Billionaire energy investor T. Boone Pickens has a bone to pick with the country’s leading pollutocrats.

Pickens said in an interview Wednesday with Yahoo’s Daily Ticker that Koch Industries, the company owned by Charles and David Koch, is the major stumbling block to a coherent U.S. energy policy:

“The biggest deterrent to an energy plan in America is Koch Industries,” the BP Capital founder tells Yahoo’s Aaron Task. “They do not want an energy plan for America because they have the cheapest natural gas price they’ve ever had, and they’re in the fertilizer business and they’re in the chemical business. So their margins are huge. And they do not want you to have an energy plan, because if you had a plan, then natural gas prices would come up.”

Watch it:

Back in October, a German state minister explained that the country could decarbonize with renewables because “We Don’t Have the … Koch Brothers.” He was referring to the Kochs’ lobbying for dirty fuels and against clean energy, and its spending on climate science disinformation, which exceeds that of ExxonMobil. As Business Insider explains:

The second-largest private company in the United States, Koch Industries has spent at least $5 million in lobbying in each of the past four years, and given at least $1,000,000 in seven of the last eight election cycles, according to data from OpenSecrets.

In 2008, the company spent nearly $18 million on lobbying for oil and gas interests alone, according to Open Secrets. They’ve already spent $2.3 million on oil and gas lobbying in 2012.

Pickens was referring to the Koch brothers’ Americans For Prosperity front group, which has been bashing Pickens’ beloved NAT GAS Act (HR 1380) to promote natural-gas vehicles (NGVs). Since the AFP campaign began, 14 House Republicans have withdrawn support for the legislation. Of course, we now know that NGVs are bad for the climate (see “Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere Absent A Carbon Price AND Strong Standards To Reduce Methane Leakage“). As EDF chief Fred Krupp put it, “I’m here to tell you today that every truck we switch to natural gas damages the atmosphere.”

Still, who can argue with Pickens’ central point? The men from Koch — and the groups, politicians, and  disinformation they fund — are now the Sith Lords of climate and clean energy inaction in the country.

False balance is alive and well even at the so-called liberal media, the PBS NewsHour.

The story in question, which aired Monday, is “Teachers Endure Balancing Act Over Climate Change Curriculum.”  Unfortunately, PBS treats the subject as if they were a teacher straitjacketed by some absurd state law forcing them to maximize confusion:

• PBS doesn’t actually interview a single climate scientist for the story.
• They quote Mitt Romney’s anti-scientific etch-a-sketch moment on climate — “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 and reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.”
• And they still give “equal time” to the Heartland Institute, a fringe right-wing think tank funded by the pollutocrat Koch brothers, that pushes long-debunked climate myths and indeed is planning an effort to dupe children into believing that climate change is a hoax.

The disinformers are helping to ruin our children’s future and have no place in a story on climate education.

Watch it:

I am not going to print the Heartland’s myths, especially after running Romney’s. All successful disinformation is the same, at the end, cleverly crafted myths and lies designed to sound plausible and stick in your memory.

PBS itself follows the Heartland falsehoods by saying, “These are views challenged by scientific evidence.”

Seriously PBS? Would you give air time to someone who says the Earth is flat or cigarettes don’t cause cancer and simply follow those falsehoods by ”These are views challenged by scientific evidence.” Would PBS go so far as to give air time to an even more extreme kind of disinformer, a Holocaust denier? Where do they draw the line?

Let’s remember that several climate scientists who “had their emails stolen [in 2009], posted online and grossly misrepresented,” slammed Heartland for “spreading misinformation” and “personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals.” The scientists specifically noted:

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The dramatic boom in shale gas and shale oil production is increasing flaring of waste gas at drilling operations, a practice that emits large amounts of carbon dioxide pollution. According to a World Bank official, gas flaring bumped up by 4.1% in 2011 — roughly totaling the gas demand from Denmark.

The increase in carbon-intensive flaring comes after a period of decline globally since 2006. The World Bank estimates that world-wide flaring spews yearly emissions equal to the carbon output of France. Reuters broke the news about the upward trend:

The increase is mostly due to the rise in shale oil exploration in North Dakota, propelling the United States into the top 10 gas flaring countries along with Russia, Nigeria and Iraq.

The preliminary data – which will be released in detail later in May – shows that global gas flaring crept up to around 140 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2011, up from 134 bcm the previous year.

If this waste were to take place within the European Union’s carbon emissions trading scheme, the flaring would cost some 2.5 billion euros ($3.30 billion) at current market value of 7 euros per metric ton of CO2.

And, of course, the actual damage to health and well-being from CO2 is well over 10 times that. The only reason CO2 prices are so low are that Europe is in recession and there is a global deal to reduce emissions to levels that would not destroy the wood will climate.

The amount of gas being flared in North Dakota alone is stunning. According to a recent New York Times piece, shale oil producers in the state burn 100 million cubic feet of natural gas daily — “enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day.”

