This week, 47 House Republicans sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner asking him to let key federal incentives for wind energy expire. The list of sign-ons range from swing seat Republicans desperate to fire up the Tea Party base (Maryland's Andy Harris) to genuine wackos (Texas' Louie Gohmert).
Although GOP districts hold 81 percent of the nation’s wind power capacity, Republicans are deeply split on investing in wind (Mitt Romney, for example, drew criticism from fellow Republicans for opposing the PTC). Boehner’s home state supports up to 6,000 wind jobs.According to the Tea Party, $5 billion a year to back hundreds of thousands of jobs harvesting clean, domestically-produced wind energy? Unaffordable! The billions we shovel to already-massively-profitable oil companies even though the top 5 oil companies alone banked $137 billion in profit just last year? Indispensable!
The GOP remains less divided on issues favoring Big Oil.
Of the 47 Republicans asking Boehner to end the wind investments, 46 voted in March 2011 against closing tax loopholes that let Big Oil collect $4 billion in annual subsidies. The one outlier, GOP Rep. Richard Hanna, was a no-vote that day. According to OpenSecrets, these representatives have received a total $2.2 million from the oil and gas industry, in an election cycle where Republicans have collected 89 percent of the oil industry’s contributions. Republicans have maintained these tax breaks are “essential” to an industry posting record-breaking profits.
It's always interesting when reporters try to make sense of politicians' energy positions while ignoring the influence of money in politics.The Koch brothers-backed nonprofit Americans for Prosperity and pro-Mitt Romney super PAC Restore Our Future combined to spend about $23.4 million against President Barack Obama during the second half of August.Now, one might think such spending would make Democrats fight for clean energy that much harder. But many Democrats still think appeasement works, and in some ways, that's reflected in the party platform. (Note that climate change is mentioned 18 times in the Democratic platform, so Democrats aren't exactly running away from tackling the climate crisis.)
That’s nearly 10 times the $2.44 million that Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC supporting Obama, spent against Romney, federal records show.
Global warming is pushing Arctic Sea ice cover towards new record lows:The area of ocean covered by ice shrank to 4.93 million square kilometers (1.9 million square miles) on average for the five days through Aug. 15, according to the latest data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. With as many as five weeks of the annual melt season left, it’s already the fourth-lowest annual minimum ever measured.Needless to say, the combination of melting ice and new drilling would be double trouble for America's polar bears.
“Unless the melting really, really slows down, there’s a very real chance of a record,” Walt Meier, a research scientist at the NSIDC, said in a telephone interview. “In the last week or so it’s dropped precipitously. There’s definitely a chance it’ll dip below 4 million square kilometers.”
The shrinkage is the most visible sign of global warming according to Meier, and raises the prospect that the Arctic Ocean may become largely ice free in the summer. That opens up new shipping routes and is sparking a race for resources that’s led to Cairn Energy Plc (CNE) and Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) exploring waters off Greenland for oil and gas.
we're giving him plenty of material.
Are communities really making money off of oil and gas drilling if they have to spend nearly all of the tax revenue building infrastructure to support oil and gas drilling?The state should invest up to $5 billion in northwest North Dakota communities with the most oil activity, the president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council said Wednesday.It makes oil and gas drilling sound like a Ponzi, doesn't it? You'll make lots of money eventually, but only if you keep re-investing! As places like Virginia consider whether to allow oil and gas drilling, politicians like Gov. Bob McDonnell make it sound like every penny of tax revenue will go to existing roads and schools. But if the oil and gas industry expects the money to be spent on supporting the industry, how much will really be left for your community?
Ron Ness, while testifying to a group of legislators meeting in Williston, said communities need significant resources to do long-range planning, but the state’s grant program for those areas is only helping them react. Ness called for a five-year plan with $800 million to $1 billion per year invested in schools, roads and infrastructure for communities in the core areas of the Bakken. [...]
The industry paid $1.3 billion in oil and gas production tax last year, and will pay even more this year, Ness said. Those dollars should be targeted at the counties with the greatest oil activity, he said.
Record profits now give oil executives even more cash than usual to spend on advancing their political agenda — and that begins with electing Romney. In fact, Big Oil executives pledged more than $200 million to aid Romney’s campaign and defeat Obama.Mitt Romney's magical gas price prescription: More drilling! And Virginia GOP Senate candidate George Allen is just as deeply snuggled in Big Oil's back pocket. But here's the problem - even Romney's own economic team knows that wouldn't lower gas prices or help the economy.
What does Big Oil get in return for its $200 million investment in Romney? It gets to keep its billions in special tax breaks every year. So middle-class families pay twice — high gas prices when they fill up the tank and $4 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies for an industry where the top five companies combined made $137 billion in profits last year.
At the same time, Big Oil gets one of its own dictating Romney’s energy policy. Harold Hamm, Romney’s top energy adviser, is a billionaire oil executive who says clean energy is a “magical fantasy” and wants high gas prices. He admitted as much when he declared in 2009 that cheap oil would be a “disaster.”
Leighton Steward, a retired oil industry official who is chairman of the nonprofit groups Plants Need CO2 and CO2 is Green, said the coalition formed a few weeks ago. He had given presentations to the NASA retirees last year meant to underscore that empirical data don't echo the dire predictions of climate modeling espoused by Hansen and others.First, the obvious: The "extra CO2 is good for plants" argument is completely nuts, unless you enjoy wildfires and think Virginia Beach would look better under 30 to 90 meters of seawater.
"We've been trying to tell people that there's a lot of great benefit in CO2 in the atmosphere," he explained to POLITICO. Steward emphasized that he did not organize the coalition of NASA retirees nor is he a spokesman for them.
