The winter that wasn’t is bleeding into a spring of fire, with freakish warmth and dry ground breeding a disturbingly early start to wildfire season across the nation:

ALABAMA: A wildfire burned 70 to 100 acres of land in Tuscaloosa County before being contained. [WBRC]

Firefighters are still fighting a forest fire that has blackened more than 350 acres north of Waterloo in Lauderdale County since Monday. [Florence Times-Daily]

ARIZONA: Emergency personnel said a wildfire that broke out in eastern Santa Cruz County burned close to 450 acres Saturday night. [Nogales International]

COLORADO: Residents on Colorado’s eastern plains are trying to determine the extent of damage and the number of farm animals killed following a wildfire that charred more than 37 square miles, destroyed two farmsteads, and forced 1000 people to evacuate. Three firefighters were injured, one with critical burns, while trying to escape from a stranded fire truck after the fire broke out last Sunday. [AP]

FLORIDA: Statewide, the dry conditions and the lack of tropical systems last year have helped cause 986 wildfires that have burned more than 16,000 acres since Jan. 1. [Palatka Daily]

The Florida Forest Service is working to contain a 50-acre wildfire northwest of Baldwin in Baldwin Bay. [News 4 Jacksonville]

GEORGIA: A wildfire forced officials to evacuate four homes and shut down one road for a couple of hours Tuesday evening in Cook County. [WALB]

MICHIGAN: Wildfire season has descended upon Michigan early this year, as unseasonable temperatures combined with low snowfall this winter have dried out grass and wood earlier than usual. [Arenac County Independent]

The remains of a bonfire left unattended in Tuesday’s high winds and heat caused a 40-acre wildfire in a swampy section of Custer Township bounded by Johnson, Stephens, Hansen and Reek roads. [Ludington Daily News]

MINNESOTA: Wildfire activity has picked up significantly, and people are reminded to obtain burn permits and keep an eye on weather conditions. [Grand Forks Herald]

VIRGINIA: U.S. Forestry Service and Virginia Department of Forestry crews are responding to a wildfire that began in the Wise County side of High Knob Tuesday afternoon. [Kingsport TImes News]

WISCONSIN: As of Tuesday morning firefighters had responded to 160 wildfires over roughly 300 acres on state-protected lands. Two people were killed in grass fires in the last week. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]

Meanwhile, wildfires are burning in Costa Rica and ravaging northern Kenya, including a fire on the slopes of Mount Kenya, the nations’s tallest mountain, which “is sending big game animals like elephants fleeing for their lives.”

Scientists have warned for decades that the hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution added to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels would bring these disasters. The states that are now burning are now also polluted by dozens of politicians who claim the science is a lie.

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

This morning the House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing entitled “Harnessing American Resources to Create Jobs and Address Rising Gasoline Prices: Families and Cost-of-Life Impacts.”

Rather than focus on actual solutions to rising gas prices, Republican committee members advocated for more drilling, a policy which would increase big oil profits but does not decrease gas prices.  In his opening remarks, Chairman Doc Hastings’ (R-WA) stated:

In order to address rising gasoline prices, we must do everything we can to increase production here in the U.S. We have the energy resources; we just need the federal government to get out of the way.

Unfortunately, more drilling does not decrease gas prices.  As the Associated Press reported this morning:

It’s the political cure-all for high gas prices: Drill here, drill now. But more U.S. drilling has not changed how deeply the gas pump drills into your wallet, math and history show.

A statistical analysis of 36 years of monthly, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices and U.S. domestic oil production by The Associated Press shows no statistical correlation between how much oil comes out of U.S. wells and the price at the pump.

This is because oil prices are set on the world market, and are “relatively insensitive to what happens here in the United States with regards to production,” as Senator Jeff Bingaman put it recently.

So why are Republicans continuing to advocate for more drilling as a panacea to high gas prices?  Perhaps because 88 percent of all political contributions from oil and gas companies go to Republicans.  The Natural Resources Committee itself takes an astounding amount of campaign money from oil and gas, as seen in this chart that ThinkProgress put together in November 2011.

