise. And the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, found that the 2008 oil record was partly driven by speculators driving up prices to make a quick killing.

This year “it’s like d©j  vu all over again.”

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Because of draconian budget cuts, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is stepping back its investigation of how speculators are driving up oil prices. Earlier this month, Reuters estimated “the total speculative premium in U.S. crude oil was between $21.40 and $26.75 a barrel,” which translates to about a 50-cent premium on the price of a gallon of gasoline at the pump. In 2009, following a similar speculative surge in 2008, the EIA established an Energy and Financial Markets Initiative to “improve energy market transparency, support sound policy and efficient markets, and increase public understanding.”

In order to implement the EIA’s budget reduction of $15.2 million, or 14 percent, from the FY 2010 budget, administrator Richard Newell announced a bevy of cutbacks, including an end to “efforts to understand linkages between physical energy markets and financial trading.” Here are just a few of the cuts:

– Do not prepare or publish 2011 edition of the annual data release on U.S. proved oil and natural gas reserves.

– Curtail efforts to understand linkages between physical energy markets and financial trading.

– Suspend auditing of data submitted by major oil and natural gas companies and reporting on their 2010 financial performance through EIA’s Financial Reporting System.

– Terminate annual data collection and report on solar thermal systems.

– Halt preparation of the 2012 edition of EIA’s International Energy Outlook.

– Eliminate annual published inventory of Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States.

The Tea Party Congress has marked up another success in its mission to give power to Big Oil and Wall Street while keeping the rest of America in the dark.

Mal-adapation: Missouri levee failure highlights need to increase infrastructure investments and prepare for climate change

TVA COO:  Wednesday’s series of storms caused major damage to the TVA power system. We have never experienced such a major weather event in our history….  Hundreds of thousands of consumers are without power because of damage to power lines and other equipment….  The three units at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in northern Alabama automatically shutdown [safely] as a result of transmission line damage from the storm.

One thing is clear from all of the extreme weather slamming the United States:  We are ill-prepared for human-caused climate change, whose primary near-term impact on most Americans will be from the ever-worsening weather extremes.

The warming and the deluges are connected (see Masters: Midwest deluge enhanced by near-record Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures).  Capitol Climate has just aggregated the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center on “Monthly total number of daily high temperature, low temperature, and high minimum temperature records set in the U.S.” for the last few months.  April was very extreme:

Steve Scolnik” reports April has seen “1759 record high temperatures in the U.S. vs. 310 record lows, a ratio of nearly 5.7 to 1, exceeding even March’s 5.3 to 1. This is the highest since the ratio of 6.1 last April.”  That compares to the ratio for the last decade of 2.04-to-1, which itself was double the ratio of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s (see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.“).  So US temperatures are becoming more extreme — and April has been unusually extreme.

Water and climate scientist Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute, has a good HuffPost piece on “A Cost of Denying Climate Change: Accelerating Climate Disruptions, Death, and Destruction.”  Of course, if the do-nothing crowd keeps denying the reality of climate science, and the climate activists downplay the reality of climate change, as some argue they should, then we are certainly never going to get prepared for what is to come (see “Conservatives oppose adaptation, too“).  That’s why ClimateProgress has a whole category devoted to extreme weather and the best science on how it is linked to human-caused climate change.

As long as folks deny or downplay the connection, adaptation will be little more than a euphemism for abandonment, triage, and misery.  Of course, we aren’t even “adapting” to the current level of extreme weather.

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Domestic oil production is soaring, but so are global prices (see “Drill, baby, drill fails: Oil prices jump in spite of sharp increase in U.S. production under Obama”).  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!“).

Even President Bush’s former chief economist understands this, even if his former boss doesn’t.  ThinkProgress has the story and video in this repost.

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The Associated Press and the Agence France Presse are tallying reports of deaths from the most devastating storm system in the United States in decades:

Tornadoes and thunderstorms carved a trail of destruction across the southern United States, killing over 220 people in one of the country’s worst weather disasters in years, officials said Thursday. The severe weather killed 131 people in the state of Alabama alone on Wednesday, authorities said, and President Barack Obama said Washington would be rushing assistance to the battered southeastern state. States of emergency were declared in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Oklahoma, and governors called out the National Guard to help with rescue and cleanup operations. In all, state officials reported at least 227 people dead, but as the residents and emergency workers began to mop up and assess the damage the toll was likely to rise.

Damage from the storms in Alabama “surpassed what was seen after hurricanes Dennis or Frederick and could exceed what the area saw after hurricanes Katrina or Ivan.”

The Congressional delegations of these states overwhelmingly voted (HR 910 and McConnell Amendment 183) to reject the science that polluting the climate is dangerous:

ALABAMA: All nine members of the Alabama congressional delegation voted in April to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution.

MISSISSIPPI: Five out of six members of the Mississippi congressional delegation, including both senators, voted in April to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution.

TENNESSEE: Nine out of 11 members of the Tennessee congressional delegation, including both senators, voted in April to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution.

GEORGIA: 13 out of 15 members of the Georgia congressional delegation, including both senators, voted in April to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution.

KENTUCKY: Six out of eight members of the Kentucky congressional delegation, including both senators, voted in April to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution.

VIRGINIA: Eight out of 13 members of the Virginia congressional delegation voted in April to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution. Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) voted to suspend greenhouse pollution rules for two years.

“Given that global warming is unequivocal,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth cautioned the American Meteorological Society in January of this year, “the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”

The GOP-controlled Congress eliminated $1 billion in funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in its continuing resolution budget, “delaying the launch of the first satellite in the $12 billion Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) from 2016 to 2018.” Without the satellite data, NOAA’s forecasts for the southern United States lose as much as 50 percent of their accuracy.

To find out if loved ones are okay, use safeandwell.org.

Oil giants post massive Q1 profits, demand huge subsidies

Exxon stood head and shoulders above the other big five oil companies with first-quarter profits of nearly $10.7 billion.  CAP’s Valeri Vasquez has the details.

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Interest in hybrid vehicles grows with gas prices

Hybrids are hot.

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Richard W. Caperton continues his series on U.S. energy markets.

For decades, the mantra of the American utility industry has been to provide power at the lowest possible cost.  While reliability is tough to compare across countries, the evidence is that our utilities have almost certainly succeeded at making power affordable.

Consider this chart showing electric prices across the developed world, in cents per kwh:

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Yesterday, the American Lung Association released its annual air quality report, State of the Air 2011, identifying the United State’s most unhealthy cities by year-round and short term particle pollution and ozone. While this year’s findings show overall improvement in air quality across the country, vast steps are still required to ensure the health and safety of the American people in the future.  CAP’s Emily Bischof has the story.

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Unprecedented flooding predicted for Ohio River

This week’s storm system, in combination with heavy rains earlier this month, have pushed the Ohio River and Mississippi River to near-record levels near their confluence. The Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois is expected to crest at 60.5 feet on May 1. This would exceed 100-year flood stage, and be the highest flood in history, besting the 59.5′ mark of 1937.

The latest River Flood Outlook from NOAA shows major flooding is occurring over many of the nation’s major rivers.

Multiple torrential downpours are setting the stage for more 100-year floods in the coming days, as meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters reports today.

Extreme weather disasters, especially deluges and floods, are on the rise — and the best analysis says human-caused warming is contributing (see Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding).  Last year, we had Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge aka Nashville’s ‘Katrina’.  And  Coastal North Carolina’s suffered its second 500-year rainfall in 11 years.

Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in December, “The term ’100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year” (see Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”).

Former hurricane-hunter Masters has a good analysis of how the “Midwest deluge [is] enhanced by near-record Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures”:

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