NWF’s report, written by Jeff Alexander and co-authored by our own Beth Wallace, says the company’s plans for the aging line put at risk the drinking water supply for millions of Americans, while also putting at risk wildlife and the vital tourism economy supported by the Great Lakes.

Submerged in the waters where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet, the pipeline in question, known as Line 5, moves more than 20 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas fluids pumped every day. The 60 year old pipe is run by the Canadian pipeline giant that caused the worst inland tar sands oil disaster in U.S. history.   (It’s competitor is TransCanada, which is proposing to build the dangerous and controversial Keystone XL pipeline.)

Beth makes a strong case for protecting the Great Lakes from another tar sands threat.  Watch for yourself. The video is HERE.

You can support NWF in protecting wildlife from the threat of tar sands oil, the dirtiest on the planet.  Take action now!

House Speaker John Boehner has been speaking alright. For polluters. (Official U.S. House Portrait)

The speaker is adamant about doing Big Oil a big favor for the holidays and forcing a rider to unrelated middle class tax relief.  To sell a project that NWF’s senior Vice President Jeremy Symons said amounts to the “next oil disaster,” the Speaker has adopted the rhetoric of his pals in the polluter lobby who would be enriched by building a dangerous tar sands pipeline called Keystone XL.

In a press conference this week, Symons said:

“A year after the BP disaster in the Gulf, Speaker Boehner is ready to create America’s next oil disaster by bypassing regulators and rushing a project. Tar sands oil is corrosive and more dangerous to pipelines than regular oil, and tar sands pipelines are leaking across the nation at an unprecedented rate. The first keystone tar sands pipeline is only a year old and it has already leaked 14 times. Transcanada has agreed to re-route around the fragile Sand Hills, but the pipeline will still cross the Ogallala Aquifer and put this vital clean water supply at risk.”

The pipeline will also explode carbon emissions that are heating the planet, kill wildlife, and crush U.S. efforts to get off of dirty fuels.

Ah, but we get jobs, right?  Not so much.  The industry will say anything to have their payday, anything but the truth that is.

The one actual job study not funded by polluters was done by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute. Their conclusion: Keystone XL is likely to kill more jobs than it creates.

Ok, so we will get something like 50 steady jobs from this pipeline, but as Cornell asks, at what cost to our economy.  Canadian tar sands are the most expensive source of oil on the planet, and a long-term addiction to tar sands oil will drain out economy of a trillion dollars that we need to keep here in America.

No one did a better job in shoveling the industry’s rhetoric back in their faces than Stephen Colbert, who strung together a string of Fox News clips that bluster bigger and bigger job lies.  Finally, Colbert tops them all, saying there will be ‘billions of jobs!’

Big Oil has big plans to jeopardize America’s clean energy future by expanding the production of tar sands oil–one of the most destructive, dirty, and costly fuels in the world. Urge your members of Congress to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. 

US Capitol with its power plant in foreground (via Flickr's Matthew Hurst)

At a time when our members of Congress should be working to find common ground on legislation to help America’s struggling economy, House Republican leadership is instead taking the payroll tax cut bill hostage, demanding a huge new giveaway for its Big Oil donors.

Just how much Big Oil money has flowed into Congress this year, particularly to House Republicans?

• The oil & gas industry has already spent $110,691,654 on lobbying in 2011, raising its total to an incredible $566,724,419 spent on lobbying just since 2008.
• We’re still 11 months away from the 2012 elections, but the oil & gas industry has already given $10,170,152 to presidential candidates and members of Congress, including $4,060,374 to House Republicans alone.
• The top 31 House recipients of oil & gas money in the 2012 cycle are all Republicans.
• The top two oil & gas industry contributors to candidates, parties & outside groups? Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries, who are also two of the most active funders of climate science denial.

What’s followed that wave of dirty energy cash? An aggressive new push for a polluting pipeline:

House of Representatives will include approval of a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline in a payroll tax cut bill, House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday, raising the political stakes on the issue.

The move by House Republicans marked a challenge to President Barack Obama, who has warned he would veto any bill that linked quick approval of TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline to extending a tax cut for American workers that is due to expire on December 31.

This so-called policy rider would literally substitute Big Oil’s demands in place of sound science-based policy decisions. Instead of considering TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline’s potential impact on things like drinking water, climate change, and critical whooping crane habitat, it would require regulators to approve – not to consider or evaluate, but to approve — the pipeline within weeks of receiving an application.

“The Keystone XL pipeline is Big Oil’s dangerous plan to lock America into a long-lasting addiction to Canadian tar sands oil, the dirtiest source of oil on the planet,” said Larry Schweiger, president & CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “We applaud President Obama for promising to veto bills that are hijacked by Big Oil and other special interests.”

Just as Big Oil has stepped up its donations, polluter allies are wildly inflating their claims about how many jobs would be created by the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Fox host Eric Bolling even claimed with a straight face that the pipeline would create a million jobs. Really? We’re supposed to believe Keystone would employ twice as many people as the U.S. Postal Service?

