Paul Singer

A conservative political advocacy group attacking Obama for supposedly raising gas prices received a “seven-figure check” from a leading Wall Street oil speculator.

While conservative organizations — and even Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal – agree that presidents have no control over gas prices, excessive oil speculation has been blamed by economists for 15% of the increase in the price of crude oil over the last decade.

Crossroads GPS, a political organization run by strategist Karl Rove, has spent $1.7 million on a new national ad campaign blaming President Obama for making gasoline cost “too much.” But the organization has in the past received substantial funding from Paul Singer, manager of a hedge fund responsible for some of the highest volume of oil trading in the country.

Former ThinkProgress blogger Lee Fang at the Republic Report reported on the link:

I received a leaked document from the CFTC — the regulatory body that is set up to monitor commodity speculation — revealing the one day oil trading information from 2008. This list of speculators … shows that Elliott Management is among the top financial firms with the highest volume of trades in the country, up there with Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. Currently, most oil speculation is conducted on private exchanges and through investment banks, so the public left in the dark about who is trading the world’s oil supply. The document shows Singer’s firm with bets on over 50 million barrels of oil that particular day.

A blockbuster Wall Street Journal story in 2006 revealed that Singer’s firm was among several hedge funds that paid lobbyists to gain political intelligence on an asbestos bill working its way through Congress — with the hope of using inside information to profit off of asbestos-related companies. But what makes Singer interesting in the context of this latest attack ad is how his business interests conflict with the message about Obama causing high gas prices.

As a Super PAC, details of Crossroads’ donors is confidential. But Peter Stone of the Center for Public Integrity was able to get an inside look at leading GOP political operations in 2010, reporting that Singer had written a check to Crossroads for more than a million dollars to fund attack ads.

The New York Times recently profiled top GOP funders, calling Singer “among the most-sought-after Republican donors in the country.” He has also funded campaigns to tear down the 99% movement.

With the support of wealthy donors like Singer, conservative groups have undertaken an aggressive campaign to undermine Obama’s energy policies, claiming that he has limited oil production and driven up the price of gasoline.

However, oil production is at its highest level since 2003.

And multiple analyses, including the most recent from the Associated Press, show zero correlation between increased domestic drilling and the price of gasoline over the last 30 years:

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.

“Is President Obama responsible for spiraling price of gasoline? Republicans say yes, but the facts say no,” wrote Cato scholars in a recent analysis.

So what’s driving up prices? Global supply and demand is one.

Another factor experts are warning about is excessive speculation. Today, brokers betting on the price of oil — firms like Singer’s Elliot Management —  represent about 70% of all crude purchases.

Michael Greenberger, a former regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), recently called excessive speculation “a fancy word for saying that gamblers wearing Wall Street suits have taken these markets over.”

Bart Chilton, a current commissioner with the CFTC, said he believes Wall Street speculators are adding several hundred dollars to the gasoline budget of Americans each year.

Not only are the ads claiming Obama is driving up the price of gasoline completely false, they’re potentially being funded by people who actually do have a role to play in increasing prices at the pump.

With some of the best data on natural systems available, NASA has all the right tools to create stunning pieces of educational art — helping us better visualize how earth and the universe function.

The agency is always good for mind-blowing images and video, and the latest set of visualizations is one of my favorite yet. Animators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center recently released a couple animations of ocean surface currents that illustrate how heat patterns and carbon flow through the sea.

With the oceans now a net sink of carbon dioxide — a complete reversal of the carbon cycle in 200 years — researchers around the world are focusing on how that change will impact the marine environment.

ECCO model-data syntheses are being used to quantify the ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle, to understand the recent evolution of the polar oceans, to monitor time-evolving heat, water, and chemical exchanges within and between different components of the Earth system, and for many other science applications.

The video below illustrates sea surface current flows and temperature data. It does not model how CO2 moves through the deep ocean, which researchers are still trying to get a handle on.

Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm issued a forceful plea to House Speaker John Boehner yesterday: If you’re serious about creating and preserving jobs, support extension of the federal production tax credit (PTC) for wind.

In a wonderfully articulate editorial on her Current TV show, The War Room, Granholm urged Boehner to set aside ideology, extend the PTC, and provide consistency for businesses investing in this economically-valuable sector:

Mr. Speaker, of course you are right: We do need to create more jobs. So guess what — this is your lucky day. There’s one sector of the American economy that is losing jobs as we speak — and you can put a stop to it.

The PTC has supported hundreds of large-scale wind projects around the country, helping drop installed costs 90% in the last few decades, attract a broad array of manufacturers, and create 75,000 jobs. In fact, the wind industry supports 7,500 direct and indirect jobs in Boehner’s home state of Ohio, according to the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

Unlike permanent tax credits for oil and gas, the PTC expires every couple of years — setting up a “boom-bust” cycle in the industry and threatening private investment.

Leading companies are already cancelling manufacturing plants and preparing to lay off workers. The wind industry says it could shed as many as 37,000 jobs if the credit expires at the end of this year.

