By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Public Lands Project, Center for American Progress

This past week, Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-funded conservative group, held five events in three days across the state of Montana to stir up blame on the Obama Administration with regard to high gas prices.  However, a different group of Montanans (environmentalists, labor, state legislators, and others) attended the events with an alternate message, drawing attention to the fact that Big Oil receives billions of dollars in tax breaks every year, and that these tax exemptions should be repealed in times of fiscal austerity.  Rather than join this call to save American taxpayers money, Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips accused the protesters of “loving” high gas prices.

Thanks to the policies of this administration, gas has doubled over the last two years.  Doubled.  And the truth is, and they don’t want to say this openly, although the radical ones will say it openly, the protesters here today love that.  They want high gas prices because it drives their ideology that says “We don’t want a lot of energy. We want to be wind and solar, you can’t have oil, you can’t have coal, you can’t have things that give cheap, abundant energy.”

Watch it:

The “Running on Empty” tour that stopped in Montana this week is managed by Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group that is funded by the Koch brothers.  The Kochs are some of the richest people in the country due to their ownership of second-largest private company in America among other business ventures, many of which are based in oil and refining.  Their devotion to conservative causes that reward polluters at the expense of taxpayers and regular people has become aggressive and well-known, as seen for instance in their  $1 million donation to Proposition 23, the failed crusade to repeal California’s global warming law.

Second-quarter profits for the oil companies were released a few weeks ago, and just the five largest companies have already made $67.4 billion this year.  Even amongst these enormous profits, oil companies receive billions in tax breaks every year, and eliminating just a handful of them would save the government $45 billion over the next 10 years.  President Obama proposed this in his 2011 budget, and some have called for elimination of oil industry tax breaks to be high on the list of solutions that the new debt “super committee” will consider.

Even though Americans for Prosperity espouses fiscal conservatism and shuns government waste, its message during the Montana events was more “drill here drill now” rather than a serious call for ending taxpayer handouts to Big Oil.  As Montanan Kyla Wiens told the Great Falls Tribune, “The answer isn’t to drill or burn our way out of our energy problems.  We need to move forward with clean energy, and this is just distracting attention from the real problem.”

In reality, high gas prices are not caused by a failure of the Obama Administration to open more lands to drilling (indeed Headwaters Economics found that U.S. drilling is nearly at a 20-year high), but is caused by many reasons, one of the biggest of which is speculation.  A Goldman Sachs representative admitted earlier this summer that speculation adds at least $27 to each barrel of oil and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Commissioner Bart Chilton stated that speculation can drive up gas prices. And, Think Progress reported recently that the Koch brothers themselves were some of the first to engage in oil market speculation in the 1980s.

Retiring Xcel Energy CEO Dick Kelly is baffled how politicians “can deny the science” of climate pollution, complaining that all they care about is re-election. However, dozens of the nation’s top climate-denying politicians have received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the Great Plains electrical utility.

Kelly “has been about the business of driving Xcel to switch coal plants to natural gas, and he’s made Xcel the No. 1 provider of wind-produced electricity in the country,” writes Don Shelby in MinnPost.com. “We have a problem with CO2,” Kelly said in the interview. “The science is done. It is clear that CO2 is not good.” Kelly told Shelby that he “really” doesn’t know why politicians have rejected climate science and the need to “get off fossil fuels”:

“We’ve got to get off fossil fuels,” Kelly said. “The quicker the better.”

“But, there are a lot of people in Congress who wouldn’t agree,” I said.

“I know it,” replied Kelly. “All they are worried about is the next two or six years when they run for reelection. They just keep kicking the can down the road.”

Then he adds, thoughtfully: “I don’t know how they can deny the science. I really don’t.”

The answer really isn’t very complicated: coal and oil interests pump millions of dollars into the re-election of politicians that promote their fossil-pollution agenda. And one of the those companies is Dick Kelly’s Xcel Energy. In fact, the top receipients of the Xcel Energy PAC’s largesse over the years are global warming deniers Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX). Other top recipients include Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), and Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI).

XCEL’S CLIMATE DENIERS
Recipient	Contributions
Earl Pomeroy (D-ND)	$27,000
Joe Barton (R-TX)	$24,750
James M Inhofe (R-OK)	$19,000
Tim Johnson (D-SD)	$17,905
John Thune (R-SD)	$16,250
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)	$16,000
Norm Coleman (R-MN)	$15,000
John Boehner (R-OH)	$13,000
Dave Camp (R-MI)	$12,500
John Kline (R-MN)	$12,450
Fred Upton (R-MI)	$12,250
Erik Paulsen (R-MN)	$11,500
Gil Gutknecht (R-MN)	$11,250
Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)	$10,500
Jim Ramstad (R-MN)	$10,500
Paul Ryan (R-WI)	$10,200
Wayne Allard (R-CO)	$10,197
John A Barrasso (R-WY)	$10,000
Bob Beauprez (R-CO)	$10,000
Opponents of climate change policy who have received at least $10,000 from Xcel Energy PAC since 1998.

In total Xcel Energy PAC has contributed over $500,000 to politicians, mostly in the Republican Party, who question the science of global warming and oppose any efforts to limit greenhouse pollution. If Dick Kelly can’t understand why they keep getting re-elected, he should take a closer look in the mirror.

Last Saturday, a 70-mile-hour wind gust ahead of a band of thunderstorms toppled a stage at the Indiana State Fair, killing five and injuring dozens of others. Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) called the disaster a “fluke event“:

This is the finest event of its kind in America, this is the finest one we’ve ever had, and this desperately sad, as-far-as-I-can-tell fluke event doesn’t change that.

