Now that the web of Keystone XL tar-sands industry lobbyists connected to Hillary Clinton has grown far beyond Paul Elliott, DeSmogBlog, Oil Change International, The Other 98%, and Friends of the Earth have produced a new white board infographic to help everyone visualize this cast of carbon cronies. 

If funny animated cartoons are more your style, DeSmogBlog commissioned artist Mark Fiore to explain this corrupt process in a lighter fashion:

Visit the action page at RejectLobbyistsNoKXL.org.

I traveled to Koch Industries headquarters in Wichita earlier this week where Joel Francis, the Cal State-Los Angeles senior and Marine Corps veteran, formally delivered his letter challenging CEO Charles Koch to a public debate about his funding of Prop 23.

After receiving no response from Koch following the video posting of his challenge last week, Joel and a group of California students traveled from Los Angeles with Powervote CA campaign director Gabe Elsner to try to meet Koch in person.  

Faced with an outrageously polite and reasonable invitation to debate a single college student, Koch HQ prepared for the visit by posting pairs of security guards at the doors, parking lots and even the infamous granite wall bearing the Koch logo. (What, were they afraid Joel was going to try to steal the sign?) 

Joel delivered a statement on the public easement strip of lawn in front of Koch HQ (which Koch’s Director of Corporate Security Larry Moorman tried to suggest was private property at first, before backing away quietly when Elsner noted that county records indicate the first 18 feet of lawn adjoining the street is public property.)

Then, after a couple of extensive interviews with local media, including the Wichita Eagle and an ABC affiliate – neither of which ended up reporting since Koch has a death grip on local media – Joel and Gabe approached the front door, where Moorman rebuffed their polite request to see Charles Koch and ordered them to scram back to the easement with haste. He did agree to give Joel’s letter to Charles though; what a sweetheart!

Here’s a video from Powervote about the visit and encounter with the Trench-Coat-Wearing Man, Larry Moorman:

Apparently Koch didn’t appreciate my presence and subsequent blog coverage, since I’ve received some colorful commentary (see comments) from what I assume are employees who were watching us on their front lawn from their tinted office windows. 

I also drew fire from Breitbart’s ‘BigJournalism.com’ website, who accused me of being a journalist (the nerve) and suggested I was unethical for letting Joel use my cell phone to call Charles Koch.  I did gladly lend Joel my phone – how else could he get in touch with the elusive CEO about his bankrolling of Prop 23? Both Joel’s and Gabe’s phones were rendered completely frozen and useless after they returned from a close encounter with Larry Moorman, who reminded me of the Cigarette Smoking Man with that trench coat and sinister grin of his. 

Wonder what kind of jamming and tracing tech Koch has? I keep listening for the tell-tale click on my cell phone now. Hope they enjoy listening to my boring conversations. Tell Charles I said hi and that he really ought to man up and debate Joel!

A multi-billionaire afraid of a college kid? Seriously?

The billionaire Koch brothers have long claimed that they have no direct connection to the Tea Party, denying that their vast oil wealth is directly funding corporate front groups like Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the key organizers of the fake grassroots Tea Party movement.

David Koch told New York Magazine earlier this year, “I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.”

But the Guardian reports that footage has emerged showing David Koch at the podium during an AFP gala receiving direct and detailed reports from his astroturf AFP army on their efforts to organize tea parties around the nation.  

Watch the clip from the new documentary (Astro)Turf Wars: How Corporate America Faked a Grassroots Revolution:

Charles and David Koch’s company, Koch Industries, the largest private corporation in America, has also denied direct links to the Tea Party, as Jane Meyer reported in her extensive piece in The New Yorker on the Koch brothers:

In April, 2009, Melissa Cohlmia, a [Koch Industries] spokesperson, denied that the Kochs had direct links to the Tea Party, saying that Americans for Prosperity is “an independent organization and Koch companies do not in any way direct their activities.” Later, she issued a statement: “No funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, or Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.”

Yet Greenpeace and others have documented the extensive funding flowing from the Koch brothers through their Koch family foundations to AFP and other front groups working on behalf of corporate America to stop progress on healthcare reform, climate, and energy policy.

With this new footage clearly showing David Koch interacting with his Tea Party foot soldiers, the Kochtopus definitely has some ‘splainin’ to do.

Paul LePage, the TeaOP candidate for governor in Maine, is running neck and neck with Democratic candidate Libby Mitchell, despite his loony climate-denying, DEP-bashing, creationism-in-schools-touting, offshore-oil-dr … spilling platform.

LePage has slipped nearly 20 points in the polls recently, largely due to some incendiary comments outlined below, and he now finds himself in a dead heat with Mitchell.