In addition to promoting more drilling as a solution to high gas prices, witnesses called by the Republicans at today’s hearing went so far as to oppose additional solutions to high gas prices.  Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) asked each majority witness if they would support keeping the oil and refined products from the Keystone XL pipeline in American, and each stated he or she would not support.  This mirrors the voting pattern of Republicans—all but nine in the entire House voted against a similar amendment to keep American oil on American soil in February of this year.

Additionally, the facts show that under the Obama administration, we are drilling more in America than everywhere else in the world combined.  As of March 16^th, there were 1,984 rotary rigs operating in the U.S., while only 1,721 in the rest of the world.  The number of oil drilling rigs in the U.S. hit a record in February, and have quadrupled over the last three years.

Rather than having hearings about real solutions to gas prices, Republicans on this committee insist on perpetuating myths about the role of domestic drilling in decreasing gas prices.  Next week, they are having another hearing on the subject, and it remains to be seen what “solutions” they will address.

This is a post about people who tell lies to fabricate a narrative, and the journalists who lazily cite them.

But it’s not just about the climate science deniers and their enablers. It’s also about NPR’s This American Life, which retracted a powerful episode about Apple workers in China after learning their key source, Mike Daisey, fabricated key details in the interest of a better narrative and what he saw as a good cause.

I’m a big fan of the show, but even if you aren’t, I’d urge you to listen to the retraction show (audio here, transcript here).

The whole episode is a cautionary tale for all journalists, including those in the climate arena — at least for those who don’t draw the exactly backwards lesson from it, such as NY Times blogger Andy Revkin.

The point of the story is that some sources consistently make up crap in the interest of a larger narrative. That was Mike Daisey. It is also what most climate science deniers do, which is why I prefer to call them disinformers.

The lesson is for journalists is to avoid those folks like the plague since you can’t trust anything they say, quoting them will probably screw up your story, and consistently relying on their perspective may harm your reputation.

Now here is where the story gets weird. Instead of drawing the obvious analogy between what Daisey did and what the disinformers do, Andy Revkin and others are actually trying to compare Daisey to … wait for it … climatologist Peter Gleick! As we will see, this is, ironically, how a desired narrative trumps all plausibility.

Here is Revkin in his all-too-aptly-titled post, “Other Voices: When Narrative Comes Before Truth“:

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by Lee Epstein, via NRDC’s Switchboard

In the middle part of the past decade, “sustainability” became somewhat of a “college craze” – that is, for ever-competitive college administrators.  Lots of schools jumped on the “green” bandwagon, though some had already been leading the parade for some time.  Others, sadly, have yet to see the light.

Oberlin College committed early on to sophisticated sustainable buildings, and local and organic food.  My own alma mater, Dickinson College, embraced sustainability as one of the defining measures of both campus systems (LEED Gold buildings, waste oil for biodiesel transportation and for its boilers, its own organic farm supplying its foodservices, free bikes) and its academic and curricular focus.

The University of Colorado at Boulder has committed that all of its new buildings will meet commendable LEED Gold standards, and it runs an alternative transportation system.  UCLA recycles, recycles, and then recycles again.  The University of New Hampshire fires up landfill gas to supply energy on campus.  Arizona State University has a School of Sustainability.  American University buys tens of millions of kwH of wind energy and has thoroughly greened its campus. And Middlebury College runs a biomass gasification plant to help it attain carbon neutrality by 2016.

(Previous articles on NRDC’s blog have described Emory University’s impressive commitment to sustainability and William and Mary’s new eco-village.)

Measuring a green college or university

There are many ways to measure how green a college is, and there are now very public pronouncements on who’s made it to the “top x number” of such schools: the Sierra Club has an annual list and Grist magazine keeps one.  There’s a “College Sustainability Report Card,” and a slew of college presidents have signed on to a climate change pledge.  Most recently, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) has created a master Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Ranking System (STARS) that will feed its information to the Princeton Review and other publications.  Of course, the easiest measure is still the most visible one: is the college constructing its new buildings or rehabilitating its old ones to high sustainability standards, such as LEED-NC (New Construction) Silver, Gold or Platinum levels?  Is it re-designing its landscapes with native plants, and substantially reducing its rainwater runoff with techniques that allow infiltration, plant uptake, and the re-use of stormwater?

