Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), after a recent vote to protect coal polluters at the expense of children’s health, is now attacking the League of Women Voters. The 91-year-old good-government organization is running television spots that hold McCaskill and Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) accountable for voting to block enforcement of Clean Air Act rules that limit greenhouse pollution, threatening the hundreds of thousands of children with asthma in their states. Watch the McCaskill ad:

Brown attacked the League of Women Voters for partisan “demagoguery.” Now McCaskill is also on the attack, accusing the league of being “bad guys,” a “tacky” front group “hiding donors behind the cloak of their good name”:

McCaskill also took aim at the League of Women Voters, who she said is “fronting for somebody who ran the ad.” “At a minimum, I think the League of Women Voters should not hide behind Citizens United and should be transparent about who’s paying for the ad,” McCaskill said. “I think that’s really tacky for an organization who’s prided itself on transparency and good government, for them to become part of the bad guys who are hiding donors behind the cloak of their good name.”

“These are our ads,” League of Women Voters President Elisabeth MacNamara told Politico. “This is about the issue of public health and the public knows who is speaking. We’ve stood behind and fought for the Clean Air Act for 40 years. At issue is Sen. McCaskill’s vote, which has endangered the public health.”

Still asserts “existing technologies could affordably limit warming”

In 2004, Princeton Profs Socolow and Pacala published a paper in Science, “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies.”  The abstract read:

Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50 years and limit atmospheric CO₂ to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration. Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.

I spoke to Socolow today at length, and he stands behind every word of that — including the carefully-worded title.  Indeed, if Socolow were king, he told me, he’d start deploying some 8 wedges immediately. A wedge is a strategy and/or technology that over a period of a few decades ultimately reduces projected global carbon emissions by one billion metric tons per year (see Princeton website here).

Socolow told me we “need a rising CO2 price” that gets to a serious level in 10 years.  What is serious?   “$50 to $100 a ton of CO2.”

You’d never know any of that from reading the false narrative industrial complex today.  They jumped all over a piece in National Geographic News by a reporter who apparently heard a recent talk of Socolow’s, but perhaps didn’t quite understand precisely what Socolow meant.

Socolow was not disavowing his original analysis in the least — nor providing any comfort to the do-little breakthrough bunch.  Quite the reverse.  He thinks they are members of a “Cargo Cult” waiting for “pie in the sky” answers (see “The breakthrough technology illusion“).

UPDATE:  This post has been updated to included comments by Socolow.  Also, Socolow sent me (and Revkin) a long reply to the various pieces published, which I reprint in full at the end.

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It’s beginning to feel like a broken record – once again the GOP put its allegiances to Big Oil ahead of their responsibilities to the American people.  CAPAF’s Kiley Kroh has the story.

Yesterday 45 of 47 Senate Republicans filibustered an attempt to end the outrageous handouts to Big Oil – a plan Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed was “not a serious effort to address the price of gas at the pump.”

Today, McConnell and his colleagues presented their big oil agenda: a reckless expansion of offshore drilling that will leave oversight even weaker than it was before the Gulf oil disaster and have absolutely no effect on the price of gas at the pump.

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Our guest blogger is Kiley Kroh, Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

It’s beginning to feel like a broken record – once again the GOP put its allegiances to Big Oil ahead of their responsibilities to the American people. Yesterday 45 of 47 Senate Republicans filibustered an attempt to end the outrageous handouts to Big Oil – a plan Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed was “not a serious effort to address the price of gas at the pump.”

Today, McConnell and his colleagues presented their big oil agenda: a reckless expansion of offshore drilling that will leave oversight even weaker than it was before the Gulf oil disaster and have absolutely no effect on the price of gas at the pump. McConnell’s bill, which failed by a vote of 42 to 57, largely mirrored the trio of egregious drilling bills that passed the House earlier this month, and would disregard the crucial recommendations of the National Commission on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

Instead, it would force the Administration to offer lease sales canceled in the wake of the BP Gulf oil disaster – including lease sales in the Arctic Ocean – while simultaneously reducing oversight. Michael Bromwich, the director of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, the agency tasked with permitting and oversight, called the House measures “a suicide pact.”

Republican efforts to tout the measure as an answer to rising gas prices are completely false and misleading. Affirming his support for the bill, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) asserted:

Our focus must be on lowering gas prices and creating economic growth and jobs in America … The way to do that is to develop more domestic energy.

As has been proven in several studies, expanding offshore drilling will have no effect on gas prices.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) broke ranks with his party and expressed his objection to the bill – but not because it is an irresponsible giveaway of public resources. Vitter was “deeply disappointed” in the legislation because its expansion of offshore drilling isn’t dramatic enough. Republicans joining Vitter against the bill were Sens. Jim DeMint (SC), Mike Lee (UT), Richard Shelby (AL), and Olympia Snowe (ME). Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), another Republican senator with deep ties to the oil industry, said that if she had to use one word to describe the bill it would be “modest.”

