Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) — who famously apologized to BP after the disastrous spill in the Gulf — now thinks that the term “Big Oil” is mean to the oil industry. Yesterday, executives from the Big Five oil companies testified before the Senate Finance Committee to defend their taxpayer funded subsidies in an often contentious hearing. In defense of the Big Oil executives, Barton told a C-SPAN interviewer that the media shouldn’t use the phrase “Big Oil” because it’s “upsetting”:

First of all, I don’t think it should be a pejorative. We’ve got this mentality on the liberal side of our political debate: Big Oil, Big Insurance, big this, big that. We compete in a global economy, and the biggest company, Exxon Mobil, is only the fifth largest oil company overall, because the other four are run by governments. It should be something of a badge of honor that we still have companies that can compete internationally. It’s a little upsetting that we try at the beginning to make it a pejorative.

Watch it:

Contrary to Barton’s statement, “big” is an undeniably understated way to describe the industry – from its profits, to its campaign contributions and even its mistakes.  For eight years in a row, Exxon Mobil was listed by Fortune 500 as the most profitable company in America. Combined, the Big Five Oil companies raked in over $32 billion in profits in just the first three months in 2011. The Big Five oil companies make more than one trillion dollars in revenues every year. And over the past decade, those same Big Five oil companies made a combined $900 billion. Since 1990, the oil and gas industry has spent more $270 million in congressional campaign contributions, and in 2010 alone, spent $145 million on lobbying.

Perhaps the only thing that’s not big about Big Oil is its tax rate. A Center for American Progress analysis revealed that from 2008–2010, ExxonMobil’s effective federal tax rate came in at 17.6 percent, less than the average American’s federal rate in 2007. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that an ExxonMobil spokesman“conceded that the company had a net federal income tax credit of $156 million in 2009.” Yet the American taxpayers subsidize these companies with $4 billion in tax breaks every year. Read more

Masters: This is “only” a “1-in-100 to 1-in-300 year flood.”

Click on image for Weather Channel video.

Weather Channel Senior Meteorologist Jonathan Erdman writes today:

There comes a point at which a meteorological event becomes truly “exceptional”.

We’ve already seen two events just in the past few weeks that pushed the record books to the limit: The deadly swarm of tornadoes from April 25-28 particularly in the South, and now the slow-moving flood disaster that, in some areas is topping the Great Flood of 1927.

There is another weather event that has now crossed the “exceptional” threshold … the Southern drought.

Here’s a question:  At what point do three nearly simultaneous truly exceptional weather events in the same part of one country become something beyond exceptional?

I’d call them climactic climatic events, but in all likelihood they will be fairly un-exceptional weather events in a few decades if we stay anywhere near our current greenhouse gas emissions path.

Erdman himself does make the link to climate change:

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And the winner of the worst climate story of the week is:

As Clinton works against global warming in Greenland, some there don’t mind it

NUUK, Greenland “” Few places on Earth have seen starker changes in weather than this icebound island straddling the Arctic Circle. With that in mind, America’s top diplomat arrived here this week intent on calling attention to the perils of climate change.

The problem was that Greenlanders aren’t exactly complaining….

Rather than questioning global warming, many of this island’s 60,000 inhabitants seem to be racing to cash in.

I know the Washington Post thinks it is doing some clever contrarian story on the Arctic Council meeting:  Ooh, look at how Clinton is fighting against global warming in a place that (supposedly) isn’t complaining about global warming.

But this story is not merely unoriginal, it completely misses a key point:  The biggest contribution that Greenland itself is going to make to climate change will devastate it.

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, which advises the Council, concluded a major assessment last week:  “Global sea level is projected to rise by 0.9-1.6 meter by 2100.”³ Shouldn’t the Post story on the Council meeting in Nuuk and how Greelanders just love warming at least mention that report and the fact that “The average elevation of Nuuk, Greenland is 1 meters.”  Doh.

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The debate over the future of the Environmental Protection Agency is one of those debates where an ideological agenda, disguised as budget cutting, will result in a short-term political statement at a long-term cost in dollars and health.

That’s from an op-ed in The Hill by Republican Christie Todd Whitman.  She was Bush’s EPA administrator from 2001-2003 — until VP Cheney drove her out by his “insistence on easing air pollution controls” (see here).

Don’t read the comments on her piece without a head vise.  My favorite begins, “Our water and air are much cleaner now than when the EPA was founded “¦ and yet they continue to foist more and more onerous regulations on our largest employers….”   Darn you EPA for continuing to pursue your successful yet unknown efforts to clean up the air and water for our children (see “AEI scholar celebrates the success of the Clean Air Act’s acid rain cap-and-trade program “” without acknowledging its existence“).

Here’s more from the piece:

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Upton won’t rule out debt ceiling as vehicle to thwart climate rules

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) isn’t ruling out the prospect of using debt-ceiling legislation as a vehicle for provisions that would limit federal climate change rules.

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Plus a map of ‘Fraccidents’ around the U.S.

Two years ago, ClimateProgress started writing about shale gas as a potential game changer in the energy and climate arena.  Since then its potential has only grown, but so too has the scrutiny of its local and global impact.

The humorous video below – put together by the investigative reporting team at ProPublica – is a great intro to the controversy:

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Yesterday, the House passed the so-called “Putting the Gulf Back to Work Act,” which is intended to make it easier for the oil industry to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. Sadly, this bill also continues the GOP’s longstanding practice of rigging the court system to favor wealthy and influential interest groups.  ThinkProgress has the story.

Tucked within the bill is a provision that consigns many lawsuits involving oil drilling into a federal court that is dominated by judges with close ties to the oil industry:

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In the he-said, she-said world of politics and reporting inside the DC Beltway, a little bit of research goes a long way. As the heated debate over gasoline prices””and just what exactly causes them to rise””rages on, U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has had the presence of mind to do some investigative digging.   CAP’s Valeri Vasquez has the story.

In the face of conservative claims that cutting subsidies for top oil companies will push prices at the pump higher, Reid tapped the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, with a request for more information on “the extent to which proposed tax changes on the oil industry are likely to affect domestic gasoline prices.” Their answer came back on May 11^th, short and to the point:

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