“Swiss Bank Account” highlights Mitt Romney’s belief that a strong economy is built on outsourcing, loopholes and risky financial deals. As a corporate CEO, he shipped American jobs to places like Mexico and China. As governor, Romney outsourced state jobs to India, and now as a candidate for president he is pushing tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

Romney’s economic scheme stands in stark contrast with President Obama’s efforts to continue moving the country forward by rebuilding an economy that’s meant to last, by out-building, out-innovating and out-educating the rest of the world, and making the things the rest of the world buys by closing loopholes and providing incentives that are bringing jobs back to America.

The Hill:

President Obama’s reelection campaign is launching a new ad in three swings states that aims to contrast Obama’s record on energy policy with Mitt Romney, claiming Romney has a history of sending jobs overseas.

The campaign, with the new ad, seeks to kill two birds with one stone by parrying attacks on Obama’s green energy programs while knocking Romney’s record in business and as Massachusetts governor.

The 30-second ad that will air in Virginia, Ohio and Iowa opens by decrying “false attacks from Big Oil,” pointing to a Washington Post article Monday that called a pair of ads attacking Obama’s energy programs – including a multi-million dollar buy from Americans for Prosperity – inaccurate and out of context.

The TV spots point out that when immigrants settle in the U.S., their energy use quickly becomes Americanized. As a result their carbon emissions skyrocket. The result is a quadrupling of immigrants’ carbon footprints compared to the amount of carbon emissions they produced in their home countries.

The TV spot is based on a Center for Immigrations Studies (CIS) report about U.S. immigration and carbon emissions. While the CAPS TV spot is focused more on future carbon emissions, the CIS study looks at current carbon emissions. Currently, US immigrants produce an estimated 637 million metric tons of CO2 annually or the same amount of carbon emissions currently produced by Great Britain and Sweden, combined.

More at Raw Story.

Here’s a transcript of speaker Boehner’s remarks:

You know gas prices are rising and Americans are frustrated with the gap between the President’s words and his actions. The President now says he supports the Republican all-of-the-above energy strategy for our country. But for three years his administration has made every effort to block, delay and restrict new energy production in our country.

He claims that he wants to address rising gas prices, but his policies are actually making matters worse for families and small businesses. And the only recent action the President has taken on energy involved lobbying Senators, personally and successfully, to prevent the construction of the Keystone pipeline.

Yet today, he’s out in Oklahoma trying to take credit for part of the pipeline that doesn’t even require his approval. Now, this is what I’m calling the Obama energy gap. Up here in Canada, and in North Dakota, we’ve got all this oil. And the President is down here in Oklahoma taking credit for part of the pipeline that’s going to go through the normal process. It’s already gotten its approvals. And this idea that the President is going to expedite this will have no impact on the construction of this pipeline.

Now let me explain something. It’s not just oil that’s up in Canada. Right now, this year, North Dakota will become the second largest oil producing state in our country. There are three 100 tank trains every day that come out of North Dakota and have to go all the way to the Gulf, because of the lack of this pipeline. And so, it’s Canadian oil, it’s North Dakotan oil, that needs to get down to our refineries in the Gulf.

So the President can take credit for having nothing to do with the bottom half of this pipeline. The fact is, there’s only one permit that needs his approval because it crosses our national boundaries. And that’s the Keystone decision on the upper half of this. Remember we have 165,000 miles of pipeline that operate safely in our country that operate successfully every day. The Congress earlier this year passed a pipeline safety bill, to increase the safety standards on this 165,000 miles of pipeline.

The President should listen to the American people and allow the Keystone pipeline to go forward. There’s a big gap between what the President promises and what he talks about, and the actions he’s taking, and I think honest hard working taxpayers deserve actions that match the words.

Here’s the relevant part of the transcript:

We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We have quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We have added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place, right now. That’s not the challenge. That’s not the problem.

The full transcript of President Obama’s remarks today in Cushing can be found below.

THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Oklahoma! (Applause.) Well, it’s good to be here. Everybody, have a seat. Have a seat.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love you, Mr. President!

THE PRESIDENT: I love you back. It’s wonderful to see you.