LePage is a Tea Party favorite thanks to his very vocal support for teaching creationism in schools, opposition to women’s right to choose and same-sex marriages, support for opening up the Gulf of Maine coastline to offshore oil and gas drilling, and of course his view that global warming is a “scam,” a popular — if wholly unfounded and mind-bogglingly delusional — talking point this election season among TeaOP congressional and gubernatorial candidates nationwide. He once declared, “The Tea Party is the second revolution.”

His environmental platform sounds like a defense of the status quo addiction to antiquated energy sources and continued neglect for public health.

LePage says regulations from Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection often “serve no purpose except to cost businesses money,” echoing the James Watt-era fervor for dismantling pesky environmental agencies that would dare to hold industries financially accountable for their illegal pollution. 

Rather than harness Maine’s abundant supplies of wind, wood, and waves to create a sustainable energy future for his state, LePage would prefer offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Maine (at the risk of destroying Maine’s proud multibillion-dollar tourism and fishing industries), building two expensive, risky nuclear plants, and importing foreign hydropower from Canada.

But LePage’s ire is targeted at plenty of other bogeymen besides environmentalists. 

Living up to his nickname “LeRage,” Paul LePage has been on a LeRampage lately, sharing with voters some choice words for the media and for President Obama.  He “jokingly” threatened to punch a reporter this week, after previously telling another reporter to “stop the bullshit” when asked about allegations that he and his wife may be defrauding Florida and Maine by claiming residency in both.

He also loudly proclaimed that if he were elected, Mainers would enjoy regular headlines of “Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell.” Watch: 

When asked at a press conference about the allegation that LePage and his wife claimed primary residency in two states to take advantage of in-state tuition for their children in Florida while also enjoying tax breaks as full-time homesteaders in Maine, LePage angrily interrupted the reporter, telling her to “stop the bullshit and let’s answer the questions the way they should be answered.” Watch:

Seems LePage hasn’t figured out who asks and who answers questions at a press conference. Must be a liberal media conspiracy.

LePage also professes a desire to work in a bipartisan fashion if elected. Except he shows his cards by declaring, “If you can’t convince them [Democrats], there’s always the veto.”

Mocking the scam that is the BP cleanup, Greenpeace today released the “ScamWow!” infomercial targeting BP and other oil companies who need a quick solution whenever pesky ecological devastation results from their irresponsible, risky drilling practices.

Spoofing the original late night cable sensation, the ScamWow! info-mock-cial demonstrates how the simple budget picker-upper’s cleaning powers can instantly sanitize tar-balled beaches, scrub the oil company’s public image, and save shareholders millions in onerous cleanup costs — savings the company can then invest in more insulting “We will make this right” TV commercials and full-page ads.

Watch the Greenpeace “ScamWow!” video:

The scary part is that the ScamWow! spoof isn’t too far off the actual claims made by BP in the wake of the Deepwater disaster.

Touring Louisiana’s oil-drenched Fourchon Beach on May 24, BP CEO Tony Hayward pledged to ‘clean every last drop’ and return the Gulf to full health (which it hasn’t seen in decades, but that’s beside the point for BP’s current PR purposes).

“We are going to do everything in our power to prevent any more oil from coming ashore, and we will clean every last drop up and we will remediate all of the environmental damage,” Hayward said after walking the beach while a cleanup crew shoveled oily sand into garbage cans for the cameras. BP correctly labeled it a “media event” on its Flickr page.

Hayward repeated the too-good-to-be-true message in an NPR interview in early June, stating:

“Our task is to contain the oil. Ultimately to eliminate the leaking well, but most importantly, to clean up all of the oil, defend the shoreline and restore the shoreline where oil does come ashore, such that we return it to its original state.”

It looks like Tony Hayward has been watching too many late night cable infomercials.

The investigation, led by Sir Muir Russell, found no grand conspiracy among scientists brainwashed by the U.N. IPCC and Al Gore to dominate the planet by dreaming up man-made global warming, as the right wing media and blogosphere insisted in the wake of the Climategate nontroversy that followed the theft of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) late last year.

The report confirms again that climate scientists’ findings remain sound. Some of the report’s key findings:

“On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.

In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.” (pg. 11)

While this 160-page independent report should settle once and for all any lingering suspicion about the actions of the handful of scientists most frequently cited in the emails, it is unlikely to appease the conspiracy theorists who fear the U.N. is going to steal their liberties and zombify their babies under a New World Order.

As with birthers and truthers and others who cling to extreme conspiracy theories in the face of overwhelming evidence, once people are lured by the fear-induced frame suggesting that dark forces are at work to control them, they apparently can’t tell reality from fiction. Even when handed a giant stack of scientific studies documenting what is known about climate change, some still deny the blatantly obvious conclusion that the world is warming, humans are driving that disruption, and we had better get cracking to confront this challenge.

