Update: Our efforts paid off, and the Appropriations Committee will no longer be considering amendments to the EPA budget this week. Stay tuned, though. Sen. Rockefeller could introduce his Dirty Air Act proposal as early as next week, so it’s still incredibly important that you contact your Senators and tell them to stop any and every Dirty Air Act proposal that rears its ugly head.

Are we starting to sound like a broken record? Well, when it comes to protecting their profits, even at the expense of the planet, corporate polluters are just that persistent. So we’ll have to keep calling out the Dirty Air Act every time it rears its ugly head. And as the Senate is back in session this week, its ugly head is inevitably rearing.

The Senate Appropriations Committee will be considering the EPA’s budget as one of its first orders of business this week, which gives big polluters, their lobbyists, and their allies in Congress the opportunity to add amendments to the EPA budget that would limit or roll back the agency’s authority to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act.

It’s not clear yet what form the Dirty Air Act will take this time around. Last session, the Senate only narrowly defeated the Dirty Air Act, aka Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski’s attempts to weaken the EPA’s authority and allow more self-regulation of the oil and coal industries. Yes, incredible as it may seem, Murkowski was suggesting more self-regulation of the industry that gave us the Deepwater Disaster in the Gulf and the Upper Big Branch tragedy in West Virginia.

Also last session, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia had put out a proposal that would suspend the EPA’s regulatory authority for two years — which may seem like a kindler, gentler version of the Dirty Air Act, some sort of Dirty Air Act lite, on the face of it. But when you consider that we need our emissions to peak by 2015, as the IPCC says they must to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, you realize that we simply don’t have two years to wait for serious action to stop climate pollution.

Now is certainly not the time to be moving backwards on regulating greenhouse gas emissions and implementing policies to kickstart the clean energy revolution. Write to the members of the Senate Appropriations Committee and tell them to defeat yet another Dirty Air Act.

You’ve probably seen that our ship, the Arctic Sunrise, is in the Gulf of Mexico right now on a mission to get to the truth about the oil spill and its impacts on the Gulf’s ecosystems and wildlife.

You might also have seen that another one of our ships, the Esperanza, is currently off the coast of Greenland, confronting reckless oil exploration and driving home the message that it’s time to “Go Beyond Oil.”

Just wanted to make sure you also saw these videos, which tell a little bit more about what each of these ship tours are all about.

In this video, Dan Howells, our very own deputy campaign directory, along with Paul Horsman from the Global Campaign for Climate Action and Captain Pete Willcox describe the mission of the Arctic Sunrise and the independent scientists onboard.

This next video was especially cool to me because I had the opportunity to sail on the Esperanza last year. Manness, the engineer you see in the video who talks about the energy efficiency measures installed on the ship, was onboard with me at the time as well. I’m kind of jealous I’m not onboard now helping confront Big Oil for recklessly endangering the fragile Arctic wilderness. But this video is so well done it’s pretty much as close as you can get to actually being on the ship without actually being on the ship.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just issued a report declaring 2000 to 2009 to be the hottest decade on record and the evidence of man-made global warming to be “undeniable.” Around 300 scientists from nearly 50 countries contributed to the NOAA report, which tracked 11 different indicators of climate change and found that seven of them – including air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, sea level, and humidity – are indeed rising.

Moreover, according to Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK’s Met Office, one of the agencies participating in the NOAA study, “The glaringly obvious explanation for this is warming from greenhouse gases.”

Yet within this context, a flak from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Myron Ebell, still has the gall to say, “It’s clear that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is.”

This is what the climate deniers’ tactics basically amount to: Covering their ears and singing. “La la la I can’t hear you everything is fine we need oil and coal lalala.”

The worst part is, it works. That’s why we have to push back.

The science is settled: Global warming is happening and human activities are causing it. But the reporter who wrote this article on CNN’s website didn’t bother factchecking Ebell whatsoever, meaning Ebell got away with repeating the Dirty Lie. We need you to help set the record straight.

Why would Ebell be willing to go on record ignoring hard scientific data with blatantly false talking points? Hm, let’s see… His employer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has taken buckets of money from oil companies like Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and Texaco. CEI has also hosted events sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and Arch Coal. Think that maybe has something to do with Mr. Ebell’s skepticism? At the very least, these egregious conflicts of interest should be pointeded out to readers, as they should invalidate any “impartial” or “expert” opinion Ebell may have been able to provide.