It is good to be back in Oklahoma. I haven’t been back here since the campaign, and everybody looks like they’re doing just fine. (Laughter.) Thank you so much for your hospitality. It is wonderful to be here.

Yesterday, I visited Nevada and New Mexico to talk about what we’re calling an all-of-the-above energy strategy. It’s a strategy that will keep us on track to further reduce our dependence on foreign oil, put more people back to work, and ultimately help to curb the spike in gas prices that we’re seeing year after year after year.

So today, I’ve come to Cushing, an oil town — (applause) — because producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy. (Applause.)

Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. (Applause.) That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.

So we are drilling all over the place — right now. That’s not the challenge. That’s not the problem. In fact, the problem in a place like Cushing is that we’re actually producing so much oil and gas in places like North Dakota and Colorado that we don’t have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it to where it needs to go — both to refineries, and then, eventually, all across the country and around the world. There’s a bottleneck right here because we can’t get enough of the oil to our refineries fast enough. And if we could, then we would be able to increase our oil supplies at a time when they’re needed as much as possible.

Now, right now, a company called TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline to speed more oil from Cushing to state-of-the-art refineries down on the Gulf Coast. And today, I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done. (Applause.)

Now, you wouldn’t know all this from listening to the television set. (Laughter.) This whole issue of the Keystone pipeline had generated, obviously, a lot of controversy and a lot of politics. And that’s because the original route from Canada into the United States was planned through an area in Nebraska that supplies some drinking water for nearly 2 million Americans, and irrigation for a good portion of America’s croplands. And Nebraskans of all political stripes — including the Republican governor there — raised some concerns about the safety and wisdom of that route.

So to be extra careful that the construction of the pipeline in an area like that wouldn’t put the health and the safety of the American people at risk, our experts said that we needed a certain amount of time to review the project. Unfortunately, Congress decided they wanted their own timeline — not the company, not the experts, but members of Congress who decided this might be a fun political issue, decided to try to intervene and make it impossible for us to make an informed decision.

So what we’ve said to the company is, we’re happy to review future permits. And today, we’re making this new pipeline from Cushing to the Gulf a priority. So the southern leg of it we’re making a priority, and we’re going to go ahead and get that done. The northern portion of it we’re going to have to review properly to make sure that the health and safety of the American people are protected. That’s common sense.

But the fact is that my administration has approved dozens of new oil and gas pipelines over the last three years -– including one from Canada. And as long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both. (Applause.)

So if you guys are talking to your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your aunts or uncles and they’re wondering what’s going on in terms of oil production, you just tell them anybody who suggests that somehow we’re suppressing domestic oil production isn’t paying attention. They are not paying attention. (Applause.)

What you also need to tell them is anybody who says that just drilling more gas and more oil by itself will bring down gas prices tomorrow or the next day or even next year, they’re also not paying attention. They’re not playing it straight. Because we are drilling more, we are producing more. But the fact is, producing more oil at home isn’t enough by itself to bring gas prices down.

And the reason is we’ve got an oil market that is global, that is worldwide. And I’ve been saying for the last few weeks, and I want everybody to understand this, we use 20 percent of the world’s oil; we only produce 2 percent of the world’s oil. Even if we opened every inch of the country — if I put a oil rig on the South Lawn — (laughter) — if we had one right next to the Washington Monument, even if we drilled every little bit of this great country of ours, we’d still have to buy the rest of our needs from someplace else if we keep on using the same amount of energy, the same amount of oil.

The price of oil will still be set by the global market. And that means every time there’s tensions that rise in the Middle East — which is what’s happening right now — so will the price of gas. The main reason the gas prices are high right now is because people are worried about what’s happening with Iran. It doesn’t have to do with domestic oil production. It has to do with the oil markets looking and saying, you know what, if something happens there could be trouble and so we’re going to price oil higher just in case

Now, that’s not the future that we went. We don’t want to be vulnerable to something that’s happening on the other side of the world somehow affecting our economy, or hurting a lot of folks who have to drive to get to work. That’s not the future I want for America. That’s not the future I want for our kids. I want us to control our own energy destiny. I want us to determine our own course.

