“The United States needs to be less dependent on foreign sources of energy and more dependent upon American resourcefulness. Whether that is in the Everglades, or whether that is in the eastern Gulf region, or whether that’s in North Dakota, we need to go where the energy is,” she said during a stop in Sarasota, according to the Associated Press. “Of course it needs to be done responsibly. If we can’t responsibly access energy in the Everglades then we shouldn’t do it.” #

Jerry Karnas, communications director for the Everglades Foundation, says that drilling in the Everglades wouldn’t even be economically viable, as there really isn’t oil within Everglades proper and the little oil available in surrounding areas is of a very low quality. #

“As time has worn on, the Everglades has begun to encompass other areas, including Big Cypress Preserve,” says Karnas. “In 1972, there were some historic mineral rights retained by the Barron Collier family, and today, it is nothing more than a very, very small operation where the company drills for meager amounts of oil that are of a very low quality.” #

Overall, says Karnas, the minute amount of drilling near the Everglades is a “historic anomaly” and a “remnant of the past.” #

“There’s no way that it would work, under current law,” he says. “There’s no path to drilling more in any of these areas, and no way you’ll drill in the Everglades. It’s not a serious policy proposition.” Karnas says that Bachmann was likely trying to pander to a crowd that has come to associate the Environmental Protection Agency with killing jobs, a claim often made by many in the GOP. During a recent stop in Jacksonville, Bachmann promised to “turn out the lights and lock the doors” at the EPA, should she be elected. #

Unfortunately for Bachman, there is no real push to drill in the Everglades. #

“It’s the same thing as saying, ‘Let’s drill under Space Mountain, in Disney World,’” Karnas says. “She’s conflating things.” #

Everglades Foundation CEO Kirk Fordham says that thousands of hunters and fishermen, as well as 7 million Floridians that rely on the Everglades as a source of  drinking water, likely wouldn’t be too excited at the prospect of drilling in the area. #

#

The bill would end all tax subsidies for the five largest oil companies, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says it would shave $21 billion over 10 years from the budget.

Bingaman, who is retiring this year, said he isn’t sure how he will vote on the bill or a likely Republican counterproposal.

“I’ve voted in some cases to remove and reduce tax breaks for the oil industry in other cases I’ve voted not to because I felt that the proposals covered too much,” he said in an interview with C-SPAN which will air this weekend.

On Thursday, heads of the five biggest oil companies argued that cutting the tax breaks would hurt job and economic growth.

“By undermining U.S. competitiveness, they would discourage future investment in energy projects in the United States and therefore undercut job creation and economic growth,” Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., is the sponsor of the legislation, titled the “Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act.”

The bill is likely to not have much, if any, Republican support. The bill would need some Republican votes and all Democratic votes to clear a Republican filibuster.

On the campaign trail in Iowa last weekend, Bachmann offered an assertion that PolitiFact, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, found completely false. Bachmann said, “Let’s look at the number one. Number one. That’s the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office.”

She continued, “Gee, maybe that has something to do with this next figure. Let’s take a look, $1.83. That is the price that gasoline was the day before Barack Obama took office as president of the United States. Is it time for a change?”

Obama put a moratorium on offshore drilling following the an explosion at a BP oil rig that killed 11 people and caused one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in U.S. history.

PolitiFact found that the Obama administration has approved numerous permits for offshore drilling, both deepwater (six permits) and shallow (39 permits). PolitiFact gave Bachmann its lowest rating, Pants on Fire.

As an aside, Sen. Al Franken signed on to the Use It or Lose It Act of 2011 directing oil companies to develop oil production on federal lands they currently lease or lose their leases in an attempt to ramp up oil production.

On Wednesday, Minnesota Public Radio’s Poligraph evaluated another of Bachmann’s statements during her Iowa campaigning: “From the day it passed one year ago until today, there hasn’t been one week that a majority of Americans haven’t said ‘kill that bill.’”

Poligraph notes, “Bachmann’s correct that there’s solid support for repealing some or all the health care bill. What’s unclear is whether the majority of Americans do, or if they have every week for the last year. One poll supports this claim, others don’t. As a result, Bachmann’s claim is Inconclusive.”

Bachmann’s office said the numbers she was referencing came from Gallup, but Poligraph notes that other pollsters have found that the number of Americans who support a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act varies widely.