The Russell report did confirm earlier criticisms that the handful of scientists targeted by the Climategate attacks failed to display “the proper degree of openness” when dealing with public requests for information.

Fair enough, that criticism has been previously acknowledged as valid, and efforts are already underway to ensure increased transparency at CRU and other scientific institutions.  The call for greater transparency and openness among scientists and their institutions is necessary and welcomed, but certainly they aren’t the only ones who deserve that reminder. 

What institution on the planet would pass muster under such intense scrutiny?  Certainly not the U.S. government agencies, which often deny or impede FOIA requests, or global corporations like BP, Massey Energy and Koch Industries, which seem to revel in hiding information from the public all the time.  More transparency is needed everywhere, not just among scientists in lab coats.  But they get the message loud and clear.

Professor Phil Jones, who stepped down as CRU’s director during the  investigation, will finally get back to work, having accepted a new  title of Director of Research.  Climate scientists at institutions  around the world can continue to expand upon our understanding of  global warming, with greater openness and interaction with the public  than ever before. 

The overwhelming body of evidence and data underpinning our understanding of climate science remains intact, confirmed, and freshly exonerated yet again.

The only real question left unanswered is who was behind the actual crime – the theft of the emails, as Joe Romm writes at ClimateProgress:

“I would call this a CSI-type review, because of its incredible  forensic thoroughness, except that it didn’t look at the actual crime —  the hacked emails — only the charges against climate scientists.  The  investigation found there was no fire, only smoke.  Yes, the report  found “that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display  the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists  and on the part of the UEA” — and they made many useful suggestions to  improve that important failing.

But they found no evidence of any wrongdoing that undermines climate  science.  And that is what this is all about — the science — not the  scientists, no matter how much the anti-science crowd tries to change  the subject.“

But will this thorough debunking of the main allegations made by the Climategate conspiracy bloggers and their fans at FOX News suffice to end the attacks on climate scientists? Will it deflate Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s witch hunt of climate scientist Michael Mann?  Will it be the “final nail in the coffin” of climate denial? 

Not a chance.  Climate deniers like Cuccinelli have no respect for science.  They are only interested in ensuring further political dithering while the planet burns.  Expect them to label it another whitewash, as usual, and continue their antics to distract the world from taking much-needed action. 

But the U.S. Congress and international negotiators must now accept that the science of climate change is completely sound, and use it to craft policies to protect future generations from the ravages of climate change.  They no longer have any semblance of an excuse to delay. The world’s engineers, physicists and entrepreneurs can work  together to find solutions to global energy challenges and build  resilience to cope with the damage already done to climate systems. But only with international cooperation can real progress be made to safeguard future generations.

Read the entire final report of the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review [PDF attached].

The site of the initial explosion beneath the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig leased by BP is within the boundaries of the Northern Gulf of Mexico Ecoregion, an area described by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation as a marine protected area that:

“… contains over 60 percent of the tidal marshes of the United States, freshwater inputs from thirty-seven major rivers, numerous nursery habitats for fish and the Flower Gardens Banks.”

The Northern Gulf of Mexico Ecoregion contains numerous species at risk, many of which we have seen severely effected by oil contamination already, including:

• Kemp’s Ridley turtles
• Loggerhead turtles
• Alabama Shad
• Dwarf Seahorses, and
• Sand Tiger sharks

The oil slick is also very close to entering the Southern Gulf of Mexico Marine Ecoregion, which is described as containing:

“Habitats such as coastal lagoons, estuaries, and dunes to mangroves, seagrass beds and some coral reefs help to support the 1,000 plus species of fishes that occur in the Gulf of Mexico. “

This ecoregion also contains many species at risk, including:

• Manatee
• Maya octopus
• Great White shark
• Bull shark, and
• Atlantic Manta Ray

A third Marine Ecoregion, the South Florida/Bahamian Atlantic, is also under threat of contamination by the oil slick and is situated about 150 miles South East.

If you use Google Maps, you can download this Google Earth file created by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation that contains North Americas Marine Ecoregions and NOAA’s oil spill trajectory maps.

H/T Kevin Grandia at EnergyBoom.com.

With footage of the BP Deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico contrasted by majestic images of beaches and marine life from around the world, the video is an eye-opening look at the perils and pleasures found in the blue depths of our oceans, which cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface.

Watch “Blue Planet”:

“Blue Planet” is the first video released from Sam Lardner’s new “Oceans Are Talking” CD.

Featuring groups of children singing out for ocean protection from D.C. to Dominica, Spain to Australia, the video is a rallying call to all ages that the time to save our oceans is right now.

