That’s the title of Environment America’s press release today.  The group lays out some strategic steps to reduce oil consumption in their new report, Getting Off Oil: A 50 State Roadmap to Curbing Our Dependence on Petroleum.

Daniel Gatti, Staff Attorney at Environment America stated,

“The cost of our oil dependence has grown out of control, from the outrageous price we pay at the pump, to the pollution of the air that we breathe, to our contribution to global warming, to disasters like the Gulf spill last year and the ongoing spill in the Yellowstone River. Today’s report shows how we can bring the United States closer to the day when we will no longer fear the impact of Big Oil on our paychecks, our environment and our public health.”

Some of the policies recommended in the report include:

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Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate analyzed the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and found U.S. heat records in June outnumbered cold records by 2706 to 251 — nearly 11 to 1:

Monthly total number of daily high temperature and low temperature records set in the U.S. for June 2010 through June 2011, data from NOAA.

I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming.  If you want to know how to judge whether the near 11-to-1 ratio is a big deal, see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.”

As for global temperatures, the anti-science crowd had been crowing that this year’s big La Niña — which they called a “Super La Niña” — would drive temperatures way, way down.  But even the satellite datasets, which are more sensitive to the El Niño Southern oscillation, show that how modest and short-lived the temperature dip was [click to enlarge]:

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By Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Wallow Fire, AZ, June 2011.

Whenever there is a big outbreak of wildfires in the West, out come the ignorant to blame “radical environmentalists” and promote a return to excessive levels of industrial logging.

So it was earlier this week when a House panel held a hearing in Phoenix on forest health. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) was quick to blame “extreme environmental groups” and “the loss of Arizona’s timber industry” for a vicious fire season that has included the largest fire in the state’s history.

Gosar was joined by the incoming president of the Arizona Cattle Growers Association, who likewise blamed “radical environmentalists” for creating a “paralysis” in federal land management agencies that has kept employees from properly managing federal forests.

The reasons that the desert Southwest is having another extreme fire season are complex. They include decades of poor forestry and livestock grazing practices, misguided federal firefighting efforts that have prevented low-intensity fires in Ponderosa pine forests from clearing out underbrush and small trees, and prolonged, exceptional drought caused by climate change.

In April, Gosar voted to overturn the scientific finding that climate pollution threatens public welfare, which cites the “clear risk from the observed increases in wildfires.”

“What we’re seeing today in Arizona and other parts of the south are what our scientists say are the effects of climate change,” U.S. Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell testified before the U.S. Senate last month.

As the Los Angeles Times reported recently, the timber industry and cattle growers deserve much of the blame:

Experts say the logging of big trees and heavy grazing in the last century helped lay the foundation for the Wallow and the [2002] Rodeo-Chediski conflagrations. Cutting the old ponderosa pines opened the forest floor to dense young growth. Grazing eliminated the grasses that fed the frequent, low-intensity fires to which the pineland vegetation had adapted. Federal policies to quench forest fires as quickly as possible compounded the problem by promoting the buildup of brush and unnaturally thick stands of trees.

Wally Covington, a leading expert on the increasingly dry forests of the Southwest, told the paper, “We need to turn forestry on its head. Leave the old growth alone….focus on harvesting the small-diameter trees. Open the forest to restore more natural conditions and then reintroduce fire.”

That is precisely the approach of a 10-year restoration project on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona, exactly where the Wallow and Rodeo-Chediski fires took place. So far the project has thinned some 35,000 acres near communities, reinvigorated wood products companies that use small diameter trees and helped save some of those communities from the Wallow fire.

Environmental groups have been supportive of that White Mountain Stewardship Project. Not even the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity – arguably one of the most litigious of environmental groups – has sued or appealed any of the individual thinning projects on the Apache-Sitgreaves in a decade.

Unfortunately, no amount of advanced forestry practices can prevent future epic wildfires in a world with unconstrained greenhouse pollution.

In a surprise move, former Accuweather meteorologist and body builder Joe Bastardi has joined one of the most extreme, anti-scientist organizations in the world, the “American Tradition Institute.”

Many of us had expected he would sign up with the denier crowd in some sort of forecasting capacity.  But few could have imagined he would join an anti-science group so extreme that it was denounced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributing to an “environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas.”

