On the Diane Rehm radio show yesterday, senior John McCain (R-AZ) adviser and former Koch Industries lobbyist Nancy Pfotenhauer defended McCain’s flip-flop in support of offshore drilling by repeating the conservative myth that “we survived Hurricanes Katrina and Rita with no significant spills.” She claimed that the technology has been “refined enough” to “protect environmentally sensitive areas”:

And then there was a concern in the past about the technology. Did the technology exist, was it refined enough if you will, no pun intended, to be able to protect environmentally sensitive areas. And so — he’s been a conservationist all his life — he was concerned about that. And I think the things that have happened since then . . . [W]hen we survived Hurricane Katrina and Rita with no significant spills, I think that had a very powerful impact on his feeling about the technology.

Listen here (and watch a photo montage of Katrina’s oil spills):

As these photographs from Katrina Destruction, SkyTruth, and the National Geographic confirm, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused an ecological disaster on the scale of the Exxon Valdez. One of the hundreds of spills, the onshore Murphy Oil spill, devastated an entire neighborhood.

McCain’s dirty energy spokeswoman is echoing the false claim she made July 14 on MSNBC:

When Senator McCain opposed lifting the ban in the past, it was because there were concerns about environmental capability. Like, could we do this and still maintain a pristine environmental um uh climate and and area around the drilling? And basically, what we’ve seen is the technology has progressed to the point where we could do that. We withstood Hurricanes Rita and Katrina and didn’t spill a drop.

ThinkProgress reported that MSNBC’s David Schuster confronted her with the facts and forced her to retract her false claim on July 17:

SCHUSTER: In fact, the US Minerals Management Service said that Katrina and Rita caused 124 offshore spills for a total of more than 743,000 gallons of refined products in spills. So Nancy, do you want to take back what you said?

PFOTENHAUER: Well, I actually do. I was misinformed, and my embarrassment aside . . .

Transcript: Read more

Our guest blogger is Peter Altman, Climate Campaign Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

One of the ways to gauge how seriously Congress is talking about environmental issues is by watching how many industry front-groups pop up like weeds to try to choke off efforts to clean up the world around us. The weeds grow in various sizes and shapes, but they tend to share a common root system: funding from industry backers who would rather keep underground, away from the light of public discourse.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) — which is trying to persuade Americans that global warming is a hoax – is such a weed. The group isn’t just funded by an industry CEO, it was planted by one. David Koch, Executive Vice-President of family-founded multi-national conglomerate Koch Industries, is a founder of AFP and a financial supporter through the family-controlled and company-financed Claude R. Lambe Foundation. Koch Industries, Inc. and its sister company, Koch Holdings, LLC, own a group of companies invested in refineries, chemicals, minerals and so on.

The Koch companies have an atrocious record of sloppy operations. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the US and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters.  They were fined a record $35 million dollars and an additional $8 million in Minnesota for discharging into streams. In Texas –a state not usually known for rigid enforcement of environmental laws — the company was held liable for allowing large amounts of carcinogenic benzene to leak from a Texas refinery.

Koch’s slack attitude has led to tragic losses of life. In 1996, a rusty pipeline began to leak butane near a Texas residential neighborhood. Warned by the smell of gas, two teenagers drove their truck toward the nearest payphone to call for help, but they never made it. Sparks from their truck ignited the gas and the two burned alive.

It’s easy to see why the Koch family would plant and nurture sockpuppet groups like AFP. Koch can’t just come out and say we should ignore global warming, because their self-interest is too obvious. AFP is currently on a nationwide tour touting its new framing language regarding global warming, calling environmental proponents “alarmists” and pro business anti-environmentalists “realists.” Ironically enough, their image of choice is a hot air balloon (Note to front-groups: avoid using props that unintentionally reinforce your BS). But when over a million dollars of your funding in 2005 comes directly from donors like the Koch Industries “charitable foundation,” maybe hot air is all you’ve got to work with.

This post originally appeared at NRDC’s Switchboard .

UPDATE: Read more in the Wonk Room about Nancy Pfotenhauer, Koch Industries’ top lobbyist from 1996 to 2001 and president of Americans for Prosperity from 2003 to 2007.