Sam Lardner told me today from Barcelona, “When we started working on this project, Ann Luskey from the Ocean Foundation and I were focused on how to enlighten and empower children, but halfway through the process, we realized this isn’t a children’s CD at all.”

“The fact is, the oceans can’t wait for our children to grow up and save them.  There isn’t time to wait for that.  It’s all of us, right now, who have to solve this.  We all have to change,” Lardner says.

The “Blue Planet” video is dedicated to the life work of Sylvia Earle and her TED-prize project, Mission Blue.

For more about the project, visit OceansAreTalking.org.

The Roan, once described by current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as “one of those treasured landscapes of America, a place where we have fish and wildlife resources (and) beautiful streams,” is now the target of major natural gas drilling operations, thanks to George W. Bush’s Bureau of Land Management, which auctioned off oil and gas rights to nearly 55,000 acres of land encompassing the Roan Plateau for $114 million, the BLM’s largest lease sale in the continental U.S.

One of the major benefactors of this fire sale of public resources was Bill Barrett Corp. (NYSE: BBG), which snapped up a large share of the drilling rights to the top of the Roan Plateau when it spent $60 million to purchase a 90 percent interest in 40,300 acres of the oil and gas leases held by Vantage Energy, another unconventional natural gas extraction company co-founded by Barrett Corp’s former Chief Financial Officer. 

Barrett has been chomping at the bit ever since to begin drilling on the Roan, and claimed in a recent conference call with shareholders and media that legal and other challenges that have held up the development so far appeared close to being resolved.  What the company’s executives didn’t talk about on the call was the fact that Barrett Corp. had massively expanded its lobbying budget ever since the sale, retaining two of Washington’s most notorious lobby shops.

In 2009, Bill Barrett Corp. shelled out $320,000 to NES Inc. and Brownstein Hyatt to handle its D.C. lobbying efforts, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.  That’s more than five times the amount Barrett spent on lobbying in each of the last five years.

For such a small company, $320,000 in lobbying expenditures is quite a lot of scratch to be throwing at D.C. lobbyists, especially when Barrett Corp. says it has worked closely with the local communities affected by its operations in order to settle disputes and earn local trust.  So what could they possibly need to convince bureaucrats and lawmakers in Washington to help them with after getting such a sweet deal on the Roan leases?

One reason comes to mind – the massive local opposition in Colorado to the plan to increase drilling on public lands including the Roan plateau.

Before the BLM auction even took place, the Bush administration’s plan to lease the Roan Plateau raised the ire of local communities in Colorado.  It became the target of a major lawsuit by environmental and wilderness groups, the outcome of which is still pending.  Barrett Corp. knew about the legal challenge before it purchased the drilling rights from Vantage Energy, but Barrett announced at the time that it would “vigorously pursue a settlement.”

That hasn’t happened as quickly as Barrett Corp. might have preferred.  Public opposition to the plan to drill the Roan Plateau was overwhelmingly clear from the outset, even before the leases were sold by the Bush administration.  When the BLM sought local input on the plan for more drilling on the Roan, the public comments opposed it by a factor of nearly 10 to 1.

As Men’s Journal reported in its excellent piece ‘The Battle for the Roan Plateau’:

it wasn’t just hemp-and Chaco-sandaled liberals up in Boulder who were crying into their chai lattes. Local communities from Carbondale to Silt, including Rifle, the onetime ranching and mining town at the base of the Roan, passed resolutions opposing the leasing. Joining the usual cast of greenies in opposition were hunters and fishermen like my guides: Neubecker is president of Colorado Trout Unlimited, while Torbit, of National Wildlife, is an avid hunter. “I never thought I’d be sitting down at the table with environmentalists,” says Keith Goddard, a local outfitter and rancher who is a longtime opponent of drilling the Roan. “But all it’s gonna take is one screwup, and that’ll be it,” he says, for the wildlife on the Plateau.

The Bush administration ignored their objections, as well as those of the governor of Colorado, two local congressmen, and U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, all of who opposed the drilling plan.

Note that Ken Salazar was among that list of officials who originally opposed the leasing of the Roan Plateau.  As a Colorado Senator, Salazar praised “the environmental values of the plateau” and many environmental groups expected him to quickly reverse the last-minute Bush giveaway of the Roan Plateau when he became Secretary of the Interior under President Obama.  In fact, Salazar sent an encouraging sign soon after taking office by killing a similarly controversial lease sale in Utah that would have allowed drilling next to Arches National Park. Many expected that Salazar would do the same for the Roan.

But so far, Salazar hasn’t budged.

Could Barrett’s massive lobbying expenditures last year explain – at least in part – the Interior Secretary’s sudden lack of interest in protecting what he had praised as “one of those treasured landscapes of America” before moving to Washington?