Back in February, Bastardi resigned from Accuweather after 32 years.  It’s hard to imagine that his increasingly absurd and anti-scientific pronouncements played no role [see "How many major scientific misstatements does Joe Bastardi have to make before In-Accuweather fires him as their chief long-range forecaster?"].

Shortly before he resigned, for instance, Accuweather wrote, “Bastardi thinks this La Niña will last into next year” and “Bastardi is also predicting the long-term climate to turn colder over the next 20 to 30 years with global temperatures, as measured by satellite, returning to levels they were at in the late 1970s.”  Not and not.  In December, Bastardi predicted that Arctic sea “ice will increase back to those [1970s] levels in the N hemisphere.”  Not.

My forecast back in 2010 was that if he did leave Accuweather, the anti-science crowd, especially Fox News, would hire him as their ‘forecaster’.   Fox has had him on a few times since he moved on, but he landed at WeatherBell, a weather consulting firm, as “Chief Forecaster.”  To ensure no one would take them seriously, WeatherBell also hired another well-known science denier Joseph D’Aleo as “Chief Forecaster.”

[Note to WeatherBell:  Too many denier chiefs....]

But the real shocker is that Bastardi recently joined the American Tradition Institute as Senior Adviser.  The ATI is about as extreme as you get, even among hard-core deniers.

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“We don’t have set policy on climate change,” Cristi Kempf, the national foreign editor at the Chicago Tribune, told Midwest Energy News’ Tom Vandyck:

You have to remember that most European newspapers are papers with point of view, maybe liberal or right wing. Most U.S. papers still do try to retain that objectivity. We will print stories that bring both sides of the view. We will print stories about climate change presenting it as fact, and we will print stories about people who say climate change doesn’t exist. It’s very obvious that a lot of people, including members of the U.S. Congress, believe it’s not true.

When people say they are disbelievers of climate change, you have to point out that most of this has been debunked. I would say most of our stories — 75 percent — are overwhelmingly showing that climate change exists. Ice is melting, animals are dying — that kind of thing. And then every once in a while, you get something else.

One might hope that a major newspaper might aim for a higher rate of accuracy on an issue of civilizational importance than three out of four.

In a segment on the causes of 2011′s extreme weather yesterday, CBS Nightly News completely ignored the influence of global warming pollution. The piece, reported by correspondent Ben Tracy, discussed the historic dust storm in Arizona, the record drought in the Southwest, and other floods, storms, and fires that are on track to make 2011 the most expensive year for climate disasters in U.S. history, even before hurricane season began.

Tracy, assigned to “look into why” there’s been so much violent weather, ascribed the “freak weather” entirely to mesoscale phenomena: La Niña, a “stronger than normal jet stream pattern,” and “warm water from the Gulf of Mexico”:

The dust storm is the latest freak weather phenomenon in a string of strange weather events. Drought in the southwest has fueled wildfires in three states, but in the western mountains there was so much moisture this winter the snow is still there. A lingering snow pack that hasn’t been seen for 15 years. That snow and record rains here in California were caused in large part by La Niña, cooler water temperatures in the Pacific that change weather patterns. That helped end California’s three-year drought. But la Niña was followed this spring by a stronger than normal jet stream pattern, creating winds that collided with warm water from the Gulf of Mexico, causing severe storms across the southern US, that led to all those tornadoes and record flooding.

Watch it:

Blaming La Niña for extreme precipitation in California is somewhat bizarre, since it is generally associated with drought in California. What is best said is that the weather extremes of 2010-2011 took place at the same time as La Niña conditions in the Pacific, so whatever underlying physical conditions exist must necessarily allow for both. Saying that La Niña “caused in large part” the record rains in California is a failure to accurately describe how our climate system works.

The weather expert in the piece, Jan Null, is a masters-degree expert on microclimates and heat deaths, not global climate, which may explain why the influence of climate change was not discussed.

In reality, the meteorological phenomena discussed by CBS News — the wildfires, droughts, floods, storms, jet stream pattern, La Niña, the warm Gulf water — are all ones that scientists know are influenced by global warming pollution. With hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution in the atmosphere, everyday weather is more intense, more unstable, and over all hotter. Regionally, the Southwest is getting drier and the Midwest wetter, while extreme precipitation becomes much more frequent. The oceans are warming significantly, and the jet stream is moving in response to the changed climate. Historically extreme weather is now the norm because of man’s reckless abuse of the atmosphere.

