A protester hits Trump's hair with a balloon.

Donald Trump is on a warpath against wind turbines, because they may obstruct the view of his billion-dollar golf resort in Scotland. Protesters greeted Trump today as he asked Scotland to abandon a project to build 11 offshore turbines.

Trump has encountered controversy on his golf resort from the start, since he bulldozed over environmentally sensitive sand dunes.

With his resort due to open in July, Trump has only heightened the attacks. In February, while digging up 1,235 acres for his resort, he said wind farms are “destroying” Scotland. In March, he called windmills “disgusting.”

Now, Trump says they will destroy Scotland’s economy:

“Scotland, if you pursue this policy of these monstrous turbines, Scotland will go broke,” Trump told the group. “They are ugly, they are noisy and they are dangerous. If Scotland does this, Scotland will be in serious trouble and will lose tourism to places like Ireland, and they are laughing at us.” [...]

“When challenged to produce hard evidence about his claims on the negative impact of turbines, Trump said: “I am the evidence, I am a world class expert in tourism.”

Trump knows a lot about going broke. As ABC reported last year, “Donald Trump — or companies that bear his name – have declared bankruptcy four times.”

Trump also said the project “is the most serious problem that Scotland will have or has had.”

That is unlikely, however much the 11 turbines seem like the end of the world to Trump.

Koch Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) — who is deeply indebted to Koch Industries for more than $100,000 in donations — is outspoken against clean energy investment. Recently, he celebrated when the Senate failed to extend the wind energy tax credit in a 49-49 vote. However, he is celebrating the threat to 37,000 jobs in the relatively young industry, when the production tax credit is set to expire at the end of the year.

Even as the oil industry enjoys $4 billion in subsidies a year, Pompeo lamented the cost of the production tax credit, claiming the wind industry would be fine on its own:

“The program has been around an awfully long time and it’s time to let that industry stand on its own two feet. And I’m confident that they’ll do it,” he said. “There’s great, creative engineers and innovators in the alternative energy field, and I’m confident they’ll be successful.”

It now costs the government more than $1 billion a year to hand out 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of wind power — and enough is enough, says Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.).

“We’ve been subsidizing some of these industries with tax credits for multiple decades, and every time they get to the end of the line, they get within a year, they say, ‘If you just give me’ — fill in the blank — ‘one more year, four more years, that’s all I want. Just a little more time,’” said Pompeo, who is leading a charge against the PTC and other energy subsidies.

“What history would demonstrate is they would continue to come back to the federal trough and ask for more time yet again at the end,” he added.

History has shown that the three times the production tax credit expired, wind investments dropped. Meanwhile, Big Oil has benefited from 100 years of consistent tax breaks, even though the industry had a record-high year of $137 billion profits. And Pompeo, who benefits from these profits, has made clean energy his punching bag.

by Bracken Hendricks, Adam James

This past February Fannie Mae initiated a pilot program in six of the hardest-hit metropolitan areas to offer pools of repossessed homes to eligible investors looking to rent them out.

The need for this program sprung out of the two mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—both currently in government conservatorship—collectively owning about 230,000 foreclosed homes, mostly from mortgages they insured or securitized before the housing bubble burst several years ago.

Unfortunately, only a small subset of these foreclosed properties are in good enough shape and in strong enough markets to be sold directly to families looking for a place to call home. For the rest, low home prices and weak demand for owner-occupied homes mean that selling hundreds of thousands of them into that market will depress prices for a long time to come.

This pilot program followed most of the recommendations we made in an earlier paper, where we argued for a process we call “rehab-to-rent.” In this process a portion of these properties are removed from the glutted for-sale market and converted into affordable rental units. Yet the pilot program did not include a consideration of retrofit strategy as a part of the bidding process because those properties were occupied. This issue brief argues that bidders should present a strategy for retrofitting properties where it is cost effective, including labor provisions and proof of capacity to ensure quality of work. Here, we look at the wise economics of retrofitting some of these homes so they are made more energy efficient before being rented out, which would:

• Boost the value of the homes when federal government agencies eventually sell the properties
• Spur hiring in local construction markets in the meantime
• Help renters pay less for energy and more for other goods and services in their communities

How would this work? The Federal Housing Finance Agency, an independent agency that regulates the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could allow the two mortgage finance giants to sell a portion of their large portfolios of foreclosed homes to investors who would partner with them when appropriate to create a pool of energy-efficient rental housing that the federal government could eventually sell alongside their private-sector partners. We argue that the Federal Housing Finance Agency should capitalize on the rehab-to-rent process to promote more energy-efficient housing for renters and boost the long-term value of these properties for U.S. taxpayers.

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In a Rolling Stone interview published today, President Obama broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change. He made some remarkable statements, including his belief that the millions of dollars pouring into the anti-science disinformation campaign will drive climate change into the presidential campaign.

Earlier this year the President omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address. And he (or the White House communications team) edited it out of his Earth Day proclamation.

But in this interview, Obama was actually the first to bring up climate change, noting it was one of many big issues he’s had to deal with and then slamming the GOP for moving so far to the right on the issue.

The big news was that the President expects climate change to be a campaign issue:

Part of the challenge over these past three years has been that people’s number-one priority is finding a job and paying the mortgage and dealing with high gas prices. In that environment, it’s been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science. I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way. That there’s a way to do it that is entirely compatible with strong economic growth and job creation – that taking steps, for example, to retrofit buildings all across America with existing technologies will reduce our power usage by 15 or 20 percent. That’s an achievable goal, and we should be getting started now.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Yes, Romney etch-a-sketched himself to the far right on this issue in late October:

My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.