Here are a few links you can drop in the comments of the article on CNN to make sure future readers know the full story about Myron Ebell and the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Competitive Enterprise Institute – Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group
ExxonSecrets.org Factsheet: Competitive Enterprise Institute, CEI
Competitive Enterprise Institute on SourceWatch.org

We’ve all heard the arguments from Big Oil and King Coal: “Without coal and oil, energy and gas prices would go through the roof;” or “We have to use domestic coal and oil reserves to ensure our energy security;” and “Renewables can’t do the job, so we have to keep using fossil fuels.”

That’s the Dirty Lie: The idea, heavily promoted by coal and oil industry lobbyists and their friends in Congress, that there is no remedy for our addiction to fossil fuels. But the truth is that with today’s technology, we can continue to grow our economy while phasing out fossil fuels altogether.

Our Energy [R]evolution report lays out a roadmap for achieving a clean energy economy. It also shows that we could create over a million American jobs in the renewable energy sector alone by 2030.

So if we have the means for kicking our dirty energy habit and moving to clean, green energy, and most Americans are more than supportive, why isn’t it happening? The reason is simple: Big industry has an incredible amount of influence over our energy policy, thanks to decades of campaign contributions to the politicians who make the rules. These companies and politicians defend their planet-killing actions by saying that we need coal and oil. It’s time to call out the Dirty Lie, and break their stranglehold.

That’s where you come in. We need help watchdogging the politicians and talking heads who take money from the fossil fuels industry and then push the Dirty Lie on the American public. Whenever you catch the Dirty Lie being promoted without challenge, or find a case where someone is regurgitating fossil fuels lobbyist talking points as if they were fact, let us know. In turn, we’ll let you know when and where to help set the record straight.

There are a variety of ways you can plug in to our work to call out the Dirty Lie:

3 Ways to expose the Dirty Lie

Facebook

If you have a Facebook account you can immediately mobilize your friends to expose the dirty lie. When you find an article that repeats the lie, post it to your Facebook with a status message that says something like:

“This article claims that we can’t live without fossil fuels. That is a dirty lie! Please go to the article and leave a comment saying so.”

Twitter

If you spot the Dirty Lie in the media and want to report it via Twitter, just use the hashtag #dirtylie and make sure you link to the news piece in question. We’ll be searching for this hashtag regularly, so we’ll be sure to find it. You can regularly search for tweets with this hashtag as well, we’ll use it to let you know how you can help call out the worst offenders.

Delicious

Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service that allows you to bookmark and save web pages online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It’s perfect for the work before us of calling out the Dirty Lie!

Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with a keyword. That makes it a great tool for collaboration because we can easily look up all web pages tagged with the key word “DirtyLie.”

Here’s how to help:

1) If you’re new to Delicious, the first thing you need to do is create an account. Go to https://secure.delicious.com/login and follow the instructions. If you have a yahoo account you can use that to quickly create one. If not you’ll need to create one of those too.

2) Add a bookmarklet button to your browser’s bookmark bar. This way you’ll be able to bookmark and tag articles anywhere on the web with just a click. Go to http://delicious.com/help/bookmarklets and follow the instructions for your web browser.

3) Now it’s time to start exposing the Dirty Lie by bookmarking and tagging articles. When you read articles that repeat junk science like “We’ll never have enough renewable energy to replace oil,” click your “Bookmark on Delicious” bookmarklet button you added to your browser. A pop-up window will appear. Add the tag “dirtylie” (important: keep “dirtylie” as one word) and any other tags or info you think is appropriate and click save.

4) Find other articles tagged with “dirtylie” at http://delicious.com/tag/dirtylie. You can read and comment on these articles and find other Delicious users that are exposing the Dirty Lie.

Greenpeace staff and volunteers will be keeping an eye on all of these social networks for the instances of the Dirty Lie you report. We’ll prioritize the worst offenders and let you know how you can help set the record straight.

Of course, you can also stay tuned right here on this blog to find out when and where you can help push back on the Dirty Lie. Stay tuned.

We released a report back in March that exposed Charles and David Koch, the billionaire oilmen who control Koch Industries, as a chief source of funding for the climate denial machine. Well, turns out doing everything possible to delay the clean energy revolution actually runs in the family. Today we’ve released a report on Bill Koch, David’s twin brother and the principal funder of opposition to Cape Wind, the project to build the nation’s largest wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.

A Greenpeace boat in front of the Offshore Windpark Egmond aan Zee off the Dutch coast. America is falling behind in the race to develop renewable energy technologies and utilize renewable resources. Cape Wind would be the first major offshore wind facility in the US.