Though McConnell’s bill will not advance in the Senate, the 42 Republican votes in favor of the measure highlight the Grand Oil Party’s blind subservience to the oil industry, regardless of the implications for American people. Frances Beinecke, a member of the National Oil Spill Commission, stated “the oil industry’s influence on the political process is holding America hostage.” It’s clear the partnership between Congressional Republicans and Big Oil continues to be hugely beneficial to both sides. The only ones suffering in this equation are the American people.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist for the WashPost, Tom Toles, had another climate cartoon on Monday.  It led to the “1,000,000th email today complaining that I am not fair to the Republicans,” to which he replied with a a short post titled, “Own facts.”

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Is the recent run-up in oil prices due in part to Saudis slashing production in March by over 800,000 barrels a day?

West Texas Intermediate crude oil price vs. year (2003 to present)

So the right-wing has gone from attacking Obama for supposedly bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia to attacking him for ignoring the Saudis and helping to ease out Mubarak.  A Fox News story from February, “Saudis Warned Obama Not to ‘Humiliate’ Mubarak,” stated:

America’s closest ally in the Gulf made clear that the Egyptian president must be allowed to stay on to oversee the transition towards peaceful democracy and then leave with dignity.

“Mubarak and King Abdullah are not just allies, they are close friends, and the King is not about to see his friend cast aside and humiliated,” a senior source in the Saudi capital told The Times.

Yes, kind of odd for Fox News to stand with Saudi Arabia and against ousting dictators.  Guess it’s that “enemy of my enemy” stuff.

More seriously, the falling out with the Saudis seems real.  A Sunday WashPost op-ed, “Amid the Arab Spring, a U.S.-Saudi split,” by a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research & Islamic Studies, calls it “a tectonic shift.”  They don’t like our Obama’s pro-democracy moves in the MidEast:  “With Iran working tirelessly to dominate the region, the Muslim Brotherhood rising in Egypt, there is simply too much at stake for the kingdom to rely on a security policy written in Washington.”  So “The special relationship may never be the same.”

Presumably that mean the Saudis just aren’t into us and Obama anymore.  Of course, you’d be hard-pressed to find lots of evidence of that special relationship in, say, their influence on oil prices in the past several years.

And if they are driving oil prices now to harm Obama, then one would have to conclude they really wanted to screw the Republicans and their old buddy George W. Bush when they let oil prices run up to almost $150 a barrel in mid-2008.

But what’s germane here is a too-little-covered story from Bloomberg in mid-April in which the Saudis said they slashed production in March:

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Yesterday, House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) Cantor told an audience of speculators that his Republican caucus would “do our part” to block the implementation of financial reforms passed last year as part of the sweeping Dodd-Frank law.  Lee Fang has the story in a ThinkProgress cross-post.

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BP and ConocoPhillips shelve Alaska pipeline project in light of shale boom

With natural gas from North American shale formations fundamentally altering the U.S. gas market, BP PLC and ConocoPhillips Co. yesterday announced they would stop work on a proposed $35 billion pipeline to bring gas from Alaska’s North Slope into Canada and to the Lower 48 states.

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After becoming a leading spokesman for the development of wind in the U.S., T. Boone Pickens says he’s officially abandoning the wind portion of his “Pickens Plan,” which originally proposed getting 20% of American electricity from wind (along with using natural gas as a transportation fuel).

According to a story in The Hill newspaper, Pickens claims he couldn’t make the economics of his plan work and is now focusing exclusively on pushing for natural gas:

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By Bill Becker

“A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” – William Shedd

Here is a trick question: Now that the 2012 election campaign has begun, should you vote Republican or Democrat?

The correct answer: Neither of the above. In this election, probably more than ever, it should be courage that counts, not party affiliation.

It’s the tough issues in tough times that are the best tests of courage – and right now, few issues are tougher in American politics than confronting global climate change. It requires that we stand up against godzilla vested interests and say goodbye to a carbon economy which has served us so long that no American alive today remembers life without it.

The lack of political courage is well documented in the emerging field of Republican presidential hopefuls.

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, long a mouthpiece for the interests of the oil industry, has lashed out against the Democratic effort to roll back taxpayer subsidies for the Big Five oil companies.  Brad Johnson has the story.

In a letter to the U.S. Senate, the chamber’s chief lobbyist, R. Bruce Josten, blasted S. 940, the Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act, as “punitive taxation” that would “jeopardize U.S. jobs” and “increase energy costs.” The $21 billion in unneeded subsidies would go to reduce the federal deficit. Josten argues the deficit should be tackled through spending cuts at the expense of working families and the elderly, instead of the richest corporations on earth:

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