The political battle over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline has died down a bit since its peak last fall. But the pipeline is still a major campaign issue — and supporters of the project continue to put forward grossly inflated jobs numbers that were corrected long ago.

According to two separate reports from the U.S. State Department and Cornell University, constructing Keystone XL would only create around 6,000 jobs. TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, has also backed up those analyses by saying that there would be no more than 6,000 jobs on “any given day.” By comparison, oil and gas jobs increased by 75,000 from 2009 to 2011 under the Obama Administration — 69,000 more than would be created by Keystone XL.

But supporters continue to push the Keystone XL figures upward, with some politicians and pundits falsely claiming the pipeline would create one million jobs. (To see how absurd the claims have gotten, check out this video compilation called “To Infinity And Beyond” from Media Matters).

These wildly inflated numbers have been debunked by independent analysts, the State Department, and TransCanada itself. But they are still sneaking by prominent members of the press who should be catching them. That’s what happened this past Sunday on Meet the Press, when Romney surrogate Carly Fiorina’s false jobs number went unchallenged by host David Gregory:

MS. CARLY FIORINA:  Yes, but let’s talk about a very specific difference.  I actually find this critique that Romney hasn’t put forward any specifics wrong.  Whether it’s the Wall Street Journal or someone else and example, President Obama talks about an all of the above energy strategy and then stands in the way of the pipeline.

GREGORY: The Keystone Pipeline.

MS. FIORINA:  The Keystone Pipeline.  Romney talks about an all of the above energy policy and lays out crisp specifics.  And one of those is to approve immediately the Keystone Pipeline.  Most people estimate that would produce over a million jobs right there. Is twelve million a big number?  Yes.  Is it a reasonable and achievable number? If the tax code is dramatically simplified and every rate is lowered, certainly, if the pipeline is approved, certainly, if states are given more control over their energy policy, certainly.

And there you have it: Fiorina explained that a huge portion of Romney’s plan for 12 million jobs is based on construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — a project that would only bring around 6,000 jobs. The numbers don’t come close to adding up. But policymakers and pundits who make these bogus claims keep getting a free pass.

Politicians on both sides catch flak for inflating jobs numbers. In 2008, Obama set a goal of getting one million jobs from renewable energy and energy efficiency. That figure was based upon a having a national renewable energy standard and a strong carbon pricing mechanism in place. But when Congress failed to pass either of those policies, the jobs numbers fell short of the original target. Even though the stimulus supported tens of thousands of jobs in clean energy and doubled production of renewable electricity, Obama is still getting hammered by opponents who are using green jobs as a political weapon.

Saying you’re going to create one million jobs when you’re only going to produce about 6,000 is in an entirely different realm, however. So the campaign better watch out: Romney may the political price if his supporters keep throwing these ridiculously inflated numbers around.

Will journalists catch them in the act?

NOTE: On the question of journalists calling out campaign lies, be sure to catch Dave Roberts’ excellent post at Grist, “As Romney and Ryan lie with abandon, how should journalists navigate post-truth politics?”

by Joe Smyth, via The Witness blog

Oil is washing up along the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Isaac, confirming concerns that the storm could churn up oil in the Gulf of Mexico. A Greenpeace research team took samples from beaches along the Alabama coast on September 2, including from an area with hundreds of tar balls in the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge.

Hundreds of tar balls on the beach at Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge, Alabama on September 2, 2012

According to the US Coast Guard, oiled pelicans and other wildlife have been found in Louisiana marshes as well. As people struggle with flooding, wind damage, and power outages in the wake of the hurricane, officials have expressed concerns that on top of that disaster, Hurricane Isaac may stir up oil from the BP spill:

“This is another disaster on top of the hurricane that we’re going to have to deal with,” Garret Graves, chairman of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, told The Huffington Post. “The threat is not insignificant.”

Up to 1 million barrels of oil are estimated to remain in the Gulf of Mexico. That oil remains, Graves said, because BP has failed to clean it all up in the more than two years since the tragedy. “That’s four to five times the oil that was spilled with the Exxon Valdez,” he added.