Also on Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey grilled Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf about Bachmann’s infamous claim that $105 billion was “hidden” in the health care reform bill. ThinkProgress caught the exchange:

REP. FRANK PALLONE (D-NJ): We considered a bill that would repeal funding for section 1311, the health insurance exchange planning and establishment grants. Did you know about that funding stream?

ELMENDORF: Yes, Congressman.

PALLONE: Okay, so it wasn’t hidden. What about section 4002, the prevention and public health fund. Did you know about that?

ELMENDORF: Yes, Congressman.

PALLONE: So that wasn’t hidden either. And what about funding for school based health centers? Did you know about that?

ELMENDORF: Yes, Congressman.

While it’s unclear exactly what presumptive House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) energy agenda will be, we can get some idea of his thinking from the American Energy Act, a bill introduced by House Republicans last year as an alternative to cap-and-trade.

Here are the four main point of the bill, according to a summary:

• “Increase production of American-made energy in an environmentally-sound manner.”
• “Promote new, clean and renewable sources of energy such as nuclear, clean-coal-technology, wind and solar energy.”
• “Encourage greater efficiency and conservation by extending tax incentives for energy efficiency and rewarding development of greater conservation techniques and new energy sources.”
• “Cut red-tape and reduce frivolous litigation.”

Expect a great deal of discussion about expanding nuclear power. The House Republican bill calls for bringing 100 new nuclear power plants online in the next 20 years and streamlining the approval process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. At the same time, the bill calls on the NRC to continue its review of the embattled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository “without political interference,” a clear reference to the Obama administration’s efforts to prevent the site from accepting waste.

The bill also calls for expanded drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf and in the Arctic (this bill, of course, was introduced before the oil spill, so it remains to be seen how it would change as a result of the disaster). House Republicans would then use revenue from increased drilling to create a fund for renewable and “alternative” energy technology like wind, solar, so-called “clean coal” and biomass.

The proposal also calls for “cutting red tape and reducing frivolous lawsuits.” This includes curtailing environmental reviews and limiting the review time allowed in environmental lawsuits. Here are two key sections from the summary:

Legal Reform: The bill curtails dilatory lawsuits that are designed to obstruct American energy exploration. While ensuring people a day in court, it expedites judicial review by imposing a 60-day deadline on legal challenges and requires cases to be filed in the District Court for the District of Columbia, to prevent forum shopping. …
Environmental Review: The bill reduces red-tape and cost to the Environmental Protection Agency arising from having to needlessly identify alternative locations for renewable energy projects, while ensuring a proper environmental review for the proposed action and no-action.

But the plan also has a number of potential national implications. In order to convince voters that it’s worth their while to allow her to keep her Senate seat, Murkowski pledged to leverage her power as ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to ensure that the state expands its drilling activities and is able to bring its natural gas supplies to market in the contiguous United States.

In a statement, Murkowski’s re-election campaign gently reminded voters of the senator’s power to authorize and appropriate money for the Interior Department, the agency with control over the country’s offshore and onshore drilling operations. In fact, the campaign notes that Murkowski can block Interior Department appropriations that will restrict drilling in Alaska.

According to the campaigns statement on the announcement today:

It is critical for Alaskans to remember Sen. Murkowski’s dual positions of authorizing and appropriating power over the Interior Department, slated for next year in the Senate. Not only will Lisa have enough votes in the Energy Committee to pass ANWR votes for any committee bill, but she will have the power to deny any appropriations that go towards further restricting Alaska’s federal oil and gas fields, including offshore fields. This position is unprecedented for any Alaskan member of Congress.

In addition, Murkowski pledged to use her seniority to push for the construction of a natural gas pipeline to transport Alaska’s natural gas resources to the rest of the United States. “In recent weeks I’ve spoken to a number of energy leaders in Alaska, leaders with an aggressive vision for getting Alaska’s natural gas to market and making sure that our in-state needs are met, especially here in Fairbanks where fuel and electricity prices are so high that they are straining budgets and affecting the local economy,” she said.

For more on Murkowski’s energy priorities in the next Congress, see this statement from her campaign.

The announcement comes a little more than a week after the Obama administration announced that it is overturning the moratorium on deepwater drilling. Though environmentalists still have concerns with the practice, deepwater drilling stands to yield massive quantities of oil. The administration has established new deepwater drilling safety rules that companies must comply with before drilling.

