The House of Representatives added to its historic tally of anti-environment votes with a 245 to 161 vote on Friday approving the GOP’s “No More Solyndras Act” — a messaging bill that hampers Department of Energy loan guarantees to clean energy projects.

Under GOP leadership, the House has voted 302 times against the environment since 2011, according to the latest report from House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats. More than one hundred of these votes have favored profits in the oil and gas industry. Since June, the House has added 55 votes and counting to this list, amounting to more than one vote for every day it has been in session.

Here is a breakdown of some of Republicans’ votes against clean energy and in favor of oil:

– 133 votes targeting the Environmental Protection Agency
– 54 target the Department of Energy
– 128 block measures preventing pollution
– 55 to defund or repeal clean energy initaitives
– 47 votes to promote offshore drilling

The latest vote today had little to do with Solyndra, and even less to do with smart investments in clean energy. After spending $1 million of taxpayer money, holding 12 hearings, and 300,000 pages of documents, House Republicans have found “no evidence” of wrongdoing. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) has admitted the ploy is political, and would likely stop on election day.

As the House’s anti-environment record grows, oil, gas and coal’s political spending has reached record levels. In addition to the $153 million in TV ads from fossil fuel groups this election, oil, gas and coal have contributed 88 percent of its $45 million to Republican candidates. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the coal mining and oil and gas industries have contributed 89-90 percent of their $12.6 million donations to House Republicans.

Check out the full database of anti-environmental votes here.

Groups promoting fossil fuels have spent more than four times more money on television ads than clean energy proponents, independent Democratic groups, and the Obama campaign combined this election season, according to a new analysis from the New York Times.

The analysis found that pro-fossil fuel groups have already spent $153 million on TV advertisements either pushing coal, oil and natural gas or attacking renewable energy during the presidential campaign. By comparison, groups supporting renewable energy have spent $41 million on ads.

The trend became clear early in the year, when Bloomberg reported that 81 percent of attack ads in April were focused on energy. Many of these ads, run by groups like the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, were labeled “ridiculous” by fact checkers.

The latest tally shows just how dramatically messaging around energy issues has changed since the last presidential election cycle. The Times explains how this shift has impacted the messaging strategy of prominent groups working on climate and energy issues:

The lopsided nature of the energy messages this year contrasts sharply with 2008. Back then, global warming was a top public concern, and green ads greatly outnumbered those for fossil fuels, $152 million to $109 million, according to the analysis by The Times, which looked at 184 energy-related ads. In 2008, Chevron, one of the nation’s leading oil companies, trumpeted its investments in geothermal power, and Mr. McCain spent millions of dollars on ads featuring solar panels and wind farms as part of a solution to global warming.

The Times analysis shows that ads with energy themes have played an outsized role in the 2012 campaign season, with energy earning more frequent mentions than every other issue except jobs and the economy.

Energy first emerged as a major advertising topic during the last presidential election. Back then, one of the biggest spenders was the Alliance for Climate Protection, an environmental group backed by former Vice President Al Gore that spent an estimated $32 million on ads urging legislation to combat global warming.

This year, the alliance, now called the Climate Reality Project, is not buying television ads at all, focusing instead on social media, training and organizing. “Whatever we would spend, it would just be washed away in this sea of fossil fuel money,” said Maggie L. Fox, the group’s chief executive.

The Times offers a striking visual of far campaign ad spending on clean energy issues has dropped:

After the Citizens United Supreme Court case unleashed a tsunami of new money in politics, campaign spending from outside interest groups has increased 1,100 percent since the 2008 election. Last month, we took a closer look at the spending patterns of a variety of groups, many of which are focused on energy issues:

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by Ted Genoways, via OnEarth Magazine

I met Bob Bullard in his icebox of a corner office at Texas Southern University, where he is the dean of the School of Public Affairs. Outside of his building, in Houston’s predominantly African American Third Ward, kitchen workers on lunch breaks clustered under trees in search of relief from the red-hot sun. Bullard’s window overlooked a bank of solar panels that kept the building’s air conditioners churning; just beyond, a formidable security fence ringed the campus.