Another measure is the extent to which the college or university integrates with its surrounding community, to the extent there is one.  This is the college equivalent of LEED-ND (LEED for Neighborhood Development): to the extent possible, is there continuity and sufficient connectivity with the streets and services beyond the campus; is the campus and are those connections with the municipality walkable; does the campus provide good access, without having to drive, to multiple destinations, such as food and necessities, entertainment, recreation, or health care?

A third measure is whether the internal workings of the physical plant have been “greened”: have water systems been made efficient and is gray water re-used; what kind of energy is used to heat and cool buildings; are transportation systems green, efficient, and readily available; how do food services operate, are foods locally sourced, are various wastes recycled or composted, and has waste been minimized overall; and finally, what about campus wastes as a whole – is there an effective recycling system, is paper re-used, are record systems electronic?  These physical plant practices have real, calculable efficiency cost returns.

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Experts deny that drilling brings down gas prices, despite how often Republicans claim to have the “silver bullet.” Now, the Associated Press reports that an analysis of 36 years of Energy Information Administration data shows “no statistical correlation” between domestic oil production and gas prices.

AP writes:

U.S. oil production is back to the same level it was in March 2003, when gas cost $2.10 per gallon when adjusted for inflation. But that’s not what prices are now.

That’s because oil is a global commodity and U.S. production has only a tiny influence on supply. Factors far beyond the control of a nation or a president dictate the price of gasoline.

When you put the inflation-adjusted price of gas on the same chart as U.S. oil production since 1976, the numbers sometimes go in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. If drilling for more oil meant lower prices, the lines on the chart would consistently go in opposite directions. A basic statistical measure of correlation found no link between the two, and outside statistical experts confirmed those calculations.

Domestic oil production is at its highest level in eight years. According to the AP, if drilling dictated gas prices, they should already be at the $2 Republicans promise. However, gas prices fluctuate based on a variety of factors, including speculation and tensions in the Middle East.

These facts haven’t stopped Republicans from rallying around “drill, baby, drill.” President Barack Obama quipped last week on the GOP’s drilling fever: “I guess there’s some empty spots where we’re not drilling. We’re not at the National Mall. We’re not drilling at your house.”

by John Farrell, reposted from Energy Self Reliant States

A new report released by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research shows that Minnesota can meet 100% of its electricity needs with in-state wind and solar power, and (with ample energy efficiency investments) at a comparable cost to its existing electricity supply.

The notion that solar and wind energy cannot be the mainstay of an electricity generation system because they are intermittent is incorrect…. It is technically and economically feasible to meet the entire 2007 electricity demand of Xcel Energy [in Minnesota] using only renewable energy generation combined with storage technology and energy efficiency improvements…. A 100 percent renewable energy-based electricity system for Minnesota increases rates by a mere 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour when sufficient reasonable and economical investments are made in energy efficiency

The renewable energy mix would include approximately 13,000 megawatts of wind power and 4,600 megawatts of distributed solar PV.  The expenditures for the new renewable energy, storage (via underground compressed air) and energy efficiency would pump more than $90 billion into the state’s economy and create 50,000 jobs.

With the combination of new renewable energy and significant energy efficiency, electricity rates rise slightly but Minnesota ratepayers are held relatively harmless. The following chart from the report illustrates, with some relatively conservative estimates about the cost of wind and solar:

While the Minnesota-specific findings are ground-breaking, the paradigm shift suggested for the electricity system is equally profound:

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by Greg Hanscom, excerpted from Grist

Here’s the $8.5 billion question: Can suburbanites be convinced to care about cities again?

