In what will likely prove as meaningless a vote as the 37th repeal vote of Obamacare, on Wednesday night 241 members of the House of Representatives voted to approve the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. H.R. 3 would give Congress the power to approve the pipeline and allow TransCanada to build the northern leg without a cross-border permit.

These legislators support the oil industry’s push for the pipeline, even though it would create far fewer jobs than its supporters claim, would do nothing to make the country more energy independent, and would facilitate a dramatic increase in the production of high carbon polluting tar sands oil.

The 241 members who voted for the bill have taken a collective $39,150,812 in career contributions from the oil and gas industry, compared to $5,094,217 for those who voted no. Even more starkly, in the last election cycle, that split widens to $11,529,335 versus $742,125.

Only 19 Democrats voted for the bill, less than a third of the number (69) who supported a similar bill in April 2012. Even some supporters of the pipeline couldn’t vote for tonight’s bill, such as Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV):

“Last Congress, I voted for every piece of pro-Keystone pipeline legislation that was brought before this body…. Something’s happened along the way between then and now. And that something is called a hijacking of this bill by the right wing.”

This is the eighth time Republicans pushed a bill promoting Keystone, and the fifth time it voted to speed up the approval process. A White House statement made clear that President Obama would veto the bill because it “conflicts with long-standing Executive branch procedures.”

While some conservatives may claim the pipeline would create tens of thousands of jobs, the most recent State Department draft environmental impact statement found that the pipeline would directly create only “3,900″ temporary construction jobs. After construction is complete, the operation of the pipeline would only support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts.” Moreover, only 10 percent of the total workforce would be hired locally. For perspective, the U.S. had 3.4 million green energy jobs in 2011 and it was the fastest-growing industry in the country.

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Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the new chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, wrote an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post that contains several misrepresentations of fact. He argued for increased fossil fuel production, against the scientific consensus that humans cause climate change, and for a “wait-and-see” approach to cutting carbon emissions.

Two years ago, the Washington Post’s Editorial Page Editor wrote that “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.” Apparently it is a delusion the Post is happy to spread. Below is a fact check of the seven worst parts of Smith’s piece:

Integrity of Climate Science

Smith opened with a general appeal for a clear discussion of the facts: “Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate evaluation of policy options.”

However, with a look at his record, Rep. Smith did not have such a clear discussion in mind. After he became chair of the science committee, his first move was to schedule a hearing that aimed to take issue with the science of climate change. He has criticized “the idea of human-made global warming.” More dangerously, he has made headlines for authoring legislation that would politicize research conducted by the National Science Foundation. Of course, there is strong, 97%-grade consensus on human-caused climate change in the scientific literature, as a recent study confirmed.

Keystone Claims

With the House set to vote on Wednesday to force the approval of the Keystone tar sands pipeline, Rep. Smith argued that opposition to the Keystone tar sands pipeline hurts the economy and would not decrease carbon emissions. He said the “State Department has found that the pipeline will have minimal impact on the surrounding environment and no significant effect on the climate,” and would create “more than 40,000 U.S. jobs.”

This just isn’t true. The Environmental Protection Agency submitted a public comment on the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project’s carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Additionally, tar sands oil extraction is not inevitable because transporting it by rail is not feasible — the pipeline is really their only option. Smith’s claims about 40,000 jobs are also quite inflated. The project would create just 35 permanent jobs, along with 51 coal plants’ worth of carbon dioxide each year.

U.S. Emissions

Smith went on to argue “that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas.”

In fact, annual U.S. carbon emissions rank just behind China’s, despite having only a quarter of China’s population. The U.S. is by far the world’s biggest contributor to global concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, since that depends on cumulative emissions.

Despite advances in energy efficiency and renewable energy, the United States remains a significant part of overall global carbon emissions. Domestic coal use is on the rise again in the U.S., and coal exports reached a record high last year, beating the record set in 1981. America is also the world’s number one fossil fuel subsidizer.