One of the tar balls on the beach at Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge

Meanwhile, officials in Washington DC are calling on federal agencies to provide an update on their oil spill cleanup efforts in the wake of Hurricane Isaac:

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wants two federal agencies to explain how they will address lingering oil contamination from the 2010 explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Markey told the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in letters sent Friday that Hurricane Isaac makes the Gulf of Mexico cleanup effort imperative.

– Joe Smyth is a media officer with Greenpeace USA. This piece was originally published at Greenpeace’s The Witness blog and was reprinted with permission.

by Justin Guay, Ashish Fernandes, and Chaitanya Kumar

A $33 billion “Coal-Gate” scandal is rocking the Indian government. This “mother of all scams” created a windfall for private developers who secured public resources at rock bottom prices.

As a beleaguered Prime Minister Singh takes to defending this egregious allocation of public resources, it’s important to recognize that Coal-Gate isn’t just happening in India. It’s happening everywhere, including the U.S., and it must be stopped.

For those who care about the health and well-being of our children, the low-point of the Republican convention was surely this line by Romney — and the response it got from the audience:

President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans — [bites lip and pauses for audience laughter(!)] — and to heal the planet. MY promise is to help you and your family.

This is both a shameful and shameless attack. It’s shameful because global warming is the gravest preventable threat to our children’s health and well-being — and because Romney said it in Tampa, which is among the U.S. cities most threatened by global warming and sea level rise.

If the country fails to act quickly, South Florida alone will have to spend “hundreds of billions of dollars” dealing with rising seas, according to the author of a recent study on the subject. Chris Hayes on MSNBC rightly said the audience laughter at the whole notion of fighting sea level rise will some day “be in documentaries as a moment of just ‘what-were-they-thinking’ madness.”

I suppose Romney believes that rising seas lifts all yachts.

The quip was shameless because just minutes earlier, Romney said “when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.” Setting aside this sweeping insult of all the great national leaders a President Romney would have to deal with, how precisely can he mock Obama for wanting to do really big stuff after he has just praised Americans for that very quality!

To its credit, team Obama — which has been treating climate change like the Voldemort of national issues (“The Threat-That-Must-Not-Be-Named”) – put out an email Saturday:

It is nothing short of terrifying to imagine a party that openly mocks climate change taking back the White House.

Those who were hoping that a President Romney might Etch-A-Sketch his way back to climate sanity should note that not only did Romney revel in this mockery on Thursday in Tampa —  he repeated the line on Saturday in Ohio (at 12:00 in this C-SPAN video)!

Yes, the man who might be the next president of the United States thinks mocking climate action is a winning slogan.

Again, one can certainly criticize Obama for not doing enough to keep this important promise, but not for making it in the first place.

Two more points. The latest Democratic national platform, being approved today in Charlotte, also calls Republicans out for their denial of this grave, grave threat:

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While the increase extreme weather has boosted Americans’ attention to climate issues, it still hasn’t spurred much alarm or concrete political action. Last week, after the underwhelming reaction to record melting of Arctic sea ice, George Monbiot of the Guardian labeled it as “the day the world went mad.”

Well, what if your local weatherwoman went mad sane and told it like it is? The mock video below shows how that might play out:

by Rob Hogg, Iowa State Senator

In case you missed it last week, Mitt Romney said in his nomination acceptance speech that “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

And then the crowd erupted in laughter and cheers.

There is something wrong when, in 2012, a major party candidate for President uses global warming and the environment as a quip – especially when much of the State of Louisiana is still under water from Hurricane Isaac, which brought huge storm surges and record rain falls that were literally pulling parts of the Gulf Coast back into the ocean.

It is surreal. It ignores the reality of what is happening. But it does provide an opportunity to explain better why rising seas and the planet’s declining health hurt us and our families.

If you are concerned about yourself and your family, you ought to be concerned about fossil fuels, climate change, and the sustainability of the planet. Here’s why:

Jobs and our Economy – The single most important reason that our economy remains sluggish is high gas prices and the high cost of imported oil. We import the same amount of oil into this country as we did in 1997 – but it now costs us nearly $300 billion a year more, a five-fold increase.

That is nearly $1,000 more per American each year. If we had that money here, rather than sending it out of the country, we could employ almost 5 million people with jobs that pay wages and benefits worth $60,000 per year.