The Jack and St. Malo oil fields are in about 7,000 feet of water, while the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was in about 5,000 feet of water. Chevron is investing $7.5 billion to develop the fields. The project is expected to start producing in 2014. Chevron says it can produce 170,000 barrels of oil and 42.5 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

The oil fields are potentially very lucrative. Chevron says they have the capacity to produce 500 million barrels of oil.

This is Zade Marcrie’s story. Marcrie owns a fishing charter business in Little Sarasota Bay, Fla. In an email to me, Marcrie told me about his struggle with the claims process:

I filed with BP and they just kept asking for more documentation but the person with my file did talk to me. Since re-filing with GCCF on 8/25 I’ve only been able to talk to people with generic answers. I call them the Placaters.

My claim has been Under Review since around 8/28, but initially I applied for a Final Payment. It took two weeks to find out only Emergency Payment claims were being reviewed. I spoke with a Placater and asked if I should go ahead and file for an Emergency Payment. He said I’d have to start over with a new application and my initial claim for Final Payment would be voided.

A week later I received a letter from GCCF asking if I was sure I didn’t want to file for an emergency payment. It said all I had to do was email, mail or fax them my intention to receive an EP. I did and was told, by a Placater, they not only received my email, but I had been put in an expedited queue. A week later I received an email asking if I wanted to file for an EP. … I was frustrated, but I replied that I did want an EP. The next week I received an email stating they had received my request. I called and a Placater said my claim for EP had been in an expedited queue for two weeks.

Its obvious the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. … [W]hen you consider how much better off myself and untold numbers of others would be had our claims been handled within a week its actually pathetic.

What’s more frustrating are rumors about the claims reps being inexperienced people with backgrounds in any and every field other than claims and/or accounting or finance.

For now all I can do is keep checking my status online.

The above has been edited for clarity.

If you are having problems with your oil spill claim, email me: arestuccia@washingtonindependent.com.

The story, by Ryan Lizza, is nearly 10,000 words, but it’s definitely worth a read. It documents, in extensive detail, how the White House and Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and (at least for a time) Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) were often not on the same page as they tried to hash out a climate bill.

For instance, the White House announced a plan in March to open up new areas of the Outer Continental Shelf to drilling. The plan was announced while Kerry, Graham and Lieberman were simultaneously negotiating a plan to open up more drilling in exchange for key industry groups’ support for their climate bill.

But, Lizza reports, the White House made its drilling announcement without consulting the senators, taking away their leverage in negotiations with industry.

The Sierra Club has worked for six months to determine how to reduce the United States' oil dependence. (Flickr, The Sierra Club)

Despite the Gulf oil spill, a massive pipeline break in Michigan and broad concerns about global warming, ambitious climate-change and energy legislation is likely dead for the year. That poses a conundrum, going forward, for environmentalists: How to convince lawmakers of the need for legislation to sever the country’s decades-long ties to oil and to reform energy policy more generally?

[Environment1] The Sierra Club is in the process of trying to answer that question. For the past six months, it has worked on a massive study on how to reduce the United States’ oil dependence in an economically and environmentally beneficial way. The group is also building a coalition of environmental advocates and lawmakers to support the project, which will quantify potential oil-use reductions across every industrial sector.

“Over the next 20 years, how steep can we make cuts in oil consumption while allowing the economy to flourish and while creating more jobs rather than penalizing individual workers or communities?” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune asked. “So, this will be a major priority of the club over the next several years — to build a broad based coalition of organizations and elected officials who will want to stand up for a very thoughtful and pragmatic, but visionary and aggressive plan to get off oil.”

In an interview with The Washington Independent, Brune, who took over his post just one month before the oil spill started, outlines the organization’s oil study, talks about the prospects for energy legislation and previews the upcoming mid-term elections.

Here is an edited-down version of our interview:

What is the major issue going forward for the Sierra Club right now?
Our top issue remains fighting climate change in a way that increases the availability of clean energy like solar and wind, while also improving the public health benefits associated with decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels.

Is the focus now on Environmental Protection Agency regulations, Congress or both?
I would say both for sure. We see great opportunity in EPA rulemakings to increase public health benefits by forcing utilities in particular to account for the cost of their pollution. A top priority right now is organizing around EPA’s hearings on coal ash, to make sure that coal ash is treated as a hazardous waste. But, over the next couple of years, we’ll be looking at a whole series of rulemakings, many of which are focused on stationary sources like coal plants, but we’re also looking at EPA rulemakings to cut our dependence on oil.

