More than 100 Lung Association staff members, volunteers, doctors, nurses and clean air advocates from 34 states across the country unfurled a giant Red Carriage banner on the Capitol steps, drawing attention to the devastating impact of air pollution on the health of children, in addition to sitting in on 150 meetings with key members of Congress. The Lung Association Red Carriage campaign has defended Clean Air Act rules designed to fight greenhouse pollution, smog, and toxic mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants.

The day of action also falls on the same day the House Energy and Power Subcommittee held a hearing on the GOP’s Gasoline Regulations Act of 2012, which would eliminate life-saving clean air protections that reduce toxic pollution in our air and make cars more fuel-efficient.

A recent Lung Association poll found that two-thirds of American voters support stricter EPA standards on pollution.

From the Crossroads GPS website

Crossroads GPS is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) group, affiliated with the American Crossroads super PAC. Karl Rove has been linked to both groups.

The spot begins by noting gas prices “then and now” — going up from the unusually low prices of January 2009 to the higher prices of today. A narrator asks what has made the difference.

The narrator then claims the reasons for higher gas prices are:

– “President Obama’s administration restricted oil production in the Gulf”

– Limited development of American oil shale

– Obama personally lobbied to kill a pipeline bringing oil from Canada

Watch the spot:

Unlike candidate ad spots, television stations are under no obligation to run ads by outside groups, especially when the ads are factually wrong. This one is.

The non-partisan FactCheck.org outright calls the ad’s claims “bogus.”

Some important points to keep in mind:

– U.S. gas prices do not correspond with domestic oil production. Decades of statistics show domestic gas prices correspond with global gas prices.
– The President is not to blame for rising gas prices. Oil companies, whose profits go up an estimated $800 million a year, every time the price of gas goes up a penny, and speculation are the key reasons for the cost increase.
– Gas prices were unusually low in January 2009. Though prices were much higher at other points during the Bush administration, they were artificially low when President Obama took office because the world economy was reeling from the Wall Street meltdown.
– The temporary moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico came because of the BP oil spill. The Obama administration put the moratorium in place to ensure that new safety precautions could be implemented after the worst oil spill on record poured about 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf (millions of barrels that might otherwise have been refined for gasoline).
– The Obama administration has not stymied development of American oil shale. As FactCheck.org notes, “production of petroleum from shale formations is booming. What the administration slowed down were plans for experimental development of ways to produce oil by heating kerogen-rich rocks, something that is years away from becoming commercially feasible.”
– President Obama did not lobby to kill the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. He has supported building part of the pipeline — what has opposed are efforts by Congressional Republicans to deny his administration the time necessary to do a thorough review of the plan. And much of the oil delivered via the proposed pipeline would likely be exported after refinement.

Are the deceitful ads funded by Big Oil? By Keystone XL? Crossroads GPS isn’t telling — they do not publicly disclose their donors. But viewers — and television station executives — would be wise carefully scrutinize this dishonest content, even if they cannot scrutinize the motivation of the people paying for it.

The campaign of President Barack Obama has fired back at GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney following the Republican’s calls for the firing of three Obama administration Cabinet officials — Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson — in charge of overseeing energy issues. When asked for a response to Romney’s call for the President to fire his “gas hike trio,” Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told ABC news:

“As a result of the president’s all-of-the-above energy strategy, domestic oil and gas production has increased each year and our dependence on foreign oil is at a 16-year low.”

“In Massachusetts, Gov. Romney raised the gas tax by 400 percent. Now Mitt Romney rolled out a tax plan that continues to charge taxpayers $4 billion a year to subsidize oil and gas companies making record profits and he opposed raising fuel economy standards, which will save consumers an average of $8,000 per vehicle.”

LaBolt then took to his Twitter, providing a link to an article on tax reform by Greg Mankiw, a Romney adviser Harvard economics professor, who was once the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George W. Bush. In the article, published January 21, 2012, Mankiw advocated a tax on gasoline exceeding $2 a gallon.

LaBolt’s comment is misleading — Romney did not raise the 21-cent state gas tax at all, but did increase a 0.5 cent clean-up tax to 2.5 cents, and then diverted the money to the general budget, BuzzFeed explains:

Romney actually increased the price of gasoline directly himself. In 2003 Romney increased fees on drivers by two cents a gallon to pay for environmental clean ups of leaking underground gas station fuel tanks. The fee increased the clean-up tax on drivers by 400% and hit consumers directly at the pump. The fund, which was originally only half-a-cent, was created in 1992 to aid gas station owners with clean-ups. Two weeks after raising taxes on drivers, Romney eliminated the fund for gas station clean-ups entirely but kept the two cent increase in the tax gas. The money raised by Romney’s tax increase now goes directly into Commonwealth’s coffers for legislators to spend as they please.

The issue of gas taxes has been a proven vulnerabilty for Mitt Romney in the past. When running against Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for the Republican nomination in 2008, Romney’s campaign took a bruising for the gas fee he imposed on the state of Massachusetts:

McCain campaign communications director Jill Hazelbaker responded to a Romney attack on McCain over energy issues by saying, “Mitt Romney has proven in this campaign that he will say anything to anyone at any time if he thinks it will help him politically. … As governor, Mitt Romney effectively raised gas taxes on every single motorist in Massachusetts.”