Urban America is hoping so. For some cities, it’s a matter of life and death. And nowhere is the question more relevant than in Atlanta, where citizens will vote this summer on a massive regional transportation initiative that would stitch together a city and suburbs that have been divided for decades along racial, economic, and political lines.

The all-too-familiar storyline goes like this: Back in the 1960s and ’70s, Americans bolted from urban centers like concert goers from a burning theater, leaving cities smoldering, sometimes literally. And while urban industrial might built the suburbs, suburbanites were content to leave cities on the ash heap of history.

Witness the 1971 vote in Atlanta and its outlying counties over creating a tax to build a regional mass transit system. The vote broke down along racial lines, says Robert Bullard, a longtime Atlantan who is widely considered to be the father of environmental justice. The largely African American city and two counties voted to support the system, while two other counties, both predominantly white, opted out. The joke at the time was that MARTA — the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority — was short for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”

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Today the U.S. Department of Commerce announced plans to impose import tariffs ranging from 2.9 percent to 4.73 percent on Chinese-manufactured solar panels. Melanie Hart, China Energy and Climate Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress, issued the following statement:

Today’s Commerce Department decision to levy import tariffs on Chinese solar panels is a positive step forward in a much larger effort to level the clean energy playing field between the United States and China. I applaud SolarWorld for pursuing this case and utilizing the trade institutions designed to address these types of complaints. Too many U.S. companies avoid filing trade petitions because they fear Chinese government retaliation. When U.S. companies allow those fears to prevail, the end result is tacit accommodation to illegal trade behavior, and that can erode U.S. competitiveness and drive entire U.S. industries out of business.

This countervailing duty (subsidy) tariff is lower than many industry analysts expected. It is important to note, however, that in trade cases where subsidy and dumping petitions are filed in tandem, the dumping tariff is generally the higher import duty. The Commerce Department is expected to issue the SolarWorld dumping determination in May. At this point it is far from clear what the end result of this case will be and how it will impact manufacturers in the United States and China.

One thing that we can say based on this relatively low subsidies tariff is that the Commerce Department did not apply punitive duties in this ruling. Instead, the Commerce Department based this decision on its own review of the evidence and only levied tariffs based on what it could prove. Chinese companies and officials are watching this case very closely, and hopefully this action will serve as an example in China for how these cases can and should be handled impartially and according to law.

The United States and China are the world’s biggest energy consumers. Keeping our borders open to allow and encourage clean energy trade can stimulate competition, speed innovation, and bring down costs to speed our transition toward a clean energy economy. To be equally beneficial for both countries, however, it is critical that U.S. and Chinese companies compete on a level playing field. At present, it is clear that the field is often far from level. Allowing and encouraging U.S. companies to file trade petitions such as this one is critical for correcting that imbalance.

These tariffs are designed to counteract government subsidies in China that artificially suppress Chinese manufacturing costs and give Chinese solar panels a pricing advantage in the U.S. market. Today’s announcement is the first of two long-awaited tariff verdicts on two trade petitions filed last October by SolarWorld Industries America Inc. A Commerce Department decision on the second trade petition (dumping) is expected in May, and the May ruling could substantially increase the cumulative import tariffs levied on Chinese solar panels in the United States.

Shhhh! Don’t tell the Politico that the ‘rebranding’ of global warming happened 3 years ago and now is being reversed by climate champions such as Bill McKibben.

The Politico is known for cutting-edge inside-the-beltway political reporting — if center-right spin is your idea of cutting edge.

Today, however, they ran a story that would have been cutting edge 3 years ago, but is now in fact mostly wrong. Indeed, as we’ll see, the Politico story is actually contradicted by the polling that they cite.

Here is their big ‘scoop’:

‘Global warming’ gets a rebranding

Shhhh! Don’t talk about global warming!

There’s been a change in climate for Washington’s greenhouse gang, and they’ve come to this conclusion: To win, they have to talk about other topics, like gas prices and kids choking on pollutants.

