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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Giant 'never-before-seen' twin tornadoes pummel Nebraska; Obama openly mocks climate change deniers; New study finds - again - economic benefits of EPA regulations outweigh costs; PLUS: Billionaire Koch Brothers' 'Kochtopus' grows a new tentacle... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Germany sells out guidebooks to renewable energy sites; Oil and coal must be phased out entirely by 2050: study; Group of 77 & China agree to fight climate change; Upbeat ending to U.N.-Bonn climate talks; Warren Buffett issues warning on catastrophic insurance bond bubble; EPA doesn't kill coal jobs - new technology already did; Fukushima operator struggling to build ice wall; Tesla Motors goes open source to fight global warming; Abandoned oil wells spouting significant levels of methane ... PLUS: Even Science Museums Being Undermined by Fossil Fuel-Funded Science Denialism ... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: President Obama pushes back against climate change-denying politicians; Real-world data shows cutting emissions boosts economic growth and that the Koch Brothers are wrong; PLUS: Supreme Court says BP must continue oil spill payouts ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): How Solar Will Destroy Utilities in 5 Easy Steps; President of Kiribati: "It's too late for us"; Amazon tribal chief: the white man is destroying everything; War on Coal already happened - mining industry won and miners lost; FAA oks first drones on US soil - for BP; Supreme Court rules against homeowners in Camp Lejeune water contamination; Duke Energy signs deals for Dan River spill cleanup; Illinois bans plastic microbeads in personal care products due to water pollution ... PLUS: 7 reasons to be more optimistic about climate change than Ezra Klein ... and much, MUCH more! ...

The leading Republican candidate for Secretary of State in California does not want to go on record as to why he once claimed to agree with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that GOP polling place Photo ID restrictions are "offending people".

Pete Peterson is, according to a mid-April Field Poll [PDF], leading a large field of candidates of all parties to become the next chief election official in the Golden State. He's a public policy adviser