Bill Koch made his fortune through his privately-held, carbon-intensive company, Oxbow (or, I should probably say, he founded Oxbow with the fortune he received from suing his brothers in 1983 after they ousted him from the family business). Oxbow Corporation, with $3.7 billion in yearly sales and over 1200 employees, sells 10 million metric tons of petroleum coke and 8 million metric tons of steam coal annually.

After making a killing peddling dirty energy, Bill Koch turns around and uses his immense personal wealth to fund the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the primary group that finds every possible way to undermine and delay Cape Wind. Even worse, he pays lobbyists through his Oxbow corporation to try and quietly kill the wind farm project altogether.

We compiled the full story behind Bill Koch into a brief dossier which you can read below or righ-click this link and choose "Save Link As" to download the PDF: Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition.

Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition

Since the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig exploded and sank in April, BP has devoted inadequate resources to the oil spill response, withheld information from the American public, and denied access to spill sites to journalists. So our ship the Arctic Sunrise is heading to the Gulf to do an independent assessment of the impacts. We believe it’s way past time the full, unabridged truth about the extent and nature of this oil catastrophe was told to America and the world.

The Greenpeace ship MY Arctic Sunrise was in the Mediterranean Sea in June to help protect endangered bluefin tuna. © Gavin Parsons / Greenpeace

The reports coming out of Louisiana about cleanup workers and even local police helping BP enforce a media blockade have been nearly as frustrating as watching the oil spew into the Gulf without cease for almost three months (a hat tip is most definitely deserved here to Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland, who has been chasing this story all along and doing a great job of reporting what’s happening on the ground).

It’s in BP’s best interest to limit media access to oiled beaches and wildlife, as the more they can contain the truth about just how much damage has been done, the more they can limit their liability to pay for that damage later on. We released our ScamWow video last week to highlight this very sad and galling state of affairs.

We’ve also had a team on the ground since the start of the disaster, tirelessly investigating local beaches and coastal ecosystems to take measure of the extent of the damage. Our team has taken copious photos and posted numerous oil spill updates on our blogs to make sure folks can see for themselves just what BP has done to the Gulf.

But BP is cracking down on public access more than ever, so we’re stepping up our efforts. The Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise is on its way to the Gulf for a three-month expedition to document the true impacts of the BP Deepwater Disaster on the Gulf’s marine life and unique ecosystems. This tour is especially crucial now because even if BP has finally capped the leaking well, the crisis will continue for some time, endangering wildlife and ecosystems, destroying the region’s fisheries, and affecting the ocean for decades to come. It’s important that we not let the focus shift away from the truly extensive catastrophe that is still unfolding in the Gulf, whether more oil is spewing out of BP’s well or not.

The Sunrise will leave Tampa, Florida during the week of August 9th and visit the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas before approaching the wellhead during the first month of the expedition. The crew aboard the Sunrise will be examining everything from the plankton on the surface to the subsurface plumes and the deep-sea corals on the floor of the Gulf.

The Arctic Sunrise is a 50-meter long, icebreaker ship that was purchased by Greenpeace in 1995. Since then, it has peacefully protested whaling in the Southern Ocean, documented climate change and glacier melts in the Arctic, and was the first ship to circumnavigate James Ross Island in the Antarctic, which was  an impossible journey until a 200m thick ice shelf connecting the island to the Antarctic continent collapsed.
 
Throughout the expedition, the Arctic Sunrise will host independent scientists and researchers who will be looking for oiled marine mammals, turtles, fish, and sea birds. Charles Messing and Jose Lopez from Nova Southeastern University will be on board looking at sponges, which filter large quantities of water and are therefore useful for looking at sub-lethal impacts of oil and dispersants. We’ll announce other on-board scientists in the coming weeks.

So keep checking back on our blog for live interviews with our onboard campaigners and scientists, video and still photography from the Gulf, and an interactive, web-based Virtual Ship Tour that lets supporters come along for the journey. You can grab an RSS feed of our blog posts dedicated to the tour by going here: Greenpeace Gulf Oil Disaster Expedition blogs.

We’ll also be posting lots of ways you can help call for a moratorium on new offshore drilling and for Congress and the White House to come clean, get rid of campaign contributions from dirty energy, and stop subsidizing big oil and coal.

In the meantime, help us promote our Energy [R]evolution report, which shows how it’s possible to phase out fossil fuels and reach 96% renewables in our energy mix by 2050. The US consumes 25% of the oil produced globally but has only 3% of the world’s oil reserves. We will never drill our way out of being dependent on foreign oil. The only way for the US to achieve energy security and stop oil spills before they happen is to invest in its huge renewable energy potential.