So, yes, we’re going to keep on drilling. Yes, we’re going to keep on emphasizing production. Yes, we’re going to make sure that we can get oil to where it’s needed. But what we’re also going to be doing as part of an all-of-the-above strategy is looking at how we can continually improve the utilization of renewable energy sources, new clean energy sources, and how do we become more efficient in our use of energy. (Applause.)

That means producing more biofuels, which can be great for our farmers and great for rural economies. It means more fuel-efficient cars. It means more solar power. It means more wind power — which, by the way, nearly tripled here in Oklahoma over the past three years in part because of some of our policies.

We want every source of American-made energy. I don’t want the energy jobs of tomorrow going to other countries. I want them here in the United States of America. (Applause.) And that’s what an all-of-the-above strategy is all about. That’s how we break our dependence on foreign oil. (Applause.)

Now, the good news is we’re already seeing progress. Yesterday, I went, in Nevada, to the largest solar plant of its kind anywhere in the country. Hundreds of workers built it. It’s powering thousands of homes, and they’re expanding to tens of thousands of homes more as they put more capacity online.

After 30 years of not doing anything, we finally increased fuel-efficiency standards on cars and trucks, and Americans are now designing and building cars that will go nearly twice as far on the same gallon of gas by the middle of the next decade. And that’s going to save the average family $8,000 over the life of a car. (Applause.) And it’s going to save a lot of companies a lot of money because they’re hurt by rising fuel costs, as well.

All of these steps have helped put America on the path to greater energy independence. Since I took office, our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year. Last year, we imported 1 million fewer barrels per day than the year before. Think about that. (Applause.) America, at a time when we’re growing, is actually importing less oil from overseas because we’re using it smarter and more efficiently. America is now importing less than half the oil we use for the first time in more than a decade.

So the key is to keep it going, Oklahoma. We’ve got to make sure that we don’t go backwards, that we keep going forwards. If we’re going to end our dependence on foreign oil, if we’re going to bring gas prices down once and for all, as opposed to just playing politics with it every single year, then what we’re going to have to do is to develop every single source of energy that we’ve got, every new technology that can help us become more efficient.

We’ve got to use our innovation. We’ve got to use our brain power. We’ve got to use our creativity. We’ve got to have a vision for the future, not just constantly looking backwards at the past. That’s where we need to go. That’s the future we can build.

And that’s what America has always been about, is building the future. We’ve always been at the cutting-edge. We’re always ahead of the curve. Whether it’s Thomas Edison or the Wright Brothers or Steve Jobs, we’re always thinking about what’s the next thing. And that’s how we have to think about energy. And if we do, not only are we going to see jobs and growth and success here in Cushing, Oklahoma, we’re going to see it all across the country.

All right? Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

Crossroads GPS is hitting President Obama over rising gas prices and accusing him of “playing politics” with energy policies in a new ad that began airing Wednesday, as Obama embarks on a two-day energy tour.

“Then and now — the difference — President Obama’s administration restricted oil production in the Gulf, limited development of American oil shale and Obama personally lobbied to kill a pipeline bringing oil from Canada,” says the narrator in the ad.

“Instead of delivering practical solutions to make energy more affordable, President Obama is pursuing restrictive and naive policies that are hurting families at the pump and in their utility bills,” said Crossroads GPS President Steven Law in a statement.

The implication of the ad is that President Obama’s energy policies have limited domestic oil production, causing gas prices to go up. Consider these facts:

• American oil imports are currently lower than they were at any time during the Bush Administration.
• A new Associated Press statistical analysisof U.S. oil production and oil prices found that the two are not related.
• During the Bush Administration, U.S. oil production decreased each year. So far during the Obama Administration, it has increased each year:

Carol Browner, former U.S. Evironmental Protection Agency administrator and a former White House adviser on energy and climate change, talks about U.S. energy policy. Browner also discusses fuel-efficient vehicles, tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, and TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL oil pipeline.

The Hill:

Mitt Romney released a new Web video Monday attacking President Obama’s Cabinet secretaries over rising gas prices, evidence that the former Massachusetts governor sees rising fuel pieces as a major political liability for the president — and that he hopes to pivot the national discourse into a one-on-one battle with the president.