More than two years since Democrats’ cap-and-trade plan died in Congress, the strategic shift represents a reluctant acknowledgment from environmentalists that they’ve lost ground by tackling global warming head-on. Their best bet now lies in a bit of a bait and switch: Help elect global warming fighters by basing campaigns on kitchen-table issues.

What’s funny is that this story would have been news in early 2009 — when I first reported on it (see here). Heck, it still would have been news in mid-2010 when the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote about it in his article, “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“

What the Politico missed entirely is there has been a backlash against that rebranding because many in the progressive and environmental communities realized that the rebranding effort failed, realized that focusing just on topics like gas prices doesn’t work.

How ironic that Politico ran the story next to an ExxonMobil ad for the oil tar sands — since the biggest recent political success of the environmental movement, halting the approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, was done by talking explicitly about global warming, a strategy explicitly championed by one of the leaders of the effort, Bill McKibben.

I asked McKibben to comment on his winning strategy, and he wrote me:

Talking about climate was precisely what rallied most of the people who came out to oppose the Keystone Pipeline. The largest civil disobedience action in 30 years on any issue saw people from all 50 states taking part, not jsut or even mainly the 6 along the pipeline route. When we circled the White House five deep with people, the most common banner was simply a quote from Obama: In my administration the rise of the oceans will begin to slow.

People sense in their bones–especially on a week like this–that the climate is starting to shift–this issue is moving quickly from the theoretical to the deeply real.

Yes, leave it to the Politico to say no one is talking about global warming during one of the most extreme heat waves in the history of the country, one that is so extreme, even major networks are talking about global warming.

I’m not saying that everyone who supports climate action is now talking about global warming — obviously the president and his team still aren’t. I’m merely saying that the story is mostly wrong, that the part that is “news” for the Politico —  the supposedly rebranding — happened 3 years ago and the part that should be news for their readers is that there has now been a backlash to that rebranding.

That backlash comes in 2 forms. First, there has been a vast amount of polling and social science research done showing that global warming is a winning political issue (see links below). Indeed we now know climate is a wedge issue that splits the Tea Party extremists from independents and moderate Republicans (see for instance the 2011 work of Stanford public opinion expert Jon Krosnick: Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent).

Second, more groups like Tarsands Action are starting to talk about climate change again.

Of course, some groups never stopped talking about global warming. You may have heard of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s where I work. Climate Progress is a project of CAPAF.  I think it’s safe to say CAPAF never stopped talking about global warming.

So guess how Politico begins its article about this supposedly new rebranding? By quoting CAPAF’s director of climate strategy! Seriously, here’s the quote in the very next paragraph after the excerpts above:

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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released the GOP budget yesterday morning.  In all the coverage about the  massive shortcomings of the budget, many may have missed the proposal to sell off millions of acres of the public lands that belong to all of us.

Tea Party favorite Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is credited with adding the language, which says:

Sales of Unneeded Federal Assets:  In the last year alone, Republicans put forth proposals to sell unneeded federal property.  Representative Jason Chaffetz has proposed to sell millions of acres of unneeded federal land. Likewise, Representative Jeff Denham’s bill to authorize the sale of billions of dollars worth of federal assets would save the government money, collect corresponding revenue, and remove economic distortions by reducing public ownership.  Such sales could also potentially be encouraged by reducing appropriations  to various agencies.  If done correctly, taxpayers could recoup billions of  dollars from selling unused government property.

This is likely referring to Chaffetz’s bill, H.R. 1126, the “Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act of 2011.”  The radical proposal would force the government to sell off 3.3 million acres of public lands in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming to the highest bidder, without specifying how American taxpayers would receive a fair compensation for them.

Selling off public lands—including national parks—has recently been high on various Republicans’ wish lists.  Read more

by Mindy Lubber, reposted from Forbes

When Prudential Capital Group provided $121 million in financing for an Arizona solar power project earlier this year, and General Electric invested $1.4 billion in solar energy projects in 2011, they weren’t speculating in risky, early-stage technology ventures. They were investing in core infrastructure projects with high gross margins and revenues fixed for 20 to 25 years; “power plants with no fuel costs,” according to Bill Green, senior managing director at Macquarie Capital in New York.