Is there a serious concern about challenges to EPA’s regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act going forward?
Yeah, certainly many threats have been made to EPA’s authority to act under the Clean Air Act, attempts either to gut the Clean Air Act or eliminate EPA’s authority. So, we’re taking those threats very seriously. We also think that should there be a public debate about these issues that the public overwhelmingly supports strong, effective and cost-effective regulations that have come out of the EPA for the last 40 years under the Clean Air Act. We think there’s broad public support for retaining its authority.

In terms of Congress, it doesn’t seem that anything is going to happen on cap-and-trade any time soon. Is that your thinking as well?
Well, you know, I think it is difficult to predict too far into the future. We think Congress should act. We know that members were put into office with the expectation that there would be a meaningful, substantive response to climate change and that Congress would enact laws that would put a down payment on scaling up clean energy. So, we know that the demand is there. But whether or not senators in particular will respond remains to be seen.

Putting aside cap-and-trade, there’s been talk of a narrower energy bill. It looks like Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Sen. Brownback  (R-Kans.) are introducing a renewable energy standard that they are hoping to get passed. Is there a specific RES target that you would like to see or is it that the policy needs to move forward as soon as possible?
Well, let me make a general point. There was far too much of a focus earlier this spring on a single bill to address climate change economy-wide. And, in reality, there are dozens of things that Congress can do to fight climate change and to increase energy security in the country. In regards to this particular RES bill, our focus is primarily on keeping it clean. We want to see a renewable energy standard that is focused on truly clean energy and doesn’t have absurd giveways to nuclear power or so-called clean coal or any one of the other handful of options. And then of course to increase those investments as quickly as possible.

Is there a number that’s being thrown around among your members now?
Yeah, but it’s not something I really want to discuss in the public right now.

What other things are you focusing on in Congress?
I’d say the top thing is a plan to get off oil. We just experienced the largest environmental disaster in our country’s history and in response, Congress has done nothing. There’s not even a plan to fully reform what used to be called MMS and there’s not yet a plan to hold oil companies fully accountable and to lift the liability cap. And most importantly, there’s no effective plan right now to significantly reduce our dependence on foreign oil. So, if there’s one thing that Congress can do in the next couple of months, it would be to challenge the oil industry and deliver us a plan to get off oil.

It’s been sort of an uphill battle trying to get an oil spill response bill to pass, something that is incredibly popular with the American people. And you’re right, it seems like the bill is getting held up on this idea of liability, whether or not an oil company should be held 100 percent liable for spilling thousands of gallons of oil into the ocean. What are your thoughts on that?
We shouldn’t be privatizing the gain and sharing the risk with the public. If oil companies are going to be benefiting from oil drilling, they also have to be able to absorb any of the risks associated with drilling.

Do you expect that Congress will pass an oil spill bill this year?
We do.

I wanted to also touch on the mid-term elections. It’s on everybody’s mind right now. What is the Sierra Club doing in terms of working with individual candidates?
So, there’s lots that we’re doing. The Sierra Club has 1.4 million members and supporters, so over the next several weeks, a big job of ours will be to educate our supporters about what’s at stake Nov. 2., trying to get people out to the polls and to engage our members to become volunteers. So, the Sierra Club endorses specific candidates.

We get very heavily involved in local and state propositions. Arguably our biggest priority this year is to defeat Prop 23, which would undermine the Global Warming Solutions Act, AB32, that was passed in California a few years ago. With that, we’re doing a massive voter mobilization drive. Individual members will be calling voters to encourage them to get out. We are also part of a coalition of groups that is doing advertising, thought we’re not doing any ourselves.

Are there any other races that are of particular concern for you?
We’re looking at the Senate races in Nevada and Missouri. Obviously, Harry Reid has been excellent in fighting the coal industry as well as supporting big investments in clean energy. We are also looking at the Florida race. Democratic Senate candidate Meek has a 100 percent League of Conservation Voting score. He’s been strongly in favor of Florida’s solar bills as well as the ban on offshore oil drilling. There’s obviously dozens or even hundreds of races in which the environmental voice is an important one.

There has been a lot said by the oil industry and Gulf coast lawmakers about the Obama administration’s offshore drilling moratorium’s impact on jobs, though there was a report that came out last week that said job losses might not be quite what people estimated. What’s the Sierra Club’s position on all of this? Should the moratorium be lifted?
No, I think that a full moratorium should be put in place. We’re mindful of the fact that we need to make stronger investments in clean energy jobs so that those who work in the oil industry who want to put food on the table for their families have viable alternatives in growing industries that they can work in.