Increasing our dependence on expensive oil, domestic or foreign, will not help our economy. The most expensive oil in the world, both economically and environmentally, is offshore oil and oil extracted from the tar sands of Canada.

By contrast, energy conservation, energy efficiency, fuel efficiency, and clean renewable energy like wind power are already creating jobs, saving consumers money, and growing prosperity right here in Iowa.

Health Care Costs – One of the causes of increasing health care costs is pollution from coal and other fossil fuels – a cost of more than $175 billion a year from coal alone according to research led by Paul Epstein of the Harvard Medical School. That figure is more than $560 per American every year.

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by Daphne Wysham, via Other Words

Now that the hottest summer on record is drawing to a close, are we any closer to admitting that climate change is upon us? If not, why not?

It might have something to do with the five stages of grief. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified these stages as denial, then anger, followed by bargaining, depression, and acceptance. With record drought killing our cattle and our corn, West Nile virus sweeping the country, and Arctic ice sheets melting away, it’s no surprise that millions of people are responding to these frightening signs of environmental decline in stages.

Nobel Laureate Steve W. Running first proposed this frame for understanding the popular response to climate change in 2007. I’d like to go one step further and suggest a sixth stage: The Work.

Denial, the first stage of grief, can be quite comfortable. The U.S. media is in many ways co-dependent with the denialist camp. It rarely connects the dots between extreme weather events and climate change, making it easy to remain blissfully ignorant. Our politicians are also prolonging this denial stage by rarely uttering the term “climate change,” as though the words themselves were obscene.

The second stage — anger — sums up the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. These talk show hosts are at their most vitriolic when they attack climate scientists or advocates of fossil fuel alternatives. Their ferocity gives license to the crazies who issue death threats against climate scientists: they would rather shoot the messenger than listen to the message.

The next stage, bargaining, comes when the deniers begin to acknowledge that global temperatures are indeed rising, but claim it’s due to natural causes. Or they take a stance like ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s — admitting climate change is a major, man-made problem, but claiming that the answer is to “adapt” to it instead of changing our behavior.

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Warming global temperatures and melting polar ice caps have helped a trio of explorers go where few men have gone before. [Los Angeles Times]

The crew, which also includes Edvin Buregren, a Swede, and Nicolas Peissel, a Canadian, set out on the quest to bring awareness to the changing climate that has radically reshaped the planet’s North Pole.

“Our approach to sail across a historical stretch of water that has traditionally been frozen is meant to be a clear visual example of the extent of declining polar ice,” the group said in a statement.

The Democrats’ official platform expected to be approved at the party’s national convention on Tuesday calls for an international deal to limit greenhouse gas emissions. [The Hill]

If you look on a much grander scale, the disparity of record highs in the U.S. vs. record lows has grown wider every decade since the 1970s. [Climate Central]

It could take a week to wrestle the fire churning through the Angeles National Forest into submission, authorities said Monday as the blaze grew to 3,600 acres and injured four people, including at least two of the 500-plus firefighters who had swarmed into the hills above Azusa. [Los Angeles Times]

International pledges to reduce greenhouse gases may fail to stop global warming from rising to twice the level deemed safe by United Nations scientists, Climate Action Tracker said. [Businessweek]

Vilas Dinkar Mukane lives halfway around the world from the corn farmers of Iowa, but the Indian sharecropper is at risk of losing his livelihood for the same reason: not enough rain. [New York Times]

The last decade saw the end of cheap oil, the magic growth ingredient for the global economy after the second world war. This summer’s increase in maize, wheat and soya bean prices – the third spike in the past five years – suggests the era of cheap food is also over. [Guardian]

The drought is an ill portent for the snack food world. All across the Midwest, where rows of popcorn normally thrive alongside fields of soybeans, U.S. popcorn farmers have watched in horror as stifling, triple-digit temperatures and weeks without rain withered crops. [Reuters]

Israel has developed some of the world’s most advanced solar energy equipment and enjoys a nearly endless supply of sunshine, but when it comes to deploying large-scale solar technology at home, the country remains in the dark ages. [Daily Herald]