With international tensions and Wall Street speculation pushing gas prices up, experts are floating the possibility of $5 gas prices this summer. Conservatives have seized on unsubstantiated explanations for higher gas prices, from President Obama “wanting” expensive gas to restricting domestic production, despite it being at an eight-year high.

Today, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said that the “supply and demand is fine” — the driving factor is “concerns about the rhetoric” over Iran. As Tillerson points out, hawkish rhetoric is enough to fuel oil speculation and gas prices:

As I look at just the supply and demand fundamentals, I would not expect to see prices reach that [$5] level. Again, the unknown in here is if the markets view of the political risk, if the rhetoric gets more heated, if there’s a problem someplace else in the world that flares up, then certainly it can drive these prices up further.

Even during last year’s price spike, Tillerson admitted the major role speculation played, adding up to $40 more per barrel.

Exxon is not especially interested in oil production levels or easing gas prices, despite lambasting “dysfunctional regulation.” Not only is supply and demand “fine,” but Tillerson noted the company cares less about production than maximizing profits:

Rather than immediate production, Mr Tillerson said a priority for the company was to do “a lot of studying” to understand how to maximise the long-term value of its resources.

“A lot of the players in this space are more cash-flow driven. We’re return-driven. We don’t have ongoing cash flow to maintain our holding around these resources. It’s really about how are we going to develop these over the next 20 to 30 years and have them really generate good profitability.”

Of course, this is not the story the industry tries to tell the public. Big oil benefits from the higher gas prices — no matter whether it’s driven by speculation on international conflict. The big five are slated to take at least $5.8 billion more profit from higher prices for the first three months this year.

The controversial natural gas fracking process that has driven an explosion of natural gas drilling across the nation caused a dozen earthquakes in Ohio, state regulators confirmed:

A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth, Ohio oil and gas regulators said Friday as they announced a series of tough new regulations for drillers.

Among the new regulations: Well operators must submit more comprehensive geological data when requesting a drill site, and the chemical makeup of all drilling wastewater must be tracked electronically.

In addition to requiring well operators to submit complete geophysical logs, the new requirements intended to avert fracking quakes include:

– Future injection into Precambrian rock will be banned, and existing wells penetrating the formation will be plugged.

– State-of-the-art pressure and volume monitoring will be required, including automatic shut-off systems.

– Electronic tracking systems will be required that identify the makeup of all drilling wastewater fluids entering the state.

Republican presidential candidates have mocked concerns about fracking. Mitt Romney has called the EPA “out of control” for its modest efforts to increase fracking oversight and Rick Santorum calls hydrofracking the “new boogeyman.”

“A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth,” Ohio oil and gas regulators said today.

Citizens respond to speakers during a community forum in Youngstown, Ohio, to discuss seismic activity related to deep wastewater injection wells. Source: AP.

These quakes weren’t caused by the original fracking — that is, by injecting a fluid mixture into the earth to release natural gas (or oil). It was caused by a Class II disposal well used to reinject the resulting brine deep underground. That reinjection is banned in some states.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) has issued a preliminary report “on the relationship between the Northstar 1 Class II disposal well and 12 Youngstown area earthquakes” (news release here). They spell out what happened and the steps they will take to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Specifically, ODNR found:

Geologists believe induced seismic activity is extremely rare, but it can occur with the confluence of a series of specific circumstances. After investigating all available geological formation and well activity data, ODNR regulators and geologists found a number of co-occurring circumstances strongly indicating the Youngstown area earthquakes were induced. Specifically, evidence gathered by state officials suggests fluid from the Northstar 1 disposal well intersected an unmapped fault in a near-failure state of stress causing movement along that fault.

As fracking has exploded onto the science, it has increasingly been connected to earthquakes — see my November 2011 post, Shale Shocked: “Highly Probable” Fracking Caused U.K. Earthquakes, and It’s Linked to Oklahoma Temblors.

Here are some of the steps ODNR is doing to prevent this from reoccuring:

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Scientist: “The planet is getting warmer and it will continue to warm, on average, as we go into the future.”

ABC News: “That means we are in for more extreme weather, more Snowmageddon type winters and torrential downpours that can flood entire towns.”

Here’s the whole story from Wednesday night, which warns the public about “the wild swings in the weather we can expect in the future.”

Kudos to ABC for talking to a climate scientist and explaining how warming drives the extreme weather we’re seeing. They seem to be doing some of the best reporting on this:

• With No End in Sight for Texas Drought, ABC News Explains: “Every Farmer in the World Will Be Affected by Climate Change”
• Another terrific ABC News story — on the role global warming is playing in extreme winter weather
• Terrific ABC News story: “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming”

To many Americans, climate change is weird weather and political debate. For the nation of Kiribati, it’s an existential crisis.

Kiribati, an island nation located in the central Pacific, rises just a few feet above sea level in many areas. Elevating ocean levels could soon render the entire country uninhabitable.

With leading world economic powers doing little to combat climate change, Kiribati is drawing up contingency plans to relocate the country’s entire population to another island nation, Fiji, if necessary.

Kiribati President Anote Tong told The Associated Press on Friday that his Cabinet this week endorsed a plan to buy nearly 6,000 acres on Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu. He said the fertile land, being sold by a church group for about $9.6 million, could be insurance for Kiribati’s entire population of 103,000, though he hopes it will never be necessary for everyone to leave.

Tong said some villages have already moved and there have been increasing instances of sea water contaminating the island’s underground fresh water, which remains vital for trees and crops. He said changing rainfall, tidal and storm patterns pose as least as much threat as ocean levels, which so far have risen only slightly.

Some scientists have estimated the current level of sea rise in the Pacific at about 2 millimeters (0.1 inches) per year. Many scientists expect that rate to accelerate due to climate change.