This is adding to an already significant problem. According to estimates from GE, gas flaring makes up about 2% of total global carbon emissions.

Last spring, GE issued a report saying that halting gas flaring “has the potential to be one of the great energy and environmental success stories, and it has the potential to be achieved within the next five years.” The company recommends better financial incentives and global agreements to give oil companies a reason to capture the gas and it more efficiently.

In early April, a group of investors worth $500 billion in assets sent a letter to the largest shale oil producers, saying they “are concerned that excessive flaring, because of its impact on air quality and climate change, poses significant risks for the companies involved, and for the industry at large, ultimately threatening the industry’s license to operate.”

If we’re going to tell this story — and it’s the most important story of our time — we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.

by Bill McKibben, via TomDispatch

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline.  Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical — the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure — and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it.  There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day.  If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

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Who would have thought that clean energy would become the source of such scorn for Mitt Romney, a candidate who called transitioning away from fossil fuels “a must” in 2007?

The Romney campaign released a new campaign ad this morning attacking clean energy jobs. Just like every other ad on the issue this election cycle, this one cherry-picks a few stories and claims that efforts to create jobs in this sector have failed.

As numerous reports have shown, the claims in this ad are completely absurd: The Brookings Institution found that the stimulus helped the clean energy sector grow 8.3 percent during the height of the recession; a report from the Department of Energy showed that the 1603 Treasury Grant Program supported 75,000 jobs and $25 billion gross economic activity; and a recent analysis from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the clean economy now employs 3.1 million people — with growth in the last few years happening in every geographic region of the U.S.

And in a masterful piece of spin, the campaign ad actually insinuates that Obama is responsible for 10,000 job losses in the wind industry. Ask anyone in the wind industry and they’ll tell you those jobs have been shed because of Congress’ inability to pass the production tax credit and give businesses in the sector certainty — threatening an additional 37,000 jobs today. In fact, it was the stimulus package that helped the wind industry maintain 85,000 jobs during the height of the recession in 2009.

But here’s the real kicker: There are actually 64,000 renewable energy and energy efficiency jobs currently in Romney’s home state of Massachusetts. Because of strong state and federal policies (which Romney once supported), employment in Massachusetts’ clean energy sector grew 6.7 percent between 2010 and 2011 — crushing the 1% growth rate in the rest of the economy.

Check out the documentary film below to see what’s happening today in Romney’s home state. In just one short election cycle, the candidate has Etch-a-Sketched himself squarely against clean energy — even as the industry gains traction.

by Jason Tanz, via OnEarth Magazine

Perhaps you recall Milo Minderbinder, the ambitious World War II mess hall officer from Catch-22. An avatar of capitalist ambition, Minderbinder expands his modest operation into a full-fledged multinational corporation.

It starts innocently enough — Minderbinder starts buying eggs from Sicily, then arranges a series of increasingly ludicrous deals to turn a profit. The absurd logic of untrammeled capitalism soon drives him to outrageous action, including accepting money from the Germans to bomb his own platoon. He justifies his behavior by pointing out that, as everyone in the troop is an investor — “everybody has a share,” as his catchphrase has it — they are in fact profiting from their own demise.

In Steve Coll’s new book Private Empire, a history of ExxonMobil in the years since the March 24, 1989, Valdez spill in Alaska, CEO Lee Raymond doesn’t quite reach Minderbinderian levels of amorality, but he gets mighty close. His company pays the torture-happy Singaporean military to protect its oil fields from rebel forces. He hires a team of scientists to browbeat researchers attempting to assess the damage from Valdez. He publicly dismisses the very notion of climate change, even as his company explores how global warming might offer new opportunities for oil exploration and profit. “Don’t believe for a minute that ExxonMobil doesn’t think climate change is real,” Coll quotes a manager as saying.

Coll conducted hundreds of interviews to compile this exhaustive — sometimes exhausting — history of one of the world’s most secretive companies. In piercing Exxon’s crude-black veil, Coll is doing more than describing the inner operations of a successful multinational. He is investigating an organization that, in size and influence, may as well be its own nation with its own sovereign interests — a “corporate state within the American state,” as Coll puts it. In capturing the mind-boggling scope of Exxon’s activity, Coll also offers crash courses in the finer points of oil exploration, the bizarre and brutal history of Equatorial Guinea, the rise of piracy in Nigeria, the eco-guerilla movement, resource management in post-Soviet Russia, the finer points of campaign-finance law, the apportionment of oil field contracts in post-war Iraq, and the battle for Acehnese independence. (NB: This is a much-abridged list.)

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by John Griffith and Richard Caperton

The U.S. government is arguably the largest and most influential financial institution in the world, with about $2.7 trillion outstanding in loans and loan guarantees. Among other things, these federal credit programs help college students afford tuition, first-time homebuyers access affordable mortgages, and budding small businesses get the capital they need to expand.