Today the big news is that BP thinks it has finally managed to cap the well that has spewed as much as 184 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Now, of course, we’re all waiting anxiously to see if the cap BP placed over the well will be able to contain the oil, or if it will spring a new leak and begin gushing even more oil into the Gulf.

It’s great that BP might at last have stopped the bleeding. But compare this to another less-noted bit of news: It was announced today that China has officially overtaken the USA as the world’s leading investor in renewable energy.

Nothing could paint a starker picture of the state of energy in America. Fossil fuels companies and their lobbyists have a stranglehold on our energy policy, and we’ve failed miserably to move off of their dirty product even as reckless companies like BP and Massey Energy have destroyed lives and livelihoods across the nation in their pursuit of profits. We’re reduced to hoping a thoroughly negligent oil company has finally managed to contain a disastrous leak — which nonetheless has already done untold damage that will affect the Gulf region for decades — as our global competitors quietly pass us by in ushering in the coming clean energy revolution.

We’re falling behind. Renewables are the way of the future, no matter how many fossil fuels lobbyists there are trying to convince our elected officials otherwise. China knows this, and is aggressively pursuing renewable energy.

When will we wise up?

There’s no way to clean up an oil spill. We’ve seen this time and again — in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, for instance, where oil from the Exxon Valdez spill is still having an impact on local ecosystems. Corporations like Exxon or BP that find themselves responsible for an oil spill — or, as was the case for Exxon and now is the case for BP, an oil disaster — are really left with only one option to handle the problem: public relations, damage control and fierce lobbying.

It’s clear BP knows this all too well, and is determined to spare no expense on the cleanup… of its image. We put together this "ScamWow" video to highlight this sad state of affairs:

We decided to spoof the original late night infomercials for the ShamWow miracle clean-up towel, which is touted as a quick fix for any cleaning problem (it’s made in Germany and "You know the Germans always make good stuff"), because BP is attempting to use PR damage control as a miracle cure for its sullied image. Except, unfortunately, PR has no miraculous cleaning powers. The company’s image may be less soiled as a result of the millions BP is spending on PR, but the Gulf of Mexico will be reeling from the impacts of the company’s negligence for decades.

Consider the estimated $50 million BP has spent on an all-out media blitz, complete with a TV ad featuring an earnest Tony “I’d like my life back” Hayward looking into the camera and assuring us “We will make this right.” What he means is, "We will do anything to make you think we will make this right" — anything short of, you know, actually reporting the true size of the spill, allowing journalists unfettered access to spill sites and oiled beaches to provide independent coverage of cleanup operations, stopping the damn leak in a timely manner, or god-forbid taking worker and environmental safety concerns seriously in the first place so that this spill never even happened.

“The Gulf spill is a tragedy that never should have happened,” Tony “The size of the spill is small in relation to the size of the ocean” Hayward tells us in his TV ad. We can agree on that, at least, Tony!

BP has engaged multiple PR and lobby firms to help wage its PR assault, which spans all conceivable media. According to our calculations, BP spent almost $6 million through the end of June on ads in newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, while also purchasing Google and Yahoo ads that will display whenever people search for “oil spill” — surely an extremely pricey keyword at the moment that is generating a lot of clicks.

Considering the spill cleanup costs (estimated at $16 million a day), why would BP do this? Because public relations and lobbying is one way BP can turn public opinion in their favor and soften the blow from lawsuits, regulators, and Congress.  If the public could somehow be made to feel sympathetic toward BP, or to feel that BP is really going “to make this right,” the ultimate financial pain to BP might be lessened. So from where BP’s sitting — a place where the bottom line is the ultimate concern, not Gulf Coast residents’ livelihoods, not Gulf Coast ecosystems — the decision to give their image the vigorous scrubbing they can’t give the Gulf Coast ecosystems befouled by their oil is a no-brainer.

BP made $66 million a day in profits in the first quarter of 2010. If they want to keep raking it in hand over fist like that, they gotta do some damage control. It’s just that simple.

Oil spills are an inevitability of the supremely dirty oil drilling business, especially as companies are forced to dig deeper and take more outrageous risks to reach what’s left of the world’s oil reserves. Heard about BP’s plans to drill 2 miles deep and as much as eight miles horizontally from a gravel island the company built in the middle of the Beaufort Sea up in the Arctic? No, that’s not just a sick joke.