Kiribati isn’t the only nation drawing up plans to leave their homeland if climate change continues unabated. Maldives, an archipelago nation south of India, could soon be wiped out by rising seas as well, forcing the government to consider evacuating the population to Australia.

Take your kids to see The Lorax.

I took my 5-year-old daughter and she loved it. Despite the best efforts of Fox News to smear the movie, The Lorax is doing very well at the box office — $70 million opening weekend (better than other Dr. Seuss movies) and “strong midweek numbers” — for a reason. It’s entertaining.

There is a great closing song, “Let It Grow,” about letting the Once-ler’s last Truffula Seed grow into a tree (if you don’t know who the Once-ler is or what he did to every last Truffula tree in his self-destructive quest to make and sell Thneeds, the movie probably isn’t for you). The online remix of the song doesn’t do it justice, so you’ll just have to take your kids to see the movie.

Fox News’s Lou Dobbs complains Hollywood’s goal is to “indoctrinate our children” — one of his guests claims the goal is to create “occu-toddlers“! Apparently it’s okay for conservatives to push a “Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax.” But a movie based on a classic children’s story — that’s out of bounds.

Funny how Dobbs attacks Hollywood and the fictional Lorax — “a tree-smooching commie” – rather than Dr. Seuss, who wrote the book. Yes, the movie expands on the book, but doesn’t make it any stronger. The book itself has a strong message, though it isn’t anti-business per se, merely anti-unsustainable business.

It’s safe to say that anyone shocked that the movie has a strong environmental message has never read the book. The Lorax speaks for the trees.

What is particularly amusing is how the reviewer for Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal reinterprets the story to turn the Once-ler into an “entrepreneur” — and the Lorax into a failed environmentalist — in his negative review “The Bad! Bad! Bad! Biggering of Dr. Seuss“:

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In a radio interview with Voice of Christian Youth America, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) argued that his belief that global warming is a hoax is biblically inspired. Promoting his book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Inhofe told interviewer Vic Eliason on Wednesday that only God can change the climate, and the idea that manmade pollution could affect the seasons is “arrogance“:

Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

Listen here:

Inhofe went on to attack evangelical leader Rich Cizik, the former Vice President of the National Association of Evangelicals, who has made the religious case for fighting climate change pollution. Inhofe said Cizik has been “exposed as a liberal” and that he is like idolatrous Romans described in the Bible as those who “give up the truth about God for a lie.”

In the interview, Inhofe did not mention he has received $1,352,523 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $90,950 from Koch Industries.

VCY America also argues that Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud, Muslim extremists have infiltrated the federal government, and that the United Nations has engineered the Agenda 21 program to transform human society through population control and energy use.

(H/T Right Wing Watch)

by Greg Hanscom, reposted from Grist

In an increasingly desperate attempt to save his signature, $260 billion highway bill from the junkyard, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) pleaded with fellow Republicans to get on the bandwagon this week, even threatening to go with the (gasp!) bipartisan Senate bill instead if they didn’t get in line. Now it looks like he has given up on passing his own bill altogether.

To anyone who has been watching this saga, it comes as no surprise that Boehner’s bill is in the ditch. The original proposal, floated in late January, would have cut all designated funding for mass transit, bike paths, and safe routes to school, and tied highway building to increased oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It also included a mandate to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Not a winning combination.

What is surprising is that Boehner actually seems to have believed that he could push this junk heap through Congress — or at least the U.S. House of Representatives.

In cutting transit and bike funding, Boehner was trying to appease budget hawks and small government conservatives in his party. (He was also playing to the GOP’s suburban base.) But he still wanted a big ass bill, stretching over five years, that he could splash his name across and tell the grandkids about. Thus the effort to increase drilling: He needed a way to pay for all the road building.

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by Lisa Speer, reposted from NRDC’s Switchboard

As summer sea ice disappears, Big Oil, commercial fishing, shipping and other industries have set their sights on the Arctic as a new source for profits.  So far, mismanagement of virtually every other ocean on the planet has led us to a brave new world of collapsing fisheries, massive dead zones, huge floating garbage patches and destroyed habitats.   The Arctic Ocean — long protected by a blanket of ice and now on the brink of major new development — might be our last chance to get oceans management right.

In late February, I had the opportunity to speak at the World Oceans Summit in Singapore, an international conference hosted by The Economist. Hundreds of government officials, business leaders, scientists and activists came together to address our biggest ocean challenges.  I came away from the meeting feeling more than ever that we need bold, daring, and achievable solutions to conserve and protect this remarkable and unique ocean, and the wildlife and people who depend on it.

With sea ice rapidly disappearing, the Arctic faces expanded fishing, offshore oil and gas development, and shipping. These activities always bring huge risks for ocean wildlife, including spills, invasive species, pollution, and disruptive underwater noise.

The Arctic is particularly vulnerable to these risks.  Take offshore oil, for example, and think back to the 2010 BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite occurring in perhaps the most well prepared region on Earth for a major oil spill, only a tiny percentage of the 170 million gallons of toxic crude oil that spewed into the water was ultimately captured and cleaned up. Now imagine a similar disaster taking place in the Arctic, with raging ice storms, blinding fog, darkness for months at a time, winds at hurricane force, and heaving chunks of broken sea ice. All that, and the nearest Coast Guard station more than 1,000 miles away. The results would be catastrophic, to say the least.

The Arctic is critical habitat for endangered and threatened species, including polar bears, whales, seals, and migratory birds. With sea ice melting and the water warming, these species are already under huge stress. Increased disruption could push these animals over the edge.

With the fate of the Arctic in the balance, what can we do about it?

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Other stories below: Ranchers fight Keystone XL; Why cities can’t tackle global warming on their own

Senate rejects expediting Keystone pipeline