The ad suggests that three top Obama officials — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson — should resign over rising energy prices.

“Three of President Obama’s top energy advisers have supported policies that make it harder for the United States to utilize our natural resources and keep energy costs low. It is clear that the ‘Gas Hike Trio’ are only interested in raising energy prices and should resign,” the Romney campaign said in a statement.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu stood firmly behind his department’s efforts to address volatile gas prices and invest in clean-energy projects Tuesday amid aggressive attacks from House Republicans.

Chu, during a tense House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, defended the Energy Department’s embattled loan program and gave the agency high marks for working to develop a long-term plan to protect consumers from soaring pump prices.

At one point, committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) asked Chu whether he’d give his efforts to control gas prices an “A-,” the same grade he gave to the department’s work on the loan program.

“The tools we have at our disposal are limited, but I would say I would give myself a little higher in that since I became secretary of Energy, I’ve been doing everything I can to get long-term solutions,” Chu said.

How hot is it? It is so hot that the low temperature for the normally frigid International Falls only hit 60°F yesterday, which tied the previous record high for the date! meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters wrote he’s never seen that happen station with a century-long data record. Monday was “the seventh consecutive day that International Falls broke or tied a daily record.”

How hot is it? Seasoned meteorologists have said of the current super-charged heat wave, “it’s surreal” and “this is not the atmosphere I grew up with” and it’s “not just breaking but obliterating records” and “OFF THE SCALE WEIRD; even for Minnesota.”

How hot is it? ABC ran a story on extreme weather that linked it to global warming for the second time in 12 days — see “ABC News (3/7/12) Explains Warm Winter, ‘Wild Swings In Weather’, Driven by Global Warming, Only Going to Get Worse.” Here is last night’s story, which quotes Masters and NOAA on global warming.

Brazil plans criminal charges after Chevron oil leak, casting a pall over development in the region.

The Hill:

The ad opens with a wide shot of Washington, D.C.’s skyline with thunder and lightning crashing in the background. The congressional testimony of Energy Secretary Steven Chu is edited to emphasize a 2008 statement in which he called for gas prices to increase to levels similar to those of Europe.

Chu made the remark during an interview with The Wall Street Journal during a discussion about encouraging energy efficiency, but has said since becoming Energy secretary that he “no longer share[s] that view” and that he wants the price of gasoline to go down.

The Gingrich video then transitions to a speech by President Obama earlier this month in Charlotte, N.C., where he warns “the next time you hear some politician trotting out some three-point plan for $2 gas — you let them know we know better.”

Onscreen text then asks, “We do?”

The ad then returns to Chu’s congressional testimony, highlighting a portion where Chu advocates for the Chevrolet Volt, an electric car that has struggled to gain traction in the U.S. market despite heavy federal subsidies. GMC announced earlier this month that it was suspending production of the car.

“Ideas have consequences,” the screen reads.

The US consumes 25% of the world’s oil — but as energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens points out onstage, the country has no energy policy to prepare for the inevitable. Is alternative energy our bridge to an oil-free future? After losing $150 million investing in wind energy, Pickens suggests it isn’t, not yet. What might get us there? Natural gas. After the talk, watch for a lively Q&A with TED Curator Chris Anderson.

The nuclear energy industry’s main trade group is launching a multi-million dollar TV, radio and print ad campaign at a time when power companies face a number of hurdles in their push to build expensive new reactors.

The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) ads launching Tuesday cast nuclear plants as a reliable, climate-friendly energy source that create scores of jobs.

The campaign arrives a year after the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and as the industry, which hopes to build the first new U.S. reactors in decades, faces competition from the natural gas production boom.

A spokesman said the buy will cost twice the group’s normal annual ad budget but declined to provide a specific estimate. The ads will run in outlets including NBC’s “Meet the Press” and nightly news, Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” PBS Newshour, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Politico, The Economist, Time, WTOP radio and many others.

Advancing a highly misleading talking point from ExxonMobil, Fox’s “straight news” program Happening Now defended the oil giant on Friday from Obama’s call to end tax subsidies for oil companies.