Unrefined tar sands (Photo: Flickr/Lou Gold)

With Americans still weary of  the games played with the debt ceiling limit this year, the last thing they want now is more political scheming. A WashingtonPost.com poll currently asks, “Should House Republicans tie extension of the payroll tax cut to other measures, such as approval of the Keystone Pipeline?” With more than 9,000 responses, a whopping 79% reject the House GOP’s hostage strategy.

House Republican leadership shouldn’t put the needs of polluters ahead of helping economic recovery in communities across America. Ask your members of Congress to say no to holding legislation hostage to polluter giveaways.

Rupert Murdoch (courtesy World Economic Forum)

Will the media finally start asking if Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. was connected to the illegal hacking of climate scientist emails?

I’m more optimistic today after word the investigation into voicemail hackings is expanding to include email attacks:

Scotland Yard will expand its investigation of The News of the World and its parent company, police officials said Saturday, adding a new inquiry into possible instances of computer intrusion to the current accusations of phone hacking and payments to police officers.

The new investigation was opened after an examination of “a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy” received since the Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard, reopened inquiries in January into possible crimes by newspaper employees, a statement said.

It’s been frustrating that for all the rightful attention paid to The News of the World phone hacking scandal, virtually no journalist has been willing to ask if News Corp.’s lawbreaking extended into email hacking.

Given how quickly the stolen emails were handed to climate science deniers who were then immediately featured on Fox News, it’s a fair question to ask.

When the hacked emails were subject to independent investigation, climate scientists were vindicated. But given the clear as well as alleged connections between Scotland Yard and News Corp., there’s been no similar independent investigation of who stole the emails in the first place. And as much as journalists were eager to report to the controversy on the emails, they’ve shown little interest in doing the hard work of tracking down the thieves.

So far, there’s been no public evidence that News Corp. was involved. But how long do we have to wait before someone directs some sunlight into that corner of Rupert Murdoch’s infected empire?

Global Temperature Record (Courtesy NASA.gov)

In the midst of global climate change talks last December, a top Fox News official sent an email questioning the “veracity of climate change data” and ordering the network’s journalists to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.”

The directive, sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, was issued less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was “on track to be the warmest [decade] on record.” [...]

Sammon’s orders for Fox journalists to cast doubt on climate science came amid the network’s relentless promotion of the fabricated “Climategate” scandal, which revolved around misrepresentations of emails sent to and from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.

As National Wildlife Federation President & CEO Larry Schweiger wrote in his book Last Chance, “Walter Cronkite’s journalistic values are gone, and Glenn Beck’s are in.”

What does independent, unbiased climate science tell us? The more studies scientists do, the more certain they are that current manmade global warming is unprecedented in magnitude, speed & cause.

Learn more about global warming’s impact on people, wildlife & America’s natural resources at NWF.org/Climate.

Saudi-funded Fox News found this ad by Vote Vets“too confusing” to air.  It’s hard to imagine what’s so confusing about Iran getting $100 million a day from our addiction to oil.  Passing a national clean energy and climate plan will cut our dependence on foreign oil in half and reduce profits to hostile nations.

By Larry J. Schweiger

The following editorial will be published in the upcoming issue of National Wildlife Federation’s National Wildlife magazine:

The famed Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes understood that great revelations create great enemies. He once warned: “You never need think you can overturn any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.”

Based on many observations and calculations, Galileo discovered that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe. Pope Urban VIII deemed the discovery heretical and launched an inquisition that ended with Galileo receiving a life-sentence “house arrest” in 1632.

Sadly, it seems that important scientific findings can be just as contentious today as in the 17th century. This is especially true when those discoveries bump up against and threaten to overturn profits. Consider these examples:

In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote her now famous book Silent Spring, warning that DDT was harming bird life. For the remainder of her days, she was attacked relentlessly by DDT manufacturers and their hired critics.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Herbert L. Needleman, a Pennsylvania medical researcher and toxicologist, discovered that urban children who had been exposed to atmospheric lead from vehicle emissions and lead paint had significantly impaired mental development. His research subsequently was attacked by oil and chemical interests that were making a profit peddling leaded gasoline and lead-based paint.

Reflecting on his painful experience, Dr. Needleman wrote recently: “For researchers who operate at the intersection of basic biology and toxicology, following the data where they take you—as any good scientist would—carries the risk that you will be publicly attacked as a crank, charged with scientific misconduct or removed from a government scientific review panel. Such a fate may seem unthinkable to those involved in primary research, but it has increasingly become the norm for toxicologists and environmental investigators. If you find evidence that a compound worth billions of dollars to its manufacturer poses a public health risk, you will almost certainly find yourself in the middle of a contentious battle that has little to do with scientific truth.”

In an effort to cast doubt on last December’s Climate Conference in Copenhagen, unidentified deniers hacked into a computer server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and stole tens of thousands of emails, then carefully parsed the words to craft a story they dubbed “Climategate” just days before the meeting. The contrived storyline suggested a deliberate and systematic attempt to manipulate data by two leading climate scientists: Phil Jones, who heads the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and Michael Mann, the director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center researcher who studies ancient tree rings patterns as a proxy for climatic conditions. The distortions created by the hackers accomplished their intended purpose to slow progress at Copenhagen.