Even with the support of more than 350 companies, a bi-partisan coalition of the nation’s governors, and local conservative politicians around the country, Congress has failed to extend this vital tax credit. Meanwhile, they’ve voted to preserve $24 billion in tax credits for the highly-mature oil and gas industries.

The wind industry has been pushing on this issue intensely. However, in trying to stay as non-partisan as possible, it has failed to hold Congressional leaders accountable. If more influential people like Granholm actually stand up and fight for the PTC, the political equation could still shift. Who’s going to step up next?

Watch Granholm’s entire editorial here:

Two years after state hit by warming-enhanced 1000-year deluge, bill to ‘teach the controversy’ on evolution and global warming becomes law

On Tuesday, Tennessee adopted a law “to prevent school administrators from reining in teachers who expound on alternative hypotheses” to the scientific theories of evolution and climate change.

The National Center for Science Education has said of the primary alternative to evolution — creationism — that “students who accept this material as scientifically valid are unlikely to succeed in science courses at the college level.”

I suppose this is some form of natural selection, then, as Tennessee encourages the disinforming of its kids in two of the most important areas they will need to thrive in the 21st century — thrive economically in a world of  global competitors who don’t teach anti-science disinformation to their kids and, of course, thrive literally in a world where a livable climate is being destroyed by man-made global warming and a man-made disinformation campaign to delay action.

Ironically, the bill was enacted two years after one of the epic extreme weather events in U.S. recorded history devastated one of America’s great cities (see “The Tennessee deluge of 2010: Nashville’s ‘Katrina’ and the dawn of the superflood“).

The status quo media barely told the story of Nashville’s Katrina (let alone its link to human-caused climate change), so you may not remember this superstorm unless you are a regular Climate Progress reader. But this one was way off the charts.

NOAA’s National Weather Service reported the jaw-dropping factoids in its report, “May 1 & 2 2010 Epic Flood Event for Western and Middle Tennessee“:

• Fifteen (15) observation sites had rainfall measurements exceeding the maximum observed rainfall associated with Hurricane Katrina landfall.
• The two day rainfall of 13.57 inches at Nashville International Airport shattered the monthly rainfall record for May which was 11.04 inches.
• The heaviest rainfall occurred in a swath across Davidson, Williamson, Dickson, Hickman, Benton, Perry, and Humphreys Counties.  An average of 14 to 15 inches of rain fell equivalent to 420 billion gallons of water in just two days.

The NWS put together this “stunning map of Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge“:

What is a 100 year flood?  A 100 year flood is an event that statistically has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. A 500 year flood has a .2% chance of occurring and a 1000 year flood has a .1% chance of occurring. 

The map below relates to amount of rainfall that fell to the chances of that amount of rain actually occurring.

I had never seen a map like that before, but then that may be because there simply aren’t many events to rival this one.  Look at the red streak, which is the area hit by a greater than 1000-year deluge.  And look at how much of western Tennessee was slammed with a greater than 500 year downpour.  This is the biblical “high water” of Hell and High Water — but it is science that tells us humans are contributing to the superstorms by pumping billions of tons of heat trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year

It was an off-the-charts extreme weather event that human-caused global warming set the table for and almost certainly made more intense, as Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explained to me the very next month:

I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.

Not that kids in Tennessee will ever hear any of this. But then why should they. It’s not like there’s anything they might be taught that would suggest this will happen before another 1,000 years, is there?

Renewable Energy Standards Deliver Affordable, Clean Power; Right-Wing Attacks Are Misguided

by Richard W. Caperton

New Jersey, Texas, and California have very different energy profiles. They use different types of energy to power their economy. They have different types of utility systems. And they have different expectations of their energy system.

But these states share one important trait: They’re reaping the benefits of renewable energy. New Jerseyans are first-hand witnesses of how solar power creates new businesses and new jobs. Texans can thank wind power for keeping the lights on during extreme weather that struck the state in early 2011. And Californians are using renewable energy to meet their state’s new greenhouse gas pollution reduction standards.

Twenty-six other states also have renewable energy standards, which require a certain amount of the electricity sold within a state to come from renewable energy. These policies lead to cleaner air, economic development, and a more resilient electrical grid.

Despite these facts, though, renewable energy standards have come under attack. A small but vocal group of right-wing activists and fossil-fuel advocates claim that these policies are raising electricity prices for consumers, which in turn is holding back state economies. As conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist wrote in a recent Politico op-ed:

Renewable energy standards, by design, are intended to drive up energy costs—requiring utilities to use more expensive and often less reliable sources of energy. Not surprisingly, such laws have hit ratepayers hard. States that have a binding [renewable energy standard] now have electricity costs that are 39 percent higher than states that don’t have a binding [standard].

And Robert Bryce of the conservative Manhattan Institute adds:

There is growing evidence that the costs may be too high—that the price tag for purchasing renewable energy, and for building new transmission lines to deliver it, may not only outweigh any environmental benefits but may also be detrimental to the economy, costing jobs rather than adding them.

