Our guest blogger is Ed Dolan, an economist and author of TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch), a book that outlines the libertarian case for a cleaner environment.

I am usually a big fan of Joe Nocera, whether he is skewering Wall Street crooks or exposing the high-handed behavior of the NCAA, but he is all wrong about the Keystone XL pipeline. He claims that Obama, in his “centrist heart of hearts,” also favors KXL. If so, the President is wrong, too.

The first problem is that Nocera, like other pipeline proponents, frames the decision on KXL in isolation. Doing so leads to the following seductive line of reasoning: The United States needs a lot of oil now and for the foreseeable future. If we don’t get the oil from Canada, we will get it from other sources, like Venezuelan oil sands or Nigeria’s polluted delta, that are just as dirty. Therefore, we might as well buy our oil from our friends to the North.

But who says we have to use so much oil? Other countries do not. The United States has the highest oil consumption of any one of the advanced economies that make up the OECD. Why? Primarily because we have the lowest energy taxes and the cheapest oil prices. Low oil prices feed into an endless list of decisions we make. How far from work will we live? Is it worth buying an electric car, even with subsidies, when gas is so cheap? If we build a high-speed rail line, will enough people ride it when it costs so little to drive?

In case you think prices don’t matter, take a look at this chart, courtesy of Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. The United States is the little diamond in the extreme upper-left-hand corner: Lowest oil prices, highest oil consumption.

Once the question is reframed — not as “KXL yes or no,” but as “what kind of an energy policy should we have” — the pipeline starts to look a lot less attractive. If we get the country on a downward trajectory of energy use, we can start to pick and choose which fuels to take. We don’t have to use the dirtiest ones just because they are the closest to hand.
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BP’s 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill is still affecting the lives of many Americans, particularly the tens of thousands that have not settled lawsuits with the company. Yet the company has bounced back from the billions it lost in the wake of the spill. BP announced today that its 2011 profit totaled $26 billion, a 114 percent jump from the year before, when the company’s “failure of supervision and accountability” caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history. As the company prepares for its upcoming civil trial, let’s take a look at how BP has made out after the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

BP earned $3 million every hour in 2011. Its fourth-quarter profits reached $7.69 billion, which is up 38 percent from 2010.

The company is sitting on another $14 billion in cash.

The company continues to scale back its production in the wake of the spill, producing 10 percent less than 2010 levels.

BP contributions to federal candidates totaled more than $98,000 in 2011, with more than half (65 percent) to Republican candidates.

BP spent $8 million lobbying Congress in 2011, down from the record $15 million the company lobbied in 2009 – one year before the oil disaster.

For every dollar the big five oil companies use in lobbying, they effectively receive $30 in subsidies. This could mean BP potentially gained up to $243 million in subsidies, although the exact amount for an individual company is undisclosed.

In the third quarter, BP’s Bob Dudley announced the company had reached a “definite turning point” of boosted profits. However, nearly two years following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP has still only paid $7.8 billion of the $20 billion fund they created to compensate individuals and businesses for losses incurred by the spill.

In order to pay the $40 billion cleanup costs and additional penalties, the company has committed to selling $38 billion worth of assets before 2014.

Despite being found “ultimately responsible” for the most devastating oil spill this nation has ever seen, BP has spent millions lobbying on bills that would speed offshore drilling and leases. This includes filing a total 24 reports on bills undermining safety regulation in the Gulf of Mexico, H.R. 1231 “Reversing President Obama’s Offshore Moratorium Act” and H.R. 1229 “Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act.” At the time, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar accused House Republicans of having “amnesia” about the oil spill. No doubt the total $137 billion profits in 2011 for the five big oil companies had something to do with it.

Coal, oil, and gas companies have contributed at least $1.2 million to Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a ThinkProgress Green analysis reveals.

The super PAC Restore Our Future has fundraised $30 million to Romney to the White House. The super PAC spent $800,000 on pro-Romney ads, but it has flooded his Republican opponents with attack ads totaling 17 million. Restore Our Future’s war chest comes from under 200 donors, 85 percent of whom had already donated the maximum amount to the Romney campaign.

