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.

Republicans launched an unprecedented frontal assault against environmental protections and regulations this year, prompting Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) to call his chamber “the most anti-environment House in history.” Here are the 10 most powerful and outspoken opponents of clean air, clean water, conservation and climate action.

That’s the Los Angeles Times editorial board opening its “Year in Review: Congress’ 10 biggest enemies of the Earth,” what they call “Observations and provocations from The Times’ Opinion staff.”

Here are the opponents 10 to 8:

10. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. Thought to be the biggest lifetime recipient of oil-industry contributions in the Senate, Cornyn has rewarded Exxon-Mobil’s largesse by supporting the industry’s position on pretty much every energy or environmental issue that has ever appeared before him. That’s why he, like everyone on this list, has a “0″ on the League of Conservation Voters’ scorecard for pro-environment votes.

9. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska. A tireless advocate for opening Alaska’s pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, Young was involved in one of the more entertaining name-calling spats in Congress this year when he got into a tiff over the refuge with author and professor Doug Brinkley. You can be the judge of who won by watching the video replay.

8. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista [CA]. There may have been a time when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee lived up to its name, investigating and bringing to light incidents of government waste, fraud and abuse. But I can’t remember back that far. In recent decades it has served as a tool for the majority party in the House to bash and embarrass the presidential administration, at least during times such as now when the House isn’t controlled by the president’s party. Issa, the committee’s current chairman, has turned such political gamesmanship into an art form, and has been particularly keen to attack environmental regulators and policymakers. In so doing he has turned up precious little waste or fraud, but provided plenty of political theater for those who want to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency or end subsidies for clean energy.

Here are the worst 7:

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by Melanie Hart and Tong Zhao

Many eyes are on the international climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa this week — particularly on China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

The international community is upping the pressure on China to take serious steps to reduce emissions. China’s biggest climate pressures, however, are coming from within.

As living standards go up, Chinese citizens are paying more attention to quality-of-life issues, particularly air quality. They are pressuring their government to reduce air pollution — much as U.S. citizens pushed for the Clean Air Act — and that pressure is giving the Chinese leadership new incentives to adopt tighter air pollution standards and to take on more ambitious emissions reduction programs.

Air quality has been a hot topic in China for years, but the U.S. Embassy in Beijing added to the debate by offering an alternative source of information about local air pollution and the potential impacts on citizen health. In 2008 the U.S. embassy installed a roof-top air quality monitoring system that samples the Beijing air every hour. The embassy provides a mobile app that anyone can register for to receive the hourly readings, which define the conditions as “fine,” “terrible” or “hazardous” depending on the amount of pollution particles in the air.

These reports have created a major controversy in China, because the U.S. embassy bases their assessments on EPA standards that measure particulate air pollution down to the smaller (2.5 microns in diameter and below) particles.  China’s standards, in contrast, only measure and report particles down to the 10 micron (micrometer) level. That is a critical oversight, because PM 2.5 particles are among the most dangerous. Due to their small size, they can penetrate deeper into the lungs and cause more severe health damage.

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A new economic analysis of the costs of pollution to the United States finds that coal power is harming the economy. In the American Economic Review article “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy,” economists Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus model the physical and economic consequences of emissions of six major pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, ammonia, fine particulate matter, and coarse particulate matter) from the country’s 10,000 pollution sources. They estimate the “gross external damages” (GED) from the sickness and death caused by the pollution, and compare that to the value added to the economy:

Solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, marinas, and oil and coal-fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added. . .

Coal plants are responsible for more than one-fourth of GED [gross external damages] from the entire US economy. The damages attributed to this industry are larger than the combined GED due to the three next most polluting industries: crop production, $15 billion/year, livestock production, $15 billion/year, and construction of roadways and bridges, $13 billion/ year.

“Five industries stand out as large air polluters,” the authors write, “coal-fired power plants, crop production, truck transportation, livestock production, and highway-street-bridge construction.”

When the authors add in highly conservative estimates of the cost of carbon dioxide pollution, they find that “the damages caused by oil- and coal-fired power plants are between 30 and 40 percent higher.” With an estimated social cost of carbon — a damage estimate of global warming pollution — of $65 (far less than other estimates), the GED for coal-fired generators is 4.7 cents/kWh.

In other words, instead of being “cheap” and “affordable,” coal is actually the costliest fuel for electricity.

“The findings show that, contrary to current political mythology, coal is underregulated,” Legal Planet’s Dan Farber comments. “On average, the harm produced by burning the coal is over twice as high as the market price of the electricity. In other words, some of the electricity production would flunk a cost-benefit analysis. This means that we’re either not using enough pollution controls or we’re just overusing coal as a fuel.”

Typically a reliable voice in support of corporate greed, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested this week that petrochemical polluters like David and Charles Koch should go to jail.

Mallory Factor of The Street interviewed Paul a few days ago. During the conversation, Paul blasted efforts by environmentalists to rein in unregulated hydrofracking. But at one point, the junior senator from Kentucky pivoted and made a caveat. Paul said people who pollute with benzene, a carcinogenic chemical, should “go to jail”:

PAUL: I don’t want to pollute the water. I don’t want to pollute streams. If you dump benzene in the stream, I want you to go to jail.

Watch it:

As it turns out, Koch Industries, the petrochemical conglomerate owned by David and Charles Koch, has dumped benzene into streams.

In 2000, the Department of Justice served the company with an indictment for allowing “at least 91 metric tons of uncontrolled benzene in its liquid waste streams” during a period in 1995 at its Corpus Christi refinery. Prosecutors alleged that the company was well aware of its pollution, and that Koch’s employees conspired to deceive regulators.

Shortly after President Bush took office in 2001, his Attorney General John Ashcroft dropped 88 counts against Koch for the benzene spill and cover-up. Koch pleaded guilty to falsifying documents, all major charges were dropped and the company settled the lawsuit for $20 million, a small part of the possible $350 million in fines. The Bush administration, the beneficiary of large Koch campaign checks, essentially slapped the company on the wrist for leaking a chemical known to cause leukemia.

Since the indictment, Koch has invested in modifying its Texas refinery. Over the years, however, there were other incidents benzene releases from Koch’s Corpus Christi plant.

Koch’s refineries are located in an area called Refinery Row. According to the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, residents face a high cancer rate and birth defects, while many report chronic sickness.

The billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, worth $25 billion each, never went to jail.