Fortunately for consumers in the 29 states with renewable energy standards, these critics are wrong. There are no data showing that these standards cause electricity rates to skyrocket.

This issue brief will describe the history of renewable energy standards, explain how electricity rates are determined, and present evidence showing that these standards have not caused electricity prices to rise. This information sets the stage for moving forward in two critical ways: strengthening state-level renewable energy standards so consumers can see even greater benefits from renewable energy, and passing a similar policy at the federal level.

Read more

The March heat wave finally caught the attention of major television news outlets. In recent weeks, ABC and NBC have run stories linking the “unprecedented” heat wave to climate change. They join PBS, which has been the only network consistently drawing the connection between extreme weather and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The Weather Channel has also picked up on the story, featuring a number of stories about the influence of human activity on extreme weather. One of the best segments featured meteorologist Stu Ostro, who explained why “data and science, not politics” changed him from a skeptic to someone very concerned about the problem.

Add a new piece from the Weather Channel to the mix of growing coverage. This piece features the “steroids in baseball” analogy that journalists are starting to pick up on — proving the value of a concise, easy-to-understand metaphor.

by Kendaleth C. VanLue

There are growing indications that Wall Street speculators are driving up the price of crude and Americans are paying for their profits at the pump.

“Americans overpaid $10 billion dollars for gas at the pump in the last month alone,” said Gene Guilford, president of the Independent Connecticut Petroleum Association, speaking at a Democratic Steering and Policy Committee hearing  held on April 4. Guilford estimated that speculation is adding roughly 75 cents per gallon of gas.

The high price of gas is not simply due to supply and demand mechanisms, but instead perceived supply and demand. Currently, a majority of oil trades are made by Wall Street speculators rather than commercial end users of oil. There is increasing evidence that these traders are having a powerful influence on the price of petroleum.

Here are some notable indicators:

• “The benchmark U.S. oil price fell Wednesday to $101.47 in New York, its lowest level since mid-February, but still well above where analysts believe it should be with supplies up and demand down.”
• The CEO of Exxon Mobil said in May 2011 that the price of a barrel of oil “should be in the $60 to $70 a barrel range.”
• “Historically, financial speculators accounted for about 30 percent of oil trading in commodity markets, while producers and end users made up about 70 percent. Today it’s almost the reverse.”
• The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reports financial speculators have accounted for about 15-20 percent of the increase in price for crude oil in the last decade.
• Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Bart Chilton recently cited numerous independent studies indicating excessive Wall Street speculation is driving up the price of gas.

So what to do about it?

Read more

Our morning round-up of the latest in climate and clean energy. More links welcome.

The shadow of inexpensive natural gas hovered over the annual meeting of the Iowa Wind Energy Association in Des Moines on Tuesday. U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Ia., warned the association that “a war is being waged against renewable energy,” saying that “the oil and gas industry has enormous influence, and there is an increasingly competitive environment on energy legislation in Washington, D.C.” [DesMoines Register]

According to several leading climate scientists and public health researchers, global warming will lead to higher incidence and more intense versions of disease. The direct or indirect effects of global warming might intensify the prevalence of tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, dengue and Lyme disease, they said, but the threat of increased health risks is likely to further motivate the public to combat global warming. [Yale Daily News]

Plummeting natural-gas prices are pushing U.S. industries into virgin terrain, even beginning to dislodge cheap Western coal from its once-untouchable perch as the nation’s favorite fuel for power production. [Wall Street Journal]

A conservative political action committee is going up with a new television commercial — backed by a $1.7 million ad buy — slamming President Obama’s energy policies. [The Hill]

As horizontal drilling and the controversial extraction technique known as fracking have made domestically produced natural gas more available and sharply cheaper, that gas has been widely embraced by industry, electric utilities and trucking fleets. [New York Times]

A new lab, where technology for the next generation of ground vehicles for the U.S. military will be developed and tested, officially opens today in Warren, as the Obama administration and its Defense Department unveil new programs to promote fuel savings and alternative energy. [Detroit Free Press]

Conservative activists on Tuesday urged Gov. Rick Scott to veto an energy bill pushed by a fellow top Republican, saying the measure violates free market principles by providing tax incentives to solar, wind and biofuel companies. [Palm Beach Post News]

One of the scariest possibilities is that major ocean currents could abruptly stop entirely, plunging areas like Western Europe into an abrupt deep-freeze. It’s happened before, tens of thousands of years ago, and while climate experts doubt that it will happen again anytime soon, they haven’t had especially powerful evidence to back their optimism. But now they do, thanks to a new paper just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Climate Central]

A European Union law that charges airlines for carbon emissions is “a deal-breaker” for global climate change talks, India’s environment minister said, hardening her stance on a scheme that has drawn fierce opposition from non-EU governments. [Reuters]

A team of researchers will begin flights over Bering Sea ice to answer a basic question about four of the region’s most important species: How many ice-dependent seals are out there? [Associated Press]