Yesterday, Nancy Pfotenhauer, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) senior policy adviser, claimed that she had been “misinformed” when she falsely stated that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita “did not spill a drop of oil.” Today, McCain made another “misinformed” argument, claiming that oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico “have survived, very successfully, the impacts of hurricanes”:

Q: I’ve been listening to your comments around renewable resources – solar, tide, and wind – you’ve talked a lot about that, but you keep peppering your comments with offshore drilling. But I’m not sure what you think the impact on our environment is based on that.

A: Keep the microphone. I’m aware that off the coast of Louisiana and Texas there are oil rigs, as we well know, and those rigs have survived, very successfully, the impacts of hurricanes – hurricane Katrina as far as Louisiana is concerned.

McCain is wrong. According to press reports, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita “tore through the Gulf of Mexico’s offshore oil and gas fields, toppling production platforms, setting rigs adrift and rupturing pipelines.” The U.S. Minerals Management Service reported that the hurricanes totally destroyed 113 offshore oil platforms.

The hurricanes cost Transocean, the largest offshore driller, “about $135 million in repairs, downtime and equipment upgrades” alone, and damage to offshore producers accounted for 77 percent of the oil industry’s storm costs. One offshore rig, the Ocean Warwick, drifted 66 nautical miles before running aground.

Here are some photos of the success that McCain is touting:

Cross-posted at ThinkProgress.

To support the Big Oil agenda of increased offshore drilling, conservatives have been telling the American public that there weren’t any major spills caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita for an entire month. The following video shows Sen. McCain (R-AZ), Wall Street Journal writer Stephen Moore, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, McCain spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer, former Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), and Sen. McCain (again).

Watch it:

All of these people are polluter-funded, from McCain on down. As Idaho governor, Kempthorne served the interests of the energy industries that funded him. Nancy Pfotenhauer was the top D.C. lobbyist for the right-wing energy company Koch Industries, and Lott is now a lobbyist for Chevron, Shell, and the Edison Chouest Offshore drilling rig company. Stephen Moore, like Pfotenhauer, received his economics degree from George Mason University, before working at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, then founding the Club for Growth and the Free Enterprise Fund. George Mason, Heritage, and the Cato Institute are all funded by Koch money.They appeared on CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox Business Network, Fox News, and MSNBC, but were never challenged for their false claims.

As the Wonk Room has reported, the clear satellite evidence of major spills was borne out by final reports. In May 2006, the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) published their offshore damage assessment: “113 platforms totally destroyed, and 457 pipelines damaged, 101 of those major lines with 10″ or larger diameter.”

Unsurprisingly, this devastation caused significant spillage, according to the official report prepared for the MMS by a Norwegian firm:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused 124 Offshore Spills For A Total Of 743,700 Gallons. 554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs. [MMS, 1/22/07]

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Six Offshore Spills Of 42,000 Gallons Or Greater. The largest of these was 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a “major spill.” [MMS, 5/1/06]

In addition, the hurricanes caused disastrous spills onshore throughout southeast Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast as tanks, pipelines, refineries and other industrial facilities were destroyed, for a total of 595 different oil spills. The 9 million gallons reported spilled were comparable with the Exxon Valdez’s 10.8 million gallons, but unlike the Exxon Valdez, were distributed throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Gulf Coast states, many in residential areas. The most massive spills included:

– The Bass Enterprises Cox Bay spill of 3.78 million gallons of oil, the largest spill caused by the hurricanes
– The Murphy Oil spill in Mereaux, LA of 819,000 gallons of oil, contaminating 1,700 homes and the local high school

At the time, the Houston Chronicle described the devastation as “among the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.”

Cross-posted at ThinkProgress

CNN’s Larry King Live offered a cavalcade of oil, coal, and nuclear industry apologists last night, telling watchers that “all of us” are to blame for high gas prices, oil companies are “heroes,” and that we should convert coal to gasoline, drill for oil in the North Pole, and build more nuclear plants. Not once was global warming mentioned, or how the policies advocated by the guests would lead us on a path to climate catastrophe.

Chevron’s CEO, David O’Reilly, sat with King throughout the show, defending his company’s record profits and deflecting questions about how much he personally makes. When asked by King if he feels any guilt for Chevron’s $18 billion profit last year, O’Reilly blamed “all of us” for being “too complacent about energy.” O’Reilly also pushed for lifting the offshore drilling moratorium, saying drilling in protected areas “can be done safely” but “will take some time.” He continued:

But, the reality is it can be done. It’s urgent enough that if we don’t start today, my kids and my grandkids will suffer because of it.