“It is irresponsible not to mention climate change,” Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the nation’s top climatologists, has told ThinkProgress about reporting on current extreme weather. Yesterday’s CBS News report was, quite simply, irresponsible.

Transcript: Read more

No, the Barton apology hasn’t happened (yet), but otherwise the Yellowstone River oil spill is déjà vu all over again:

1. Warnings of danger ignored :  “Exxon had briefly shut the pipeline in May after local officials expressed concern about the pipeline’s safety, but determined that the level at which it was buried in the river bed—five to eight feet deep—was safe enough, and promptly resumed operations.”
2. Large spill in pristine area :  “An ExxonMobil pipeline that runs under the Yellowstone River near Laurel, Mont. ruptured near midnight Friday and leaked hundreds of barrels of oil into the river, contaminating riverbanks and flooding fields for miles.”
3. Big Oil misleads public about speed of response :  “Exxon initially gave conflicting information about how long it took to shut off the valves on the leaking pipeline, saying to the public that it took about 30 minutes when in fact it took 49.”
4. Public uninformed about health consequences :  Rancher “Nilson said she and some of her family members breathed pungent vapors in the days after the spill, and now they’re concerned about the pollution’s impact on their groundwater. Nilson said she has been kept in the dark about the health effects of the oil and whether officials are monitoring health effects.”

And let’s not forget the tragically ironic link of this spill to extreme weather, as Naomi Klein reminds us in this must-read LA Times op-ed:

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New Hampshire Governor John Lynch vetoed a bill yesterday that would have pulled his state out of the regional carbon-reduction program.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a 10-state CO2 trading system in the Northeastern U.S. crafted in 2008 to reduce emissions 10% in the utility sector by 2018. The proceeds are designed to go back to ratepayers and businesses for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, which, according to the program administrator have brought $3 to $4 dollars for every $1 raised from carbon allowance auctions.

RGGI has been under non-stop attacks funded by the Koch brothers.  In making the veto, Lynch rejected the false claims made by opponents and recognized those benefits for the state:

The Democratic governor said in his veto message that ending the program would cost jobs, hinder the state’s economic recovery and damage New Hampshire’s long-term competiveness.

Lynch said an assessment by the University of New Hampshire found that RGGI’s cumulative impact through 2010 was a net benefit of over $16 million in revenue to New Hampshire.

The governor explained:

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A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below

Fracking Fluids Poison a National Forest

A new study has found that wastewater from natural gas hydrofracturing in a West Virginia national forest quickly wiped out all ground plants, killed more than half of the trees and caused radical changes in soil chemistry.  These results argue for much tighter control over disposal of these “fracking fluids,” contends Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

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A lot of publications are reporting on the Energy Information Administration’s latest report showing that in the first quarter of 2011 renewables cumulatively provided more BTUs of energy than nuclear.

This is not a helpful comparison at all, and I’m surprised so many websites picked that up as the news.

The EIA is comparing all types of renewables – fuels, heating and electricity – to one sector: nuclear electricity. As everyone knows, these forms of energy perform very different functions.

Would anyone say that corn ethanol and nuclear power are directly comparable? Aside from the fact that there’s a tiny bit of radiation in everything, no one would say so. This type of exercise only makes the public debate around energy more confusing than it already is.

[Joe Romm:  Also, corn ethanol is 'renewable'  only in the weakest form of the word.  It very likely does not achieve substantial greenhouse gas emissions reductions in a full life-cycle analysis -- and it most certainly is not sustainable (see "The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world's corn supply in our cars?"]

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In yesterday’s Twitter town hall, President Obama spent a significant amount of time describing his vision for a clean energy economy. He said “we know” that clean energy manufacturing “is going to be the future,” and emphasized that his administration made “the largest investment in clean energy in our history through the Recovery Act.” He also mentioned the need for a smart, efficient electric grid and reducing tax subsidies for oil companies.

In a response to a question about oil dependence, Obama complained that “we have not seen a sense of urgency coming out of Congress.” He said he was “committed” to increasing domestic oil drilling, although the United States “can’t drill our way out of this problem.” With that caveat, the president called for a goal of reducing oil use in steps, mentioned his higher fuel economy standards, and said the Detroit bailout involved having the companies “start focusing on the cars of the future instead of looking at big gas guzzlers of the past.”

In an oblique, mangled reference to global warming pollution, Obama said reducing oil use would “drastically cut down on our carbon resources.”