But I doubt Romney will want to talk about climate change since that statement is a major flip-flop aimed at the Tea Party extremists who now help decide GOP primaries. Also Romney’s team presumably knows what team Obama doesn’t: Every poll makes clear that in the general election, climate change, clean energy, and cutting pollution are some of the defining wedge issues of our time (see Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent and links below).

The media also seems unlikely to bring up the issue given that they have generally ignored it as a topic for debate questions, and regular news coverage of it has collapsed.

That means if it is going to be a campaign issue, the President and his team would have to introduce it and be willing to press the case, something they have shown no inclination to do so far.

The President made two other very interesting statement on climate. First, in response to a question on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, he basically said that the reason the issue flared up is because of his inability to achieve “sufficient movement to deal with the problem”:

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by Catherine Woodiwiss

This week, students from four Christian colleges went to the White House for a briefing with officials from the EPA and the Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. Their message: Climate change and clean air is a driver of their votes.

“We want to tell the White House that creation care is a swing vote for many Evangelicals,” said Chelsea Watkins, a young coordinator of the demonstration from Houston, TX.

At the gathering, students joined young environmental advocates, NGOs, and faith leaders in unveiling a giant quilted topographic map of the United States, sewn together from recycled clothes donated from around the country. Many also donned shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Green the Golden Rule.”

“You can’t remove the topsoil or destroy the watershed and love your neighbor. It doesn’t compute,” said Tyler Amy, coordinator of Renewal, a youth-minded sustainability-focused group that brought students together for the day of advocacy.

“If [Congress] is not listening to the EPA, maybe they’ll listen to us,” said Amy. “That’s the beauty of our democracy. Young people can make a difference.”

Officials agreed. “We all care about stewardship,” said Drew Elons, Director of Outreach and Public Relations for the EPA. “Destructive environmental practices cause massive public health concerns, and health affects education and the economy – for many of us, these things translate into moral issues.”

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The Strip, by Brian McFadden, from the NY Times [click to enlarge]

Photo: Josh Lopez

by Daniel J. Weiss

On April 13, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first carbon dioxide pollution limits for new coal fired power plants. This action launched a sixty day public comment period for the public to let EPA know that it supported the proposal.

Just ten days later, on April 24^th, a broad coalition of clean air, labor and other progressive organizations delivered over 700,000 comments in favor of the proposal to EPA.

The groups delivered the comments to EPA Deputy Administrator Robert Perciasepe:

“Setting strong limits on carbon pollution is not only critical to public health and the environment, but will also diminish the impacts of climate change and has broad public support as evidenced by numerous polls and the massive total of more than 735,000 comments submitted thus far in support of strong limits on carbon pollution.”

The comments expressed support for limits on carbon dioxide pollution from new and existing power plants.

These organizations, including the Center for American Progress Action Fund, plan to deliver “an even larger number of public comments before the close of the 60-day public comment period, June 12, 2012.”

Big electricity and coal companies are spending millions of dollars against these public health safeguards. It is critical that EPA continue to hear from Americans that they support reducing carbon pollution from power plants.

Please submit a public comment to the EPA in support of strong carbon pollution rules, urging further action to clean up our air and thanking them for their proposed safeguards. Take action here for clean air.

Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post additional links below.

Governments are falling badly behind on low-carbon energy, putting carbon reduction targets out of reach and pushing the world to the brink of catastrophic climate change, the world’s leading independent energy authority will warn on Wednesday. “The world’s energy system is being pushed to breaking point,” Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, writes in today’s Guardian. “Our addiction to fossil fuels grows stronger each year. Many clean energy technologies are available but they are not being deployed quickly enough to avert potentially disastrous consequences.” [Guardian]

Van der Hoeven said: “The current state of affairs is unacceptable precisely because we have a responsibility and a golden opportunity to act. Energy-related CO2 emissions are at historic highs, and under current policies, we estimate that energy use and CO2 emissions would increase by a third by 2020, and almost double by 2050. This would be likely to send global temperatures at least 6C [11F] higher within this century.”

See also IEA: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy”

Speaking during an automotive conference in Detroit on Tuesday, Jeff Immelt — whose company is a key supplier to automakers producing electric cars — said GE is “committed to long-term development” of alternative-fuel vehicles. The executive shrugged off the perception that electric cars are just novelties and said the industry needs to find solutions to cost and infrastructure challenges. [Reuters]

In February 2007, in his very first presidential campaign visit to New Hampshire, Mitt Romney toured a solar power plant. Unsurprisingly for a politician in such a location, he found some nice things to say about renewable energy. [Salon]

More than 127 million Americans — about 41 percent of the country — still suffer from pollution levels that can make breathing dangerous, according to a new report. [Huffington Post]

Clergy belonging to a group called Interfaith Moral Action on Climate are urging Congress to enact legislation to combat global warming. [Associated Press]

Maine regulators on Tuesday put three utilities on the path to distribute electricity harnessed from tides at the nation’s eastern tip, a key milestone in a bid to turn the natural rise and fall of ocean levels into power. [Washington Post]

At 11:10 a.m. on the dot, a squad of fresh-faced environmental activists bearing ominous black balloons sashayed into Apple’s flagship store on Union Square. [Los Angeles Times]

India is considering establishing a strategic energy fund to finance purchases of overseas assets to help secure raw materials such as coal and crude oil, three government officials said. [Wall Street Journal]

Remaining mangroves in Vietnam face the threat of being razed entirely to make way for a golf course as part of local economic development plans – part of a global development trend that has seen the clearance of as much as 50% of the world’s mangroves over the past half a century. [Guardian]