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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