Fox Business reporter Elizabeth MacDonald said she “just got off the phone with ExxonMobil” — and it showed. She
clearly didn’t bother to fact check what they told her.

MacDonald said that ExxonMobil’s “U.S. tax bill came in at $12 billion bucks — that was more than the $9 billion bucks they earned in after tax profits.” This is straight from the talking points ExxonMobil distributes when getting heat from the fact that its rising profits require drivers’ pain.

Barbour harkened back to the Reagan administration to tout Republicans success at job creation, conveniently ignoring the fact that we were hemorrhaging around 700,000 jobs a month when Bush left office. He also seemed to forget that gas prices were actually higher under the Bush administration and that Bush didn’t have any more success than the current administration in getting OPEC to open up their spigots. Barbour was also allowed to claim with no push back that more domestic drilling was going to lower gas prices or create jobs, which it won’t as Paul Krugman pointed out this week.

Here are Barbour’s remarks on energy policy:

BARBOUR: — you know, 2010 was the greatest referendum of an incumbent president’s policies in decades. And this will be a referendum on his policies, despite the fact that Bill and his friends would like for it to be anything but.

And the big policy right now that people are concerned about is the energy policy, because terrible energy policy for three years has brought about very high gasoline prices and other energy prices.

And the president says correctly, there’s no silver bullet.

When you have had three years of terrible policy, designed to drive up the cost of energy, so Americans would use less of it, whether it’s the Keystone XL pipeline, the moratorium in the Gulf, the least amount of offshore drilling lands available that we’ve had in decades, all of those things are going to lead to very high energy prices, which after all, is what the president’s Secretary of Energy called for.

He said what we really need in America is to get the price of gasoline up to where it is in Europe. Well, they’re halfway there.

UK based renewable energy developer Ecotricity has used a lot of tactics to drive the world to switch to clean energy. They’ve partnered with Coke, built awesome urban wind turbines and developed vegan biogas. Its most recent campaign is called “Dump the Big 6,” and it comes with a pretty amusing video.

The Big Six is a group of British and European electricity and gas suppliers which Ecotricity accuses of unethical pricing, awful customer service and being an impediment to the development of clean, renewable energy sources. The video shows the six companies’ towers, complete with faces, mustaches and a penchant for tea time, collapsing in turn, all utterly surprised at their demise.

Schieffer questioned Axelrod if the president is doing his own pandering. He asked Axelrod about campaign speeches in 2008 made by then-candidate Barack Obama where he blamed President Bush for gas that cost “two-and-a-half times what it cost when George Bush took office.”

Here’s the transcript of the exchange:

BRET BAIER, FOX NEWS: “Governor, obviously volatility in the Middle East affects oil prices. Do you believe President Obama is to blame for high gas prices?”

MITT ROMNEY: “Well, there’s no question that when he ran for office he said he wanted to see gasoline prices go up. He said that energy prices would skyrocket under his views and he has selected three people to help him implement that program: the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of the Interior and the EPA administrator. And this ‘gas hike trio’ has been doing the job over the last three and a half years and gas prices are up. The right course is they ought to be fired because the President has apparently suffered an election-year conversion. He’s now decided that gasoline prices should come down. Well, the ‘gas hike trio’ has been going in the other direction. Time for them to go, probably hand in their resignations, if he’s really serious about that, and start drilling for energy here. Whether that’s, of course, our oil, our natural gas, take advantage of our coal resources for power generation. It is a very different policy that he’s now talking about and I hope it is a real conversion. Time will tell.”

Republicans have been in favor of this Keystone pipeline. 20,000 jobs. If there ever was such thing as shovel ready project, here’s one of them. Plus it would get us a step closer to energy independence. It wouldn’t be the whole deal, but its a step closer. And this President has shut down everything when it comes to energy independence in this country. We’re sitting on a wealth of energy to get us to a place where we don’t have four and five dollar gas. This President isn’t there and he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Meanwhile, U.S. reliance on foreign oil is at its lowest point since the Clinton administration, having dropped from 57% of total consumption in 2008 to 45% in 2011.

For more context, see Paul Krugman’s excellent recent column: Natural Born Drillers.