Typically, according to Green, investors such as Prudential, Google and GE come in when virtually all the risk has been structured out through long-term agreements with large utilities that agree to purchase the power generated by these renewable energy generation projects. These projects offer stable, low double-digit rate of returns (IRRs) while generally paying out an annual yield in the range of 6-8 percent.

This attractive investment opportunity may surprise those who have seen sharp drops in share prices of companies that make the hardware used by renewable energy projects. Global manufacturers of wind turbines and solar panels have been facing stiff competition from Chinese manufacturers. But the falling price of this equipment has been a boon for renewable energy project developers whose installed costs are dropping dramatically.

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Our guest blogger is David Turnbull, the former director of Climate Action Network – International who is chronicling his month-long road trip across the nation in a hybrid car.

There’s a lot that I could write about today — the way driving on country roads rather than interstates lets you have a feel of the land and country you’re driving by, images of the colorful diner where I had lunch in the middle of nowhere in western Oklahoma, the sublimely random and awesome retro ’80s bar I happened upon tonight in Tulsa, etc etc etc.

But tonight I’m going to focus on one experience: I drove through Cushing, Oklahoma today.

Cushing, for those who don’t know, is known as the “pipeline crossroads for the world.” I’m aware of it because it’s been one of the cities at the center of the Keystone XL pipeline debate. The Keystone XL pipeline would, if constructed, transport the world’s dirtiest oil from Canada through the heartland of America to the Texas coast to be refined and, for the most part, shipped overseas. It’s a terrible project, and the President was right to reject it not once, but twice…and yet it keeps coming back like a zombie waking from the dead. Cushing would be a major point in the pipeline, and even today sits at what could be a crucial junction of the Southern portion, which it seems Obama may unfortunately be ready to push forward.

I drove into Cushing late in the afternoon today. When I got there I decided I’d go see a bit of downtown. There were signs talking about a “historic downtown,” so I figured I’d have a look. What I found was depressing, in as much as any town that’s struggling with hard economic times is depressing.

It’s a town where half of the storefronts are closed and boarded up. The main street, the street that is supposed to be the epicenter of the town: nearly deserted. The few people who were actually walking around looked depressed…but maybe that was just me, projecting my own feelings onto my perception of them.

After a quick tour of downtown Cushing, if you can call it downtown, I drove south of town. To where the oil sits. Read more

The Australian Climate Commission said last May we must act now or “the global climate may be so irreversibly altered we will struggle to maintain our present way of life.”

In the lead up to passing a comprehensive climate bill last year, the Australia’s political ‘debate’ over climate change became downright vicious. Some deniers actually threatened climate scientists and politicians who supported taking action to price greenhouse gas emissions.

In response to the ongoing war being waged by denial groups, Australia’s new Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, used his opening speech to the Senate to focus on the importance of addressing climate change. As former Premier of New South Wales, Carr has been outspoken on climate issues throughout his political career. With his new office in the Senate, he continues to sound the drumbeat:

“The land we call our own … is being transformed, as is the rest of the planet. Since the late 80′s I’ve been an unapologetic believer in the grim reality that human activity is changing the earth’s climate,” he said this week. Australia’s ABC News reported on the speech:

“But what if this shock, this chemical experiment with the Earth’s atmosphere is only the first of a series of shocks we might sustain?” he said.

“What about the change in the chemical composition of the oceans as they absorb more and more of the carbon our civilisations have been emitting?”

Senator Carr also used his speech to outline his vision for the way Australia can help promote tolerance between cultures and religions.

“Running foreign policy is about protecting our national interest … but it is also about being an exemplary global citizen when it comes to protecting human rights and protecting the world’s oceans,” he said.

In 2008, Carr gave a speech at the University of New South Wales, in which he called climate change deniers “the present danger.”