To be clear, we’re not advocating turning off the spigot in the Gulf. There are more than 4,0000 rigs operating in the Gulf right now and we are not saying there should be no oil drilling in the Gulf, not until we have a clear plan to get off oil. But what we’re saying is that since it’s been proven now that oil drilling offshore is dirty and it’s dangerous and it’s deadly, we need to tighten up the safety regulations to make sure that disasters like this don’t happen in the future. And we need to stop investing in exploring for new oil and instead explore much more carefully and aggressively investments in solar and wind so that we’re not poisoning our coastlines as we’re trying to keep our lights on.

On pipeline safety. There have been a couple major disasters this year. Of course, the natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Calif. And before that there was an oil spill in Michigan from an oil sands pipeline. Looming over this you have a massive proposed pipeline project, the Keystone XL project, that is going to go from Canada to Texas. Has the Sierra Club been looking at the issue of pipeline safety through a new set of eyes now that we’ve had these disasters?
Yes, we have. There’s two things that we’re doing. Clearly, the cost of our reliance on oil — when you talk abut the Michigan spill, the Gulf oil spill and the Keystone pipeline — is so much higher than what we pay at the pump when you consider the foreign policy implications, the fact that our entire economy is held hostage to wild fluctuations in oil prices.

So, what we’ve done over the last six months since I started at the Sierra Club is to build out a much more aggressive, comprehensive plan for how our country can get off oil. Over the next 20 years, how steep can we make cuts in oil consumption while allowing the economy to flourish and while creating more jobs rather than penalizing individual workers or communities. So, this will be a major priority of the club over the next several years — to build a broad based coalition of organizations and elected officials who will want to stand up for a very thoughtful and pragmatic, but visionary and aggressive plan to get off oil.

And then, regarding natural gas, we don’t think we can simultaneously phase out coal, oil and gas at the same time. Gas will need to stick around for a while. But there the challenge is to have much higher and much tighter safety standards so we’re not in this disastrous position again and again and again where people are losing their lives due to an industry is ineffectively regulated.

On oil sands or, as some call them, tar sands. There were senators in Canada last week reviewing oil sands production in there. Is there a message you would like to send to them in terms of how oil sands should be treated? Because there’s an argument out there that it’s better to get oil from Canada, despite the high greenhouse gas emissions of oil sands production, because we’re no longer reliant on the Middle East.
I think that’s just misguided thinking. The Pentagon says that climate change is one of the top national security threats in the 21st century. We have to deal effectively with climate change. Importing oil from the tar sands is 2-3 times more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional oil. You don’t solve a problem by making it worse. So, I understand that the notion that we have oil that is under the sands of our neighbors to the north is attractive to people who think we can have a simply pipeline solve a lot of problems. But the reality is that if we rely too much on a different source of oil that is dirtier, that will accelerate climate change rather than reduce it’s impacts, we’re only going to be replacing one set of problems with an entirely different set of problems. The only effective way to address this problem systemically is to adopt a plan to get America off oil.

Can you be more specific about this plan?
We’ll have a plan that we can introduce probably in the next 3-6 months. It looks at every major industrial source of oil consumption, from the oil that’s used in medium- and heavy-duty trucks, light trucks, cars and SUVs, the oil used for pesticides and paints. Whatever the major source of consumption is, we’re looking at a major, comprehensive plan to phase it out where and whenever possible.

What’s the time frame of this phase-out?
The big challenge is political will. For example, clearly it is technically possible, one would presume, to produce nothing but plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles in the next couple years. Whether that’s politically possible, of course remains to be seen. If the United States were to mobilize as we did in World War II and completely transition the entire automobile fleet to produce a new technology, clearly that could be done.

What we need to do is measure the distance between what we can do and what we’re willing to do as a country and develop what we feel as responsible and pragmatic, but also aggressive tactics to achieve energy independence. To help inform that decision we would look at the cost of different decisions under different time scenarios, the benefits economically, environmentally or socially depending on our foreign policy and what would the oil savings be in real-world terms. Then we’d highlight a few different options. We’ll have the data shortly. Then we’ll figure out how to use it. We’ve commissioned this first study just as the Sierra Club, but we anticipate doing more with a broad coalition.