In these and many other cases, the private sector will simply not lend to certain borrowers or will lend only under unaffordable or unmanageable conditions. That’s why we rely on federal credit programs: The U.S. government can bear certain risks that the private sector cannot to achieve certain public goals such as increasing the global competitiveness of our workforce, returning stability to the U.S. housing market, and adding jobs through business expansion.

These programs typically run at very low cost to taxpayers. On average, every $1 allocated to loan and guarantee programs generates more than $99 of economic activity from individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and state and local governments, according to our analysis.

But in the wake of certain widely publicized credit blunders, most notably this past summer’s bankruptcy announcement from solar company Solyndra LLC, some have called into question Washington’s ability to manage financial risk. Conservative critics contend that the government is incapable of accurately pricing risk, and that political pressure encourages government agencies to routinely underestimate the risk to taxpayers when extending credit.

Government underpricing of risk is a convenient theory for free-market ideologues but it runs contrary to the overwhelming evidence.

Our review of federal government credit programs back to 1992 shows that on average the government is quite accurate in its risk pricing. In fact, the majority of government credit programs cost less than originally estimated, not more. Specifically, we found that:

• Based on initial estimates over the past 20 years, the government expected its credit programs to cost taxpayers 79 cents for every $100 loaned or guaranteed. Based on recently updated data, those cost predictions were reasonably accurate but slightly underestimated. The current budgetary impact of these programs is about 94 cents per $100 loaned or guaranteed.
• There’s little evidence that credit programs are biased toward underpricing risk. In fact, a little more than half of all nonemergency federal credit programs will cost the government less than what they are expected to over the life of the program.
• The remainder is accounted for by the losses suffered by the Federal Housing Administration on loans made in 2008 during the peak of the housing crisis. Excluding that book of loans, all nonemergency federal credit programs cost slightly less than expected.

Conservative critics often portray a world in which government bureaucrats haphazardly issue loans and loan guarantees without considering taxpayer exposure to risk. That’s simply not the case. This issue brief explains how the government prices credit risk in the federal budget, how well those cost estimates have reflected reality over the years, and why the government is in a particularly good position to assume certain types of risk.

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Felipe Calderón stands in front of a wind farm in Mexico.

by Jeffrey Cavanagh

Since Mexico’s legislative body passed sweeping climate change legislation on April 19, Mexico joins the UK as the only two countries in the world with legally binding emissions goals to combat climate change.

The new law will reduce the country’s carbon emissions, end fossil fuel subsidies, and establish a voluntary carbon trading market. This law builds on Mexico’s previous commitments to action on climate change, and reflects on the country’s green leadership on the international stage it prepares to host the upcoming G20 leaders’ summit in June.

Adrián Fernández, a consultant for the Latin American Initiative and former President of the National Ecology Institute, recently discussed the importance of Mexico’s new climate change law during a briefing 2012 by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington DC:

[Mexico] now has a framework that allows governments at national and local levels to set aside budgets with clear earmarks towards climate change, and to create new investments for climate mitigation and adaptation … pushing [Mexico] into the spotlight and, under international scrutiny, [Mexico] will be held accountable to its people and the international community.

After several years of debate and revision, the bill passed Mexico’s lower house on April 12, with a vote of 128 for and 10 against. Mexico’s Senate unanimously passed the legislation on April 19, and President Felipe Calderon, who has championed immediate action to stop global warming, is expected to sign the bill into law soon.

As President Calderon prepares to host the next G20 summit in June, his administration will make climate change and sustainable development “priorities” during the meeting under a broad Green Growth theme. With 75 percent of the world’s GDP, the G20 is responsible for 75 percent of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Bringing together finance ministers from these countries is essential for putting sustainability at the core of economic recovery and for figuring out how to mobilize significant resources for international climate finance.

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

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted. [ProPublica]

Scientific models are failing to accurately predict the impact of global warming on plants, says a new report. [BBC]

Tariffs enforce WTO rules and protect U.S. solar manufacturers, but could also drive up solar costs or touch off a U.S.-China trade war. Center for American Progress China energy and policy analyst Melanie Hart and Grape Solar founder Ocean Yuan debated the wisdom of tariffs at the GTM solar summit. [Greentech Media]

If the mainstream media won’t connect the dots, then it’s up to the rest of us to try. This Saturday, 350.org’s global network of volunteers, activists, and organizations are hosting over 1,000 events in more than 100 countries to “connect the dots” between extreme weather and climate change. [Huffington Post]

South Korea’s Parliament approved Wednesday a long-delayed bill to start trading carbon-dioxide emissions in 2015, paving the way for Korea to become one of the first Asian countries to implement a nationwide cap-and-trade system. [Wall Street Journal]

A new paper in the prestigious science journal Nature assesses one of the big questions in ecology today: How do species extinctions rack up compared to other global change issues like global warming, ozone holes, acid rain, and nutrient pollution (overfertilization)? [Mother Jones]

Another long, stupefyingly hot summer is looming for Japan just as it shuts down its last operating nuclear power reactor, worsening a squeeze on electricity and adding urgency to calls for a green energy revolution. [Washington Post]