Our guest blogger is Tony Carrk, Policy Director for Progress Central.

Today, the Center for American Progress Action Fund released a report shedding light on the vast Koch network and how it operates. The report shows that Charles and David Koch have used the considerable wealth (they are worth a combined $44 billion) to push policies that put their profits ahead of the interests of most Americans.

The report finds:

• Grassroots support for big business. The Koch brothers use their considerable wealth to bankroll the right wing, including the Tea Party. This serves the purpose of furthering not only their right-wing ideology but also their bottom line. Koch Industries has a lot to gain from gutting government oversight and electing candidates who oppose government regulation, especially in the oil-and-gas industry.
• $85 million to 85 think tanks. Identification of at least $85 million the Koch brothers have given to at least 85 right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups over the past decade and a half.
• State organizing. The Koch brothers are active at the state level, spending $5.2 million on candidates and ballot measures in 34 states since 2003. They donated directly to 13 governors that won election last year.
• Over 70% of the GOP Freshman. The Kochs donated directly to 62 of the 87 members of the House GOP freshman class.
• 2012. The Kochs are not going away. In fact, they have already pledged to raise $88 million for the 2012 election and have started scheduling events for potential Republican presidential candidates.

Read the full report here.

This report is intended to be a guide to help progressives map out the vast network of influence the Koch brothers have built over the last decades. By exposing the Koch brothers’ agenda and shedding light on how they operate, progressives can force a public debate that will show that the Koch brothers are outside the mainstream of most Americans and that they are putting their self-interest and right wing agenda ahead of middle-class families.

In the annals of absurdly sexed up science stories crying for attention like, oh, some addled TV star, we have a new contender.  The once-excellent New Scientist, which has started running seriously flawed climate stories, as we’ve seen, now runs this stunner:

Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all

Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels and we could do as much damage to the climate as greenhouse global warming

Rubbish.  Indeed, what is surprising about this entire piece is just how much misinformation it contains.  You can read the original, unsexy, somewhat opaque (and probably wrong) paper submitted to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society here.

Even if it were true that increasing global wind power capacity 300-fold (!) would do as much damage to the climate as greenhouse warming — and there’s no evidence in this study that it would — wind and wave power would still be renewable.  As NASA’s Gavin Schmidt wrote me (see below), “The NS headline is wrong.”

I’ve been bombarded with people asking me to respond to this in detail, so here goes.

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Transocean now says statement “may have been insensitive.”

On Friday, Transocean, the company that operated the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil rig, told its shareholders that it gave its executives multi-million-dollar bonuses based on the company’s “best year in safety performance.” CAP’s Kristen Bartoloni has the what-were-they-thinking story of week.

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“Happy talk” was not the approach taken by Lincoln confronting slavery, or by Franklin Roosevelt facing the grim realities after Pearl Harbor. Nor was it Winston Churchill’s message to the British people at the height of the London blitz. Instead, in these and similar cases transformative leaders told the truth honestly, with conviction and eloquence.

Guest blogger David Orr is one of the true environmental visionaries.  I’ve known him for years, and he sent me the new preface to the paperback edition of his book “Down to the Wire” after reading my post last night on why we need to talk about climate change.

Here is an extended excerpt:

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On Friday, Transocean, the company that operated the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil rig, told its shareholders that it gave its executives multi-million-dollar bonuses based on the company’s “best year in safety performance.” Today, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar lashed out at the global offshore drilling company, which moved its official headquarters from Houston to Zug, Switzerland in 2008 in order to avoid paying taxes to the United States government. In a statement to ThinkProgress, Salazar criticized the company’s “complacency” about the explosion that killed 11 people, spewed 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and caused irreparable damage to Gulf communities:

At the end of the day, it was that complacency that created an oil spill that was pouring over 50 thousand barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico a day.

Using the justification of the company’s “exemplary statistical safety record,” Transocean’s executive compensation committee — GenOn Energy CEO Edward R. Muller, oil industry lawyer Martin B. McNamara, and retired Shell executive Robert Sprague — granted CEO Stewart Newman $6.3 million in bonus and “incentive compensation.”

“Transocean just doesn’t get it,” presidential oil spill commissioner William Reilly said in the conference call with Salazar. Reilly’s commission found that “systemic failures by industry management” and a “culture of complacency” were at the root of the disaster that Salazar characterized as a “nightmare” and “tragedy.”

If physicians want evidence of climate change, they may well find it in their own offices. Patients are presenting with illnesses that once happened only in warmer areas. Chronic conditions are becoming aggravated by more frequent and extended heat waves. Allergy and asthma seasons are getting longer….

Scientific evidence shows that the world’s climate is changing and that the results have public health consequences. The American Medical Association is working to ensure that physicians and others in health care understand the rise in climate-related illnesses and injuries so they can prepare and respond to them. The Association also is promoting environmentally responsible practices that would reduce waste and energy consumption.

That’s from a must-read editorial today from the American Medical Association, “Confronting health issues of climate change.” The AMA is but the latest major health organization to study and speak out about “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” as the medical journal Lancet‘s Health Commission put it.

Here’s more:

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One of my guilty pleasures is the CBS crime show, The Mentalist.  One-time fake psychic Patrick Jane uses his powers of observation and deduction to figure out a lot about people based on their appearance or how they say things.

Despite our 24/7 media coverage of the president, what he really feels about many key issues — notably climate and energy — remains opaque even to those who follow him closely.  Does he “get it” on global warming?  His actions — and lack of words — obviously suggest that he does not.  But who knows?  He clearly doesn’t get it enough to break out of the box that his handlers and the David Axelrod have put him into.

We have, however, been given a possible window into how he looks at energy and climate — and speechmaking.  The big speech that Obama gave last week on energy security was released in two forms:  “As Prepared for Delivery” and “As Actually Delivered.”

Let’s make what I think is a fairly reasonable assumption that the overwhelming majority of the changes in the speech were by Obama himself.

Here then is the speech with additions in boldface and the few deletions in strike through, plus some running commentary:

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Climate hawks are starting to take a strong stand against the Senate frenzy to cripple Clean Air Act rules on behalf of global warming polluters.  Brad Johnson has the story.

Note:  I am using Brad’s headline, but I do question whether hawks would defeat zombies in a straight fight.  I suppose it’s like asking whether Batman would defeat Godzilla….

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10-year window to save reef: expert

The Great Barrier Reef will be lost unless there is dramatic action to cut greenhouse gasses over the next 10 years, a climate change scientist warns.

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The Koch brothers outspend Exxon Mobil on pro-pollution disinformation aimed at preventing action to preserving a livable climate.  They also fund and help oversee the extremist Tea Party movement.

To help understand these agents of disinformation better, CAPAF’s Tony Carrk has put together a 31-page report on them.  Here’s his summary:

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Tax receipts as a share of GDP

A government shutdown over the 2011 budget seems increasingly possible.  The uncompromising Tea Party extremists who hold sway in the House are demanding deep cuts in clean energy funding and EPA oversight, along with their other slash and burn proposals.

Into this mix, the House GOP is going to offer their 2012 austerity budget tomorrow.  As Faiz Shakir explain in this Think Progress repost, however, austerity doesn’t apply to Big Oil or the super-rich.

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