Such incongruities are not lost on Bullard: they’re his stock-in-trade. In recent years, Newsweek named him one of 13 Environmental Leaders of the Century and Grist dubbed him the “father of environmental justice” — the movement that seeks to make sure environmental laws and regulations are being enforced free of any racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic discrimination.

Yet Bullard always insists that he was “drafted” into the environmental movement. In 1978 his wife, the attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, asked him to do some research for a lawsuit she was filing on behalf of Northwood Manor, a largely African American community in Houston protesting the siting of a landfill in its midst. The lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., was a legal landmark.

When your wife approached you about doing research for her lawsuit, you were a young sociologist — a recent Ph.D. — with little experience and even fewer resources.

She said, “Bob, I need someone who can work with census data and find out where the solid-waste facilities are located.” I had 10 graduate students in my research master’s class here at TSU. There was no methodology or design for doing this kind of work back then — no computerized databases, no GIS mapping. We had base maps, and census tract maps, and block maps in books that were eight inches thick. We had colored Magic Markers and map pins that we’d stick in the wall.

We found that from the 1930s all the way up to 1978, the city of Houston had placed nearly 100 percent of landfills, and six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators, in black communities. We could lay out the streets and then overlay and color-code who lived where by income and race. Northwood Manor was a residential area; 85 percent of the people owned their homes. There was no reason to put a garbage dump there, except that it was a black community.

There were several schools within a two-mile radius of that landfill, one within 1,400 feet. On the major street, Little York, there was no sidewalk. When the schools let out, you could see the big trucks rolling up and down the streets and the kids walking. To me, that was why this landfill should not have been located where it was located. It was an assault. It was an insult.

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This election season, Michigan may turn out to be one of the most important states for renewable energy in the U.S.

In November, voters will have the chance to vote on a constitutional amendment that will increase Michigan’s renewable electricity targets from 10 percent by 2015 to 25 percent by 2025.

Now, a new poll finds that a majority of Michiganders support increasing renewable energy in the state. According to a survey of likely voters conducted by a variety of news outlets in the state, 55 percent would vote “yes” for more clean energy.

Adam Browning, Executive Director of the Vote Solar Initiative, explains the significance of the Michigan ballot initiative:

A good win here can have a civilizing effect on the national dialogue. Over the past year, renewable energy has been politicized to an extent never before seen. In Michigan, renewables have bi-partisan support.  Saul Anuzis, former chair of the Michigan GOP, wrote an extraordinary letter of support, making the conservative case for the cause (it’s a must-read). A good showing will help demonstrate that polarization is bad politics.

Finally, success begets success, and this can help pave the way for wins elsewhere. Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans want to see a transition to renewable energy. Indeed, a good clean energy ballot initiative has never lost — voters in Colorado, Washington, and Missiouri all passed state renewable standards, despite being outspent by opponents. When the people lead, politicians will eventually follow.

A number of groups, including Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, have vowed to weaken or repeal state-level renewable energy targets.

However, this is inconsistent with what people actually want. According to a poll from the nonpartisan Civil Society Institute, 76 percent of Americans say they support “a reduction in our reliance on nuclear power, natural gas and coal, and instead, launch a national initiative to boost renewable energy and energy efficiency.”

In addition, 77 percent of Americans agree with this statement: “The energy industry’s extensive and well-financed public relations, campaign contributions and lobbying machine is a major barrier to moving beyond business as usual when it comes to America’s energy policy.”

by Mary Anne Hitt, via the Sierra Club

“Hey buddy!”

