Here are a few, thought-provoking climate news articles and opinion pieces that caught our eye this morning. We don’t necessarily agree with everything here – for instance, the crazy quote by David Koch - but we thought the articles were worth sharing.

Rocky Kirstner, Switchboard: “Deception by dispersal; the great Gulf oil tragedy”
The pictures below were all taken on July 28, 2010, just off the Gulf coast of Grand Bayou near Barataria Bay. They were taken shortly after cleanup authorities announced major surface oil had been cleaned up.

David Pettit, Switchboard: “Oil Companies: Clean Up Your Own Mess”
You make a mess, you clean it up.  We learned this as kids.  The oil spill bill introduced by Senator Reid, S. 3663, is true to this principle.  But the Republican oil spill bill, S. 3643, would let oil companies walk away without cleaning up the biggest messes ever seen in the United States and make the American taxpayers bail them out. 

Silicon Valley Mercury News: “Jerry Brown calls state’s global warming law the key difference between him, Meg Whitman”
Calling the issue the defining difference between himself and Republican Meg Whitman in the governor’s race, Democrat Jerry Brown gave an impassioned defense Thursday of California’s landmark global warming law.

David Roberts, Grist: “The South has renewable energy too!”
Missing in action: the South. This has always been the politics of an RES: Southern lawmakers don’t believe they have access to renewables and they think they’ll just end up transferring money to other parts of the country. Their rates will rise more. They’ll get screwed.  This is substantively false. The South does have access to renewables and it will benefit from an RES.

Climate Progress: “Politician behind the campaign to repeal California’s clean energy laws calls global warming ‘a scam’”
In the California legislature, the loudest voice to kill the landmark clean energy climate change law AB32 has become Assemblyman Dan Logue (R-Chico). Described by Sacramento insiders as a “backbencher,” Logue has built a powerful coalition of former tobacco lobbyists and Texan oil companies to orchestrate Prop 23, an initiative to essentially rescind AB 32. But who is Logue?

James Hoggan, Huffington Post: International Scientists Confirm Climate Change Is ‘Undeniable’
An international team of climate scientists led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed that climate change is “undeniable” and clearly driven by the “human fingerprints” of greenhouse gas emissions.  The findings are based on new data that was not reviewed during the most recent 2007 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Ecocentric: “The Energy Bill Gets Oiled”
Now, Reid may be playing politics here—forcing Republicans to either support his spill bill, or cast no votes and stand with a not terribly well-liked industry. But while that might help the Democrats in November, all this bickering now means that Congress is unlikely to act on these bills until September, following the August recess. And I would worry that the longer a bill like this waits, the more the initial outrage over the spill will evaporate—not unlike much of the oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. (Metaphors working again.)

LA Times, Greenspace: “EPA rejects challenge to ‘credible, compelling’ climate scienceEPA rejects challenge to ‘credible, compelling’ climate science”
The Environmental Protection Agency unleashed a full-throated defense on Thursday of scientific evidence that mankind is dangerously warming the planet, and of the Obama administration’s unilateral moves to curb the heat-trapping gas emissions scientists blame for climate change….Rejecting a series of critiques lodged by groups seeking to block federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions — including allegations linked to the so-called “Climategate” e-mail scandal and a pair of errors in a high-profile United Nations climate report — EPA officials declared that “climate science is credible, compelling and growing stronger.”