Governor Romney’s efforts to raise Massachusetts gas taxes — like his support for regulations on coal plants, the Northeast’s cap-and-trade initiative, and green energy — were progressive policies that helped improve the welfare of Massachusetts citizens. The eroding rate of gas taxes in this country has meant that more and more money flows from the 99 percent of drivers to the 1 percent involved with oil companies and Wall Street speculators. Meanwhile, the transportation infrastructure that people depend on is crumbling into disrepair. Burned by a previous attempt to restore the state gas tax from its eroding position, current Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA) is refusing to restore the gas tax enough to preserve critical public transit services for his state.

– Fatima Najiy

As governor of Massachusetts in 2006, Mitt Romney opposed a Republican proposal to suspend the state gas tax during a gasoline price spike, saying “high gasoline prices are probably here to stay.” Romney’s “fit into his broader effort to promote ‘smart growth’ policies in Massachusetts,” Alec MacGillis of the New Republic reports. Romney told the Quincy Patriot Ledger that he opposed increased gasoline consumption:

“I don’t think that now is the time, and I’m not sure there will be the right time, for us to encourage the use of more gasoline. I’m very much in favor of people recognizing that these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay.” [Quincy Patriot Ledger, 5/06]

Now that Romney’s running for the Republican nomination and seeking the support of right-wing oil magnates like the Koch brothers, he’s changed his tune. On Sunday, Romney argued that the “gas hike trio” of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson should “hand in their resignations” — because they and President Obama have pursued policies in line with Romney’s former position:

There’s no question but when he ran for office he said he wanted to see gasoline prices to go up. He said that energy prices would skyrocket under his views. And he selected three people to help him implement that program: the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of the Interior, and the EPA Administrator. This gas hike trio has been doing the job over the last three-and-a-half years and gas prices are up. The right course is, they ought to be fired, because the president has apparently suffered an election-year conversion. He’s now decided that gasoline prices should come down.

Watch it:

It appears Romney’s Etch-a-Sketch runs on oil.

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

This morning the House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing entitled “Harnessing American Resources to Create Jobs and Address Rising Gasoline Prices: Families and Cost-of-Life Impacts.”

Rather than focus on actual solutions to rising gas prices, Republican committee members advocated for more drilling, a policy which would increase big oil profits but does not decrease gas prices.  In his opening remarks, Chairman Doc Hastings’ (R-WA) stated:

In order to address rising gasoline prices, we must do everything we can to increase production here in the U.S. We have the energy resources; we just need the federal government to get out of the way.

Unfortunately, more drilling does not decrease gas prices.  As the Associated Press reported this morning:

It’s the political cure-all for high gas prices: Drill here, drill now. But more U.S. drilling has not changed how deeply the gas pump drills into your wallet, math and history show.

A statistical analysis of 36 years of monthly, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices and U.S. domestic oil production by The Associated Press shows no statistical correlation between how much oil comes out of U.S. wells and the price at the pump.

This is because oil prices are set on the world market, and are “relatively insensitive to what happens here in the United States with regards to production,” as Senator Jeff Bingaman put it recently.

So why are Republicans continuing to advocate for more drilling as a panacea to high gas prices?  Perhaps because 88 percent of all political contributions from oil and gas companies go to Republicans.  The Natural Resources Committee itself takes an astounding amount of campaign money from oil and gas, as seen in this chart that ThinkProgress put together in November 2011.

In addition to promoting more drilling as a solution to high gas prices, witnesses called by the Republicans at today’s hearing went so far as to oppose additional solutions to high gas prices.  Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) asked each majority witness if they would support keeping the oil and refined products from the Keystone XL pipeline in American, and each stated he or she would not support.  This mirrors the voting pattern of Republicans—all but nine in the entire House voted against a similar amendment to keep American oil on American soil in February of this year.

Additionally, the facts show that under the Obama administration, we are drilling more in America than everywhere else in the world combined.  As of March 16^th, there were 1,984 rotary rigs operating in the U.S., while only 1,721 in the rest of the world.  The number of oil drilling rigs in the U.S. hit a record in February, and have quadrupled over the last three years.

Rather than having hearings about real solutions to gas prices, Republicans on this committee insist on perpetuating myths about the role of domestic drilling in decreasing gas prices.  Next week, they are having another hearing on the subject, and it remains to be seen what “solutions” they will address.

Experts deny that drilling brings down gas prices, despite how often Republicans claim to have the “silver bullet.” Now, the Associated Press reports that an analysis of 36 years of Energy Information Administration data shows “no statistical correlation” between domestic oil production and gas prices.

AP writes:

U.S. oil production is back to the same level it was in March 2003, when gas cost $2.10 per gallon when adjusted for inflation. But that’s not what prices are now.

That’s because oil is a global commodity and U.S. production has only a tiny influence on supply. Factors far beyond the control of a nation or a president dictate the price of gasoline.

When you put the inflation-adjusted price of gas on the same chart as U.S. oil production since 1976, the numbers sometimes go in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. If drilling for more oil meant lower prices, the lines on the chart would consistently go in opposite directions. A basic statistical measure of correlation found no link between the two, and outside statistical experts confirmed those calculations.

Domestic oil production is at its highest level in eight years. According to the AP, if drilling dictated gas prices, they should already be at the $2 Republicans promise. However, gas prices fluctuate based on a variety of factors, including speculation and tensions in the Middle East.

These facts haven’t stopped Republicans from rallying around “drill, baby, drill.” President Barack Obama quipped last week on the GOP’s drilling fever: “I guess there’s some empty spots where we’re not drilling. We’re not at the National Mall. We’re not drilling at your house.”