Watch it:

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On Monday, the Tennessee state legislature passed legislation that requires public schools to teach the “controversy” over evolution, global warming, and human cloning:

The Senate voted 24-8 for HB368, which sponsor Sen. Bo Watson, R-Hixson, says will provide guidelines for teachers answering students’ questions about evolution, global warming and other scientific subjects. Critics call it a “monkey bill” that promotes creationism in classrooms.

In 1925, Tennessee was the home of the Scopes monkey trial, where local jurors upheld the conviction of a biology teacher for teaching evolution in his classroom, tarring the reputation of the state. Climate denial legislation has become widespread across the United States, in part due to the efforts of the corporate-funded right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council.

The text of HB368 / SB893, sponsored by Rep. Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville) and Sen. Bo Watson (R-Hixson), requires all administrators and educators to work to teach “scientific subjects” such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” as “scientific controversies“:

The teaching of some scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy . . . The state board of education, public elementary and secondary school governing authorities, directors of schools, school system administrators, and public elementary and secondary school principals and administrators shall endeavor to assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies.

The National Association of Biology Teachers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the Knoxville News Sentinel, the Nashville Tennessean, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association, and all eight Tennessee members of the National Academy of Sciences oppose the legislation.

The bill now goes to Gov. Bill Haslam (R-TN) for his signature.

Also on Monday, a bill to permit the display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings (HB2658) passed the Tennessee House by a vote of 93-9.

Spending Plan Keeps $40 Billion in Tax Breaks for Wealthiest Companies

by Daniel J. Weiss

The latest House Republican budget plan asks low-income and middle-class Americans to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while simultaneously delivering massive tax breaks to the richest 1 percent and preserving huge giveaways to Big Oil. It’s a recipe for repeating the mistakes of the Bush administration, during which middle-class incomes stagnated and only the privileged few enjoyed enormous gains.

Each component of the new House Republican budget threatens the middle class while doing nothing to add jobs or grow our economy. It ends the guarantee of decent insurance for senior citizens, breaking Medicare’s bedrock promise. It slashes investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research, all of which are key drivers of economic growth and mobility. And it cuts taxes for those at the top, asking the middle class to pick up the tab. It’s a budget designed to benefit the top 1 percent at everyone else’s expense.

American families have been plagued by higher oil and gasoline prices over the past several years despite a significant increase in domestic oil production and rigs, and decline in consumption. But while high prices threaten the economy and family budgets, they enrich American oil companies with huge profits. Yet it appears that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposed FY 2013 budget resolution would retain a decade’s worth of oil tax breaks worth $40 billion. And his budget would cut billions of dollars from investments to develop alternative fuels and clean energy technologies that would serve as substitutes for oil and help protect middle-class families from volatile energy prices as well as create jobs. In short, the Ryan budget compounds the cost of high oil and gasoline prices on the middle class.

Americans continue to pay more at the pump with little end in sight. Gasoline prices rose by 53 cents since January 2—a 16 percent increase. Average weekly gasoline purchases this year have been some of the fewest in 11 years, but families still spent $3.7 million more on gasoline the week ending March 9, 2012, than they did the week ending January 2.

These high prices and more spending by drivers for gasoline enrich oil companies. Last year the average gasoline price was $3.58 per gallon—the highest since at least 1976—so it’s little surprise that the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—made a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011. These companies had nearly $60 billion in cash reserves, too. Yet under the Ryan budget it seems that these and other Big Oil and gas companies would continue to benefit from $4 billion in annual tax breaks.

Of course, Big Oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute, their wealthy lobbying organization, trot out a number of specious arguments to keep these tax breaks such as:

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Other stories below: Obama wants southern portion of Keystone XL expedited

Damage to oceans could cost $2tr by 2100

Damage to natural services provided by oceans could cost the world $2tr a year by the end of the century if steps to curtail climate change are not taken, a study by the respected Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) said today.

Researchers warned that without action global temperatures could rise by 4°C by 2100, leading to acidification, reduced oxygen content, stronger tropical storms and sea-level rises, all of which would in turn threaten fish stocks and other marine life.

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