In a sermon written 150 years before the creation of the Internet, the influential British clergyman Charles Spurgeon warned: “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” At the speed of electrons flying through cyberspace, charges about the work of these two climate scientists disseminated all over the Internet and in the media. Unlike Watergate, where the authorities and the media sought to discover who did the break in, many in the media— especially Fox News—replayed the storyline as created by the thieves and continue to falsely report the science of climate change.

Long after the Copenhagen conference failed to develop a treaty, the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee conducted an investigation and, in part, concluded: “We are content that the phrases such as ‘trick’ or ‘hiding the decline’ were colloquial terms used in private emails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead. Likewise the evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer-review process.”

As a result of 47 emails anonymously posted on a rented Russian file server, Michael Mann became the focus of an academic investigation. On February 3, 2010, that investigation concluded that “there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data.”

Watching this affair unfold, I am reminded Rachel Carson’s response to her chemical industry sponsored critics. “I recommend,” she said, “that you ask yourself: Who speaks? And why?” We would be wise to listen to her advice and look behind the curtains.

Below is a clip of my appearance on Fox News this morning talking with Bill Hemmer about starlings and the problems with invasive exotics.  

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can help NWF protect our native wildlife from this threat.

Click on the photo to learn more about starlings.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Fox News, the constant defender of dirty coal and big oil, is now out to destroy Van Jones. Why? Because Van is one of the most powerful voices urging America to move away from old, polluting ways to a new energy economy. Van has been a consistent voice for a deeper concern for the poor who live and work in nasty places where harmful chemicals are sprayed on crops that they pick and in urban areas where old power plants belch mercury, sulphates and other harmful contaminants into the air, soil and water.

As Van clearly stated at the 2009 Power Shift conference, change must be fundamental and must go deep enough to protect all people and to secure the future of nature. Here is what Van said to 12,000 college students gathered in Washington D.C. this past winter that got Glenn Beck so stirred up.

“This movement is deeper than a solar panel. Deeper than a solar panel. Don’t stop there. Don’t stop there. No, we’re going to change the whole system. We’re going to change the whole thing. We’re not going to put a new battery in a broken system. We want a new system.

“We want a new system. All we do is take out the dirty power system, the dirty power generation in a system and just replace it with some clean stuff, put a solar panel on top of this system. We don’t deal with how we are consuming water, we don’t deal with how we’re treating our other sister and other brothers’ species, we don’t deal with toxins, we don’t deal with the way we treat each other, if that’s not a part of this movement, let me tell you what you’ll have. This is all you’ll have. You’ll have solar powered bulldozers, solar powered buzz saws, and biofuel bombers and we’ll be fighting wars over lithium for the batteries instead of oil for the engines and we’ll still have a dead planet. This movement is deeper than a solar panel, deeper than a solar panel. Don’t stop there. Don’t stop there. No, we’re going to change the whole system.”

Glenn Beck distorts Van’s words to suggest that Van is calling for communism. These words offered as evidence completely out of context, Beck outrageously distorts Van’s call for a new way of thinking about our relationship to nature and to each other by saying,

“When will America wake up? The left has started a revolution. No different than Hugo Chavez. When Hugo Chavez was elected, he was elected by Democratic process. But he did not tell the people when he was running that he was a communist.”

Beck is dead wrong about Van Jones. Van’s provocative message is different, very different from the way Beck presents it. He is not proposing communism but access to green jobs for all and a fundamental change in mindset about how we care for nature, our planet and for all people including the poor and those yet unborn. Watch Van’s inspirational speech at the Powershift conference and judge for yourself whether or not Van’s call for some fresh thinking about environmental stewardship is about forming a communistic state or about establishing moral leadership on an urgent issue that threatens us all.

I also urge a careful reading of Van’s best selling book, “The Green Collar Economy-How one solution can fix our two biggest problems.”

How are oil-industry-funded skeptics handling the release of this major motion picture? Yesterday on Fox News Dayside, Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis decided to compare the movie to Nazi propaganda.

“You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore films to see the truth about global warming.”

Jeremy Symons, NWF’s Global Warming Campaign Director–the pro to Burnett’s con on the show–was able to slip in a final thought as the segment faded off into commercial:

“Sterling is an odd one to be casting aspersions on what Al Gore’s motives are, after all the oil industry has been giving him hundreds of thousands of dollars to his organization, just like tobacco companies used to do to try undercut…”

In my observations, An Inconvenient Truth has definitely been increasing the global warming chatter across our country. Am I right? Are we finally reaching a tipping point when it comes to not only knowing there is a problem but also stepping up and doing something about it? I and my potential future children certainly hope so.

Check out when An Inconvenient Truth is coming to your town. Oh, and from what I hear, the better a movie does opening weekend, the more theaters pick it up and keep it longer, so please go early and take a friend.

Once you see it, stop back in and post a review.