Recent Warming

Rep. Smith made the case that “global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is simply not the case. The overall trend line shows continued warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record. Every year of the decades of the 2000′s was warmer than the average temperature in the ’90s.

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The Keystone XL Pipeline has been catapulted back in the spotlight of the House of Representatives this week, with Republicans continuing to waste taxpayer dollars rehashing who has the power to approve the project. Meanwhile, the State Department will be hosting a public hearing in Nebraska today to give residents a chance to comment on the pipeline that will disrupt their local communities.

Earlier this week, both the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power and the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the Northern Route Approval Act (H.R.3), which would usurp the State Department’s right to decide on Keystone and allow TransCanada Corp. to build the northern leg without a cross-border permit. Republicans in both hearings regurgitated typical Big Oil talking points, claiming Keystone would create thousands of jobs for American workers while providing a boost in U.S. energy security.

During his opening statement on Tuesday’s Subcommittee hearing, Representative Ed Whitfield (R-KY) said:

At this point we are all familiar with the benefits of this project that would bring more Canadian oil to Midwestern and Gulf Coast refineries. The estimated 20,000 direct and 100,000 indirect jobs alone would likely make it a more successful jobs program than any project in the $800 billion dollar stimulus package or any other job creating effort the president currently has in the works.

In reality, Keystone would create 3,900 temporary jobs and only 35 permanent, while providing “negligible socioeconomic impacts,” according to a report by the State Department. While Republicans may try to blame the administration for the less than ideal jobs numbers, the report was actually written by a private consulting firm with links to the pipeline’s owner, TransCanada Corp., as well as Exxon Mobil, BP and the Koch brothers.

Multiple other GOP members made reference to the supposed boost in national security the pipeline will supply, but the State Department’s report made clear that at least some of the Keystone oil will be refined and then exported in response “to lower domestic gasoline demand and continued higher demand and prices in overseas markets.” This means Keystone adds nothing to U.S. energy security and that the pipeline is a way for the industry to get access to steeper oil prices in foreign markets.

Once again, analysis has discovered that Big Oil has paid to secure their yea votes on Keystone, with members of the Energy and Commerce Committee who voted to approve H.R.3 having received eight times more in career contributions from the oil and gas industries. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, members voting to approve the pipeline received $8,686,427 while members voting against received only $1,020,631.

Nebraskans will have a chance to express how they feel about Big Oil buying votes today, with a public hearing held by the State Department beginning at 12pm in Grand Island, Nebraska. The All Risk, No Reward Coalition and other environmental groups have released ads reminding Nebraskans that oil will spill frequently as it is pumped through the U.S. on its way to be exported out of the country.

Tiffany Germain is a Senior Climate/Energy Researcher in the Think Progress War Room.

Republican members of the House Natural Resources Committee will do their level best at a hearing today to perpetuate a host of myths about the pace and efficiency of oil and gas development on federal lands compared to state and private lands. And as in the past, their level best won’t be on the level.

Today’s hearing, “State Lands vs. Federal Lands Oil and Gas Production: What State Regulators Are Doing Right,” is the latest attempt to show that the Obama administration, through regulations, bureaucratic obstacles, and an ideological hostility to the oil and gas industry, has thwarted traditional energy development on 700 million acres of federal and tribal lands and those private lands where it controls the mineral rights.

Those criticisms fly in the face of the facts:

• Oil production from federal lands and waters in every one of the last four years was higher than it was in 2008, according to an analysis of Energy Information Administration data by the Congressional Research Service.
• The oil and gas industry itself has cut back on its requests to drill on public lands, from an average of 6.6 million acres in 2006 to 2008 to 4.8 million acres annually from 2009 to 2012, a decline of 27 percent.
• The production of shale gas and shale oil in recent years is taking place “largely outside of the Federal lands” because that’s where those resources are, according to 2012 testimony by Adam Sieminski, administrator of the Energy Information Administration to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
• The vast majority of shale oil and shale gas plays exist underneath non-federal lands, a study by the Center for Western Priorities found. That study, “Follow the Oil,” showed that only ten percent of shale gas plays occur on federal lands, and only 7 percent of shale oil and mixed plays are on federal lands.
• High oil prices Market forces and depressed natural gas prices have been driving oil and gas developers to shift from drilling for natural gas to drilling for shale oil in places like North Dakota, where the resources largely lie beneath private lands. Oil and gas companies have made “market choices…to shift their production to oil and other liquid plays and away from gas,” according to Mark Squillace, professor of law at the University of Colorado. “And this means less activity on public lands.”
• State and federal permitting procedures for oil and gas are fundamentally different, with negotiations to resolve problems taking place before permitting begins on private land but after the process begins on federal land, making it almost automatically faster to get permits on lands where the state controls the permitting. As the Congressional Research Service reported, “A private versus federal permitting regime does not lend itself to an ‘apples to apples’ comparison.”
• The Congressional Research Service also found that between 2006 and 2011 the federal Bureau of Land Management has significantly cut its time for processing drilling permits from an average of 127 days to 71 days, while the time it has taken for industry to complete its processing chores has increased from an average of 91 days to 236 days.

Many critics of the federal oil and gas leasing program ignore that these resources are on publicly owned lands and waters — they belong to every American. And as the Federal Land Policy and Management Act makes clear, these lands are for multiple uses — including hunting, fishing, recreation, and grazing — and not just for oil and gas production. Despite this multiple use management requirement, the president has leased 2 acres for oil and gas production for every one acre of land conserved for future generations.

Members of the House Natural Resources Committee should be more concerned about that imbalance, rather than their fictitious statements about oil and gas production from federal lands and waters by President Obama.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress.

“Folks, last week, President Obama cynically used the inaugural address to push his radical pro-survival agenda. Folks, I didn’t think this part of his speech would get any traction, because there’s no national consensus on climate change. It’s like if JFK announced the Apollo program, but half the country denied the Moon exists.” -Stephen Colbert

“And reality has a well-known liberal bias.” -Stephen Colbert

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a subpanel on the environment — and it has become a strange thing to watch this year.

Its new chairman is a climate denier. It scheduled a hearing about climate change featuring climate deniers but since most of Washington DC shut down for a blizzard that manifested itself in the city as a lot of rain, they postponed it. Other committees, like the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have been refusing to hold hearings on climate change. Therefore this subcommittee is becoming the only option to hear in person what the House of Representatives thinks about climate change (short of catching a one minute speech on the House floor from the Safe Climate Caucus).

On Wednesday, the subcommittee on the environment investigated the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. This is the EPA’s scientific body it consults as it writes regulations — such as clean air and fracking rules.

Last year, the House GOP introduced legislation to reform the board because it said there is not enough industry representation, and too many scientific experts on the board receive EPA grants. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse showed in 2008 how industry (i.e. ExxonMobil and Dow) can gain harmful influence over scientific panels. During this hearing, the members debated similar legislation for the new congress.

Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists testified that the draft bill would not help the integrity of the scientific process:

This draft bill contains provisions that would slow the work of the Scientific Advisory Board, remove longstanding and widely accepted practices for dealing with conflicts of interest and reduce the expertise of Scientific Advisory Board members.”

This debate appears to be more an instance of lawmakers seeing data they do not like, and going back to the drawing board to change the rules to get a different result. There is scientific consensus that humans cause climate change, that it is a serious threat to our civilization, and we need to act now.

Subcommittee Chairman Chris Stewart (R-UT) finished his statement noting he was just here to help: “If the EPA scientific process is viewed as being biased, or less than willing to consider every point of view, their credibility suffers.” This would have been more credible if he had not just introduced the EPA as a job-killing monster:

Whether it is promulgating air quality regulations that could shut down large swaths of the West, undertaking thinly veiled attacks on the safety of hydraulic fracturing, or pursuing job-killing climate regulations that will have no impact on the climate, EPA’s reputation as a lightning rod for controversy is well known here in Washington and throughout the country.

When a series of doctors tell a patient about a serious health condition, accusing the doctors of bias does not heal anything.