The Exxon Valdez spill is not our only example of how impossible it is to clean up spilled oil: Ask the villagers down in Ecuador who are still battling with Chevron to try and get their traditional lands cleaned up, or the people over in Nigeria who suffer from companies like Shell spilling the equivalent of a Valdez-sized spill every year. Oil is wreaking havoc on communities across the globe, and the companies responsible always seem to treat these disasters as little more than the cost of doing business. The Ecuadorian Amazon, the Niger Delta, the Gulf of Mexico — these are collateral damage in Big Oil’s relentless pursuit for reckless profits.

The real way forward is of course to stop drilling and invest in clean energy, but oil companies cannot be depended on to drive society toward clean energy. They are OIL companies after all.

The only way to stop oil spills once and for all is to leave it in the ground where it belongs. President Obama and Congress need to ensure we kickstart the clean energy revolution and stop drilling for oil. Check out our blueprint for how America can achieve 96% renewable energy by 2050 and create over a million jobs by 2030: Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable USA Energy Outlook. Help promote our vision for the sustainable future! Then take action to tell Congress No New Drilling, Period.

As public support for solutions to climate change grows, the theme of last week’s G8 and G20 meetings seems to have been a decided lack of urgency to implement solutions to global warming.

The G8 focused on security threats — nuclear proliferation, terrorism — but failed to make any progress on global warming, easily the biggest threat to global peace we’re facing. Four paragraphs in the final communiqué were devoted specifically to climate change — including assurances that leaders are “committed to building low carbon and climate resilient economies” and that “climate change remains top of mind” — but no new initiatives or specific actions were announced that would indicate a sense of urgency among the G8 leadership.

The G20 had similarly unimpressive results to show for itself. Some G20 leaders took the first steps towards phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, but collectively the G20 failed to address the urgent need for visionary leadership to stop catastrophic climate change and transition the global economy toward clean, green renewable energy.

Some nations deserve more credit than others. Of all the G20 nations, the US offered up the most robust plan for ending subsidies for big oil and coal, though the plan represents only a fraction of the total subsidies and still requires Congressional approval. At the other end of the spectrum, nations like Australia and Canada failed to take their commitments seriously. In appendices to the communiqué, language suggests that commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies are “voluntary and member-specific,” something Canada and Australia have been aggressively pushing for.

One of the best reactions I’ve read so far, however, is from a colleague over at Greenpeace International, Brian Fitzgerald:

I don’t know about you, but the leaders I want to follow aren’t the ones who say it’s too hard to break the world’s addiction to dirty energy. The politicians I want to elect aren’t bought off by oil lobbyists. The beaches I want to walk on are not covered in tar balls. The future I want to inhabit isn’t black with coal dust and oily scum.

They don’t know it yet, but the politicians who sat in last week’s G20 meeting and decided to backslide on their commitments to tackle climate change are no longer the most important voices on the planet. It’s the people who were outside that meeting calling for an energy revolution. It’s the people who have a better idea about what our world can look like, run by energy sources that don’t spill, burn, explode, poison, or destroy. Those are the voices we need to listen to, those are the investment paths we need to follow. Real leaders look ahead to the next generation, not the next election. This is what they look like:

In the wake of the unconscionable decision earlier this week by a federal judge in Louisiana to lift the deepwater drilling moratorium, it’s good to see Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is talking about taking action. But what we really need is Congressional action to ban offshore drilling.

The Obama Administration should renew its efforts to enforce a ban on new drilling activities. This certainly means that Secretary Salazar should reissue the moratorium with further clarification and justification, and President Obama should appeal the court ruling to the 5th circuit as his administration has promised.

At the same time, Congress needs to enact a drilling ban into law — the moratorium should not have been allowed to lapse in the first place and Congress should take immediate action to ensure that no new drilling occurs.

In order to stop fossil fuels tragedies like the BP Deepwater Disaster once and for all, we need to leave behind the dirty energy of the past and move aggressively toward the clean energy of the future. No more fossil fuels and nuclear energy. We must replace them with clean renewable energy and efficiency technology.

Sign our petition calling on Congress to:

• Enact an immediate ban on all new drilling and phase-out all remaining drilling;
• Remove liability limits for energy-related activities in accordance with the principal that the polluter must pay;
• Improve regulation and oversight of energy-related activities to ensure maximum protection of the public health and the environment;
• And end all subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy and invest in clean renewable energy, efficiency technology, and infrastructure development.