Like so many others, I always got this warm greeting from Larry Gibson, followed by a big hug. Like so many others, I saw mountaintop removal coal mining with my own eyes for the first time on Larry’s mountain in southern West Virginia, Kayford Mountain, and I’ve been fighting to end the devastation ever since. Like so many others, I then took countless more people up to Kayford with me: reporters, national environmental leaders, film crews, students and many, many others. And to every person he took up Kayford Mountain, Larry would say that if he or she didn’t do everything they could to end mountaintop removal after coming down from that mountain, then they had wasted his time.

Like so many others, I just cannot believe that Larry Gibson has died.

If you’ve ever seen a photo or video footage of mountaintop removal, you’ve likely seen Kayford Mountain. Because it was one of the few places you could reliably see mountaintop removal from the ground, everybody – and I mean everybody – went to Kayford. And Larry was always there to greet them and give them a tour, walking you up to the edge of a gaping wound in the earth that would shake you to your core and never let you go.

I’ll never forget one of my later trips to Kayford, when a mining company pickup suddenly veered off the mine site and climbed an impossibly steep pile of rubble to park a foot away from our group and tell us that we needed to leave, for our own safety. Larry was cool and calm – he didn’t pick a fight, but he didn’t rush us away either. The mining representative’s concern for Larry’s well-being seemed laughable given that Larry’s family property was surrounded by mountaintop removal on three sides. And this garden-variety intimidation certainly wouldn’t faze Larry – it was nothing compared to what he had been subjected to over the years, including having his home shot at and ransacked, his truck run off the road (including once with a Washington Post reporter on board), and his dog shot and killed.

In spite of it all, Larry never backed down. Larry’s courage made him special, but it wasn’t just that.

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The severe drought across much of the U.S. proved stubborn once again during the past week as nearly four-fifths of the country was in some form of drought. And the area of the lower 48 states affected by moderate to exceptional drought expanded slightly, hitting a high for the year, according to data released Thursday morning. [Climate Central]

… moderate to exceptional drought covered a new high of 64.16 percent of the lower 48 states as of September 11….

… just 21.47 percent of the lower 48 states was drought free, which is down from 56.53 percent at the same time in 2011.

The drought is the worst to strike the U.S. since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s and lengthy droughts of the 1950s. It came on suddenly and largely without warning, and although the main trigger was most likely a La Niña event in the tropical Pacific Ocean, the drought was exacerbated by extremely hot temperatures during the spring and summer. July, for example, was the hottest month on record in the U.S., and the summer was the third-hottest on record, narrowly losing out to 2011 and 1936. Climate studies have shown that the odds of severe heat waves are increasing due to manmade climate change.

Former Democratic governor Timothy M. Kaine appears in a chopper, hovering over the Virginia Hybrid Energy Coal plant, in a new ad touting what he calls his “comprehensive energy strategy.” [Washington Post]

A proposal to require Michigan to get 25% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025 has the support of 55% of likely voters, according to a poll for the Free Press, WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) and various news media outlets. [Detroit Free Press]

California and parts of the Bay Area are expecting the current West Nile virus season to be the worst in at least five years, with almost twice as many cases of the viral infection in humans so far compared with last year. [San Francisco Chronicle]

The U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday declared a national fishery disaster in New England, opening the door for tens of millions of dollars in relief funds for struggling fishermen and their ports. [Associated Press]

Energy officials in Maine say a tidal power project is delivering electricity to the U.S. power grid for the first time. [Washington Post]

Semprius Inc., a U.S. solar-panel maker, will open its first manufacturing plant this month in Henderson, North Carolina, countering the trend of solar factories shutting their doors. [Bloomberg]

Exxon Mobil Corp. has reported inadvertent emissions of large amounts of pollutants at its flagship refinery near Houston. [Associated Press]

The row within the UK government over energy policy has been reignited ahead of the party conference season, with the former Tory environment secretary Lord Deben taking on George Osborne over the controversial role of gas. [Guardian]

We all know spinach is a wonder food, but now scientists think it can not only boost your health, but also the efficiency of your solar panels. [Business Green]