Unlike the O’Reilly clan, most “kids and grandkids” today do not have oil executives for grandparents to pass down their obscene profits — in the past five years, O’Reilly has pulled in $82.51 million. It’s certainly possible that the O’Reilly inheritance might “suffer” a bit if Chevron’s oil lust is kept in check.

However, all children today will suffer as they try to survive on the radically changed and deteriorated planet if fossil fuel use, as O’Reilly advocates, continues unabated for decades to come.

King’s guests also included the notorious global warming denier John Stossel, who pushed the climate-killing coal-to-liquids technology, then sucked up to O’Reilly with this spiel:

I think these oil companies are heroes. Think what it takes to bring this stuff to us, across an ocean, refine it into three types of gasoline, put it in trucks that cost 100,000 dollars each, ship that to gasoline stations that have to have this expensive equipment so we don’t blow ourselves up pumping our own gas.

O’Reilly’s response? “That’s nice to hear someone on our side.”

Watch it:

Stossel wasn’t the only one. In opposition to O’Reilly’s promotion of offshore drilling, Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) advocated drilling in his state of Montana. Larry King’s listeners also heard from Nancy Pfotenhauer, a McCain spokeswoman who repeated her claim — despite all evidence — that “Senator McCain’s plan has provisions to immediately offer some relief.” She somehow failed to mention that she is also a career hack for Koch Industries, the $90 billion right-wing pollution-industry giant. King joined in the fun by asking when Chevron would start drilling for oil in the North Pole — seemingly anxious for when global warming will have eliminated the ice that has been there since the dawn of the human race.

CNN’s other friends to their fossil-industry sponsors include Ali Velshi, a dedicated coal-industry supporter, and Glenn Beck, a global warming denier who recently told Americans, “Be thankful for big oil.”

Digg it!

UPDATE: Media Matters reports that NBC and MSNBC have aired multiple reports on offshore drilling — including segments reported live from a Chevron oil rig — without explaining “environmental concerns” or disclosing GE’s drilling connection.

On “Fox and Friends” yesterday, Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer — a top policy adviser for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — derided those who say that lifting the offshore drilling moratorium won’t affect gas prices, saying it “reveals ignorance on the futures markets.”

That position puts her at odds with the federal Energy Information Administration, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and even McCain himself. Why would Pfotenhauer go so far off message?

Perhaps it’s because the only ones who would benefit from lifting the moratorium are energy companies like Koch Industries (pronounced “coke”), the largest private company in the United States, the secretive backer of the right-wing message machine, and Pfotenhauer’s longtime boss.

Koch Industries Is The Secret Dirty Energy King. With $90 billion in annual sales, Koch Industries is the largest privately owned company in the United States. Begun in 1940 as an oil refining business by Fred Koch, his company — now controlled by sons David and Charles Koch — has diversified into “refining and chemicals; process and pollution control equipment and technologies; minerals and fertilizer; fibers and polymers; commodity and financial trading and services; and forest and consumer products” — a global warming pollution factory. [Forbes, 2007]

Koch Industries Is At The Center Of The Right-Wing Message Machine. Koch’s founder, Fred Koch, also helped found the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative organization that believed the U.S. government was controlled by a traitorous cabal of Communist sympathizers. Koch Industries’ charitable arm, the Koch Family Foundations, has provided over $120 million in the past 20 years to the Cato Institute (founded by Charles Koch), Citizens for a Sound Economy (founded by David Koch, now Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks), the Heritage Foundation, George Mason University, the Federalist Society, the Mercatus Center, and dozens more right-wing, anti-regulatory, and global-warming denial organizations. [Media Transparency]

Nancy Pfotenhauer Is A Pure Right-Wing/Koch Industries Product. Pfotenhauer’s resumé includes George Mason University (funded by Koch), Citizens for a Sound Economy (founded by Koch), Americans for Prosperity (founded by Koch), and the Independent Women’s Forum (funded by Koch). She also worked directly for Koch Industries as their top Washington lobbyist. When not on the Koch payroll, Pfotenhauer worked for the Republican National Committee, Sen. William Armstrong (R-CO), and Dan Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness. [Media Transparency, Dunamis International Ministries]

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