Meteorologists responded angrily to Daniels, pointing out that the warning signs were clear to experts, and Daniels should have admitted that greater precautions could have saved lives. Tim Ballisty, a Weather Channel meteorologist attacked Daniels for implying weather is “some magical mystery science”:

Let’s stop bucketing meteorology and weather in general into some magical mystery science that can’t be explained. When a tragic accident due to existing extreme weather conditions occurs, there is a notion to just throw your hands up in the air and say, “well, nothing could have been done to avoid this” or “nobody could have seen this coming” or “it was just a damn fluke”. In many instances, that just simply is not the case and it wasn’t the case in the tragedy at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Powerful, damaging winds were a known threat several days before and during the minutes leading up to the stage collapse. . .

If a known hazard – wind gusts in excess of 60 mph – is approaching, how is the destruction it causes a fluke?

“As seen in the radar images the gust front was a huge threat that to an untrained eye and on a composite radar on your phone is not detectable,” writes meteorologist Brad Panovich:

“What happened here was that either communications broke down or the threat was greatly misunderstood by the officials at the Fair Grounds,” Panovich said. “These storms did not just pop-up or pulse right over the fair grounds which would indeed have been a fluke. There was plenty of warning, if you you knew or wanted to know what was going to happen.”

Politicians try to paint incidents as accidents when they want to avoid questions of responsibility and thus action. But we understand what drives climate and weather sufficiently now that we must acknowledge the consequences of our inaction in the face of threats such as extreme weather.

Utility CEO: 170,000 electric vehicles wouldn’t overload Portland’s grid

Portland, OR strives to be the U.S. hub for plug-in vehicles. What other city has dedicated an entire block to plug-in vehicle charging? During a ceremony on Tuesday, Portland mayor Sam Adams plugged in the first vehicle at “Electric Avenue” and dedicated the charger-lined street. On display for the ceremony were plug-in vehicles from Nissan, Chevrolet and Mitsubishi and charging stations from Eaton, Ecotality, General Electric, OpConnect, Shorepower Technologies, and SPX.

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by Raymond S. Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  This article was first published in the UK Guardian.

Mitt Romney, arguably the leading Republican candidate for president of the United States in the 2012 election, recently significantly diminished his prospects for obtaining the support he needs from the right wing of his party. How did he do this? He simply declared that he believes the Earth is warming, and that human activities are responsible. To most scientists, such a statement would be considered fairly innocuous, and an accurate assessment of current understanding. But to a large fraction of the US Republican party, this is a completely unacceptable position – ranking alongside gay marriage, gun control and abortion rights. Anthropogenic climate change has become a litmus test for Republicans in the United States.

If you want to appeal to the hard core of the party – those whom you need in order to obtain the party’s nomination – you simply can not acknowledge what almost every national science academy and scientific organization has accepted for many years. In fact, many other prominent Republicans, sensing the winds of retribution, have already back-tracked on whatever previous statements they might have made, if they contained even a whiff of climate reality. Given the importance of getting the United States on board to obtain a comprehensive international agreement on controlling greenhouse gases, this dismissal of scientific evidence about global warming is both sad and alarming.

Climate scientists on the front lines of this battle have suffered badly from the poisonous political atmosphere. Rightwing blogs and talk radio demagogues have promoted the idea that climate science is a worthless charade, where data are simply manipulated to obtain a politically motivated result. Scientists have been abused on blogs and via emails and some have even been physically threatened. Government officials have misused their positions to intimidate and harass prominent scientists, following a strategy of attacking the messenger when they don’t like hearing the message. A leading Republican senator asked the Justice Department to investigate 17 climate scientists (myself included) for committing fraud and other crimes. How have we arrived at this sorry state?

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Aaron Fairchild is an unabashed “eco-capitalist.” And his Seattle-based company, Green Canopy Homes, is helping renovate excess housing stock around the city while putting people to work. It’s a one-two punch: provide a fix to the housing downturn while reducing emissions.

The company only has about nine homes under its belt. But when you consider that each project supports close to 50 jobs from start to finish, that’s not inconsequential.

Climate Solutions has a profile of the company as part of its video series highlighting “solutions stories.” It’s a great set of videos, and I hope they get to put together more of them.

With seemingly every program related to clean energy, efficiency and climate change under attack, these are the kind of positive stories we need to keep telling

Eco-Capitalists from Climate Solutions on Vimeo.

by Bill Becker, in a Science Progress cross-post.

The recent squall over SpongeBob Square Pants and his book about global climate change appears to have died down now. That’s a pity. Sometimes, it’s in the public interest to turn a squall into a hurricane.

Here’s the backstory, in case you missed it. Last month, the U.S. Department of Education sponsored an event to encourage kids to read books. One of the books at the event featured SpongeBob on an “earth-friendly adventure.” As E&E Reporter Jean Chemnick explained, SpongeBob’s sidekick Mr. Krabs…

…decides to pump enough greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere to bring on “endless summer” so his ocean-front swimming pool will always be full of paying customers. The plot backfires, however, when he and SpongeBob realize they have created an environmental disaster.

Fox News — television’s equivalent of a playground bully — beat up on Nickelodeon and the Education Department. Fox commentator Gretchen Carlson complained that SpongeBob should have told kids climate change is “actually a disputed fact.” A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation piled on, saying SpongeBob had given us “an important reminder of why the federal government shouldn’t be involved in school curriculum.”

But when it put the squeeze on SpongeBob, Fox created an ideal opportunity for the Obama Administration to slug it out on the real issues here: Is climate change really a “disputed fact,” and why shouldn’t the federal government be involved in educating kids about it?

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