CLEAN ENERGY INVESTMENT

We’ve got to have a top-notch infrastructure to support advanced manufacturing, and we’ve got to look at sectors where we know this is going to be the future. Something like clean energy, for example. For us not to be the leaders in investing in clean energy manufacturing so that wind turbines and solar panels are not only designed here in the United States but made here in the United States makes absolutely no sense. We’ve got to invest in those areas for us to be successful.

So you can combine high-tech with manufacturing, and then you get the best of all worlds.

ADVANCED BATTERY MANUFACTURING

I want to promote alternative energy everywhere, including oil states like Louisiana and Texas. This is something that I’m very proud of and doesn’t get a lot of attention. We made the largest investment in clean energy in our history through the Recovery Act. And so we put forward a range of programs that provided credits and grants to startup companies in areas like creating wind turbines, solar panels.

A great example is advanced battery manufacturing. When I came into office, advanced batteries, which are used, for example, in electric cars, we only accounted for 2 percent of the world market in advanced batteries. And we have quintupled our market share, or even gone further, just over the last two years. And we’re projecting that we can get to 30 to 40 percent of that market. That’s creating jobs all across the Midwest, all across America.

And whoever wins this race on advanced battery manufacturing is probably going to win the race to produce the cars of the 21st century. China is investing in it. Germany is investing in it. We need to be investing in it as well.

SMART GRID INFRASTRUCTURE

It’s estimated that we have about $2 trillion worth of infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt. Roads, bridges, sewer lines, water mains; our air traffic control system doesn’t make sense. We don’t have the kind of electric grid that’s smart, meaning it doesn’t waste a lot of energy in transmission. Our broadband system is slower than a lot of other countries.

OIL SUBSIDIES

The debt ceiling should not be something that is used as a gun against the heads of the American people to extract tax breaks for corporate jet owners, or oil and gas companies that are making billions of dollars because the price of gasoline has gone up so high.

REDUCING OIL DEPENDENCE

Reducing our dependence on oil is good for our economy, it’s good for our security, and it’s good for our planet — so it’s a “three-fer.” And we have not had a serious energy policy for decades. Every President talks about it; we don’t get it done.

Now, I’d like to see robust legislation in Congress that actually took some steps to reduce oil dependency. We’re not going to be able to replace oil overnight. Even if we are going full-throttle on clean energy solutions like solar and wind and biodiesel, we’re going to need oil for some time. But if we had a goal where we’re just reducing our dependence on oil each year in a staggered set of steps, it would save consumers in their pocketbook; it would make our businesses more efficient and less subject to the whims of the spot oil market; it would make us less vulnerable to the kinds of disruptions that have occurred because of what happened in the Middle East this spring; and it would drastically cut down on our carbon resources.

So what I — unfortunately, we have not seen a sense of urgency coming out of Congress over the last several months on this issue. Most of the rhetoric has been about, let’s produce more. Well, we can produce more, and I’m committed to that, but the fact is, we only have 2 to 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves; we use 25 percent of the world’s oil. We can’t drill our way out of this problem.

What we can do that we’ve already done administratively is increase fuel-efficiency standards on cars, just to take one example. That will save us millions of barrels of oil, just by using existing technologies and saying to car companies, you can do better than 10 miles a gallon or 15 miles a gallon. And you’re starting to see Detroit respond. U.S. car companies have figured out, you know what, if we produce high-quality electric vehicles, if we produce high-quality low gas — or high gas mileage vehicles, those will sell.

And we’re actually starting to see market share increase for American cars in subcompact and compact cars for the first time in many years. And that’s partly because we increased fuel-efficiency standards through an administrative agreement. It’s also because, as part of the deal to bail out the oil companies, we said to them, start focusing on the cars of the future instead of looking at big gas guzzlers of the past.

BIOFUELS

I’m a big supporter of biofuels. But one of the things that’s become clear is, is that we need to accelerate our basic research in ethanol and other biofuels that are made from things like woodchips and algae as opposed to just focusing on corn, which is probably the least efficient energy producer of these various other approaches.

And so I think that it’s important for even those folks in farm states who traditionally have been strong supporters of ethanol to examine are we, in fact, going after the cutting-edge biodiesel and ethanol approaches that allow, for example, Brazil to run about a third of its transportation system on biofuels. Now, they get it from sugar cane and it’s a more efficient conversion process than corn-based ethanol. And so us doing more basic research in finding better ways to do the same concept I think is the right way to go.