Romney’s campaign has raised at least $500,000 from the oil and gas industry, according to Open Secrets. But his super PAC allows special interests another chance to exert their influence. While many of the super PAC’s donors come from the financial sector, coal, oil, and gas have also flocked to Restore Our Future:

Coal mining:
– Oxbow Carbon:$750,000

– Oxbow President Bill Koch: $250,000

– Consol Energy: $150,000

Oil and Gas:
– Ballard Exploration: $25,000

– Bassoe Offshore President Jonathan Fairbanks: $25,000

– Murphy Wade of Murphy Oil Corporation: $15,000

– Joseph Grigg of American Energy Operations: $5,000

– Total for oil, gas, and coal: $1,220,000

In total, coal, oil, and gas companies contributed at least $1.2 million to Restore Our Future’s $18 million haul in the last half of 2011. The coal company Oxbow Carbon, alone, contributed $1 million, including a $250,000 donation from billionaire Oxbow CEO Bill Koch — the brother of oil billionaires Charles and David of Koch Industries.

With Perry out of the race, Romney has received more money from mining and oil than any other presidential candidate. The pro-Perry super PAC “Make Us Great Again” took in an outstanding $1.3 million from oil companies and executives during the last six months of his run.

Although Restore Our Future has no “formal” ties to the candidate, the donations reflect Romney’s right pivot on energy and climate concerns. The Massachusetts governor that once supported regulations on coal pollution, has since questioned whether carbon is even dangerous. In addition to becoming a climate denier, he now blasts government support for cleaner energy — despite creating a state green fund as governor.

You can expect Romney to sound suspiciously like his rich polluting backers, as dirty money continues to flood Restore Our Future and Romney’s campaign stash.

“Spoil,” a 45-minute documentary by the International League of Conservation Photographers, highlights the potential environmental and social disaster that could result from the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, through the eyes of some of the world’s top nature photographers. That pipeline would go from Alberta’s tar sands, over the Canadian Rockies, and through a fragile rainforest ecosystem in British Columbia to feed the energy-hungry Asian markets. The entire documentary is free to watch online:

Although Keystone XL advocates like to portray the flowing of tar sands crude to China as inevitable, the dangerous Northern Gateway pipeline is just as controversial.

A major report on the prospect of offshore drilling in the Arctic by the Center for American Progress concludes that the oil industry is not prepared to prevent disaster to this remote and fragile region. The Obama administration’s offshore drilling oversight agency, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, has approved Royal Dutch Shell’s plan to begin exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea beginning in the summer of 2012, pending approval by other agencies.

In “Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling: America’s Inability to Respond to an Oil Spill in the Arctic,” the authors, Kiley Kroh, Michael Conathan, and Emma Huvos, investigate the prospect of drilling in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth, and find the preparations by the oil and gas industry, federal agencies, and Congress are inadequate, overstretched, and untested:

This report outlines the specific shortcomings in both Shell’s response plans and the private- and public-sector response capabilities to a devastating oil spill in the Arctic region of the United States. Failing to meet the targets laid out here will expose the residents and natural resources of one of the last unspoiled places on the planet to an unacceptable level of risk. Until the oil and gas industry and its federal partners can demonstrate with certainty that they can identify and respond to a true worst-case scenario incident, the Arctic should remain off-limits to exploration and drilling.

In one telling example of dangerous shortcuts in the rush to drilling, Shell’s spill response plan describes a “worst-case scenario” of a spill happening in the relatively warm month of August, although it submitted plans to drill into the drastically harsher month of October.

The report also contrasts the very limited infrastructure for oil spill response in Alaska to the robust infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico (which was still unable to prevent serious harm from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster).

In October, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrator Jane Lubchenco told ThinkProgress Green that the implications of accelerating climate change by drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic has “huge implications for the global system.” Although NOAA is the nation’s top oceanographic agency, its scientists play only a minor, advisory role in the government’s approval of offshore drilling, which is run by the Interior Department. NOAA plays a larger role in cleaning up after oil spills.

Below is the summary of CAP’s recommendations for what needs to happen before offshore Arctic drilling should proceed: Read more