Our announcements below include the actual letter and signatories. The letter speaks for itself. We will update this with media interviews in which we are fortunate to participate.The list itself also deserves some scrutiny. I picked out just one name, the only listed "meteorologist," Thomas (Tom) Wysmuller, who's listed as "Johnson Space Center, Meteorologist, 5 years." But a quick Google search turns up Wysmuller's website, which says "at different times in his life, Tom has been" both "a Meteorologist" and "a NASA Intern." If Wysmuller was a NASA meteorologist for 5 years, why wouldn't his own website say so? Another Wysmuller bio that says had a "dual major in sociology and political science, and a concentration in meteorology at NYU" - how meteorology fits under sociology & poli sci, I'm not sure - and that he was an "an intern and jack-of-all-trades for NASA."
Texas A&M atmospheric sciences professor Andrew Dessler told POLITICO that he did in fact meet with the 75 or so retirees at Goddard last October — along with University of Houston professor Barry Lefer and fellow Texas A&M professor John Nielsen-Gammon — and came away less than impressed.
“These people are well meaning, but they don’t seem to realize that climate science takes years of full-time work to actually get to know,” he said. “They really don’t understand anything about the climate system. They understand less than the first-year grad students that come out of my classes.”We're well past the point of needing fancy computer models to understand global warming - just look at the thousands of temperature records that fell in March. It's time for action.
Steve Benen flags this quote:South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, a member of House Democratic leadership, told POLITICO he rejects a host of the top Republican offsets, illustrating the tricky path Democrats must travel when negotiating with the GOP.Will the GOP be demanding the CEO of Exxon Mobil be drug tested before Big Oil gets the billions of dollars in subsidies that the GOP supports? What about for nuclear power industry executives and the billions in subsidies House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has asked for? How about here in Virginia, where tens of millions of dollars in subsidies for mining & burning coal are handed out each year - will Gov. Bob McDonnell & Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli be forcing Dominion Virginia Power CEO Tom Farrell to fill a Dixie cup to prove he's clean?
“I have a real problem with what I consider a penalty to the federal employees; I got a real problem with the mandated drug testing for unemployment insurance,” he said Monday, citing an extended federal pay freeze and a favorite conservative change to jobless benefits. “We don’t demand drug testing for people getting farm subsidies.”
If Chevron took all the money it spent on greenwashing commercials and invested it renewable energy, how much progress might've been made by now?
[Third Way's Josh] Freed says you can't just pull the bottle out of the baby's mouth.America: A helpless baby suckling at Big Oil's teat. Somehow I don't see that becoming the new slogan for TransCanada, the company behind the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
"Because the baby still needs to eat, and right now virtually every car and most of the trucking fleet in the United States relies on either gasoline or diesel fuel, and you can't switch over in one year or five years or 10 years," he says. "It's going to take a long time."
Ever since the perceived successes of Bill Clinton's triangulation and the ascendency of the New Dems, the road to acceptance on the left has been paved with hippie punching. To be legit, one must signal to one's peers that one is not like those liberals, the old-fashioned, soft-headed, bleeding-hearted, slogan-shouting kind. One is a Pragmatist, not a Partisan, a traveler on the Third Way, not on the old, boring Left Way, a hard-headed, practical sort, not some kind of dippy dreamer. This pose is incredibly attractive to people whom I've called (clumsily, I grant you) "characterological centrists" -- folks who want to be, and be seen as, free-thinking and reasonable. What better way to demonstrate one's transcendence of mere partisanship than by rejecting the partisans with which one is most naturally associated?Forget cold turkey. Aside from President Obama's moderate strengthening of fuel economy standards, what are we doing to even reduce our incredibly costly oil addiction? America's oil trade deficit was $265 billion in 2010, meaning we sent a net of $2,400 for each American household to other countries to buy their oil. And that doesn't event begin to consider the hundreds of billions we spend on the military to protect oil interests, the cost of oil disasters, or the cost of air pollution. How many people go around complaining about how we're burdening our children with the national debt without talking about how little we're doing to ease our oil addictions and the trillions in long-term cost that go along with it?
Sen. Mark Warner's "Gang of Six" budget plan would've repealed the CLASS Act, part of the 2010 health reform law designed to help seniors who need help with daily tasks such as bathing and dressing. Who does Sen. Warner think should not be asked to sacrifice? Wildly-profitable oil companies:On Thursday, a handful of Senators wrote a letter (PDF) to President Obama that stated, “as you continue your negotiations, we urge you to remember the oil and gas industry is part of the solution.” Or, in other words, don’t single out big oil companies and their taxpayer subsidies as a way to reduce the deficit.Sen. Warner himself has received a smaller amount of oil & gas money relative to his oil state co-signers. But it's interesting to note the letter he signed onto tries to pass off as fact the oil & gas industry's claim to be "supporting over 9 million jobs." Just 2 years ago, the oil & gas industry was only claiming to employ less than 1.8 million people & support 4 million more. So either the oil & gas industry's share of jobs has shot up by more than a third in the midst of nationwide stagnant employment, or they now feel the need to fudge their numbers because clean energy employs more than 2.7 million Americans, 50% more than the oil & gas industry had claimed 2 years ago.
These nine Senators—six Republicans and three Democrats—have received $7.1 million in oil and gas industry cash during their career in Congress, according to our analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics. [...]
Ending oil subsidies didn’t make it into the tentative default deal reached over the weekend, but as Congress looks to create a commission to enact further deficit reduction measures, it’ll be important to watch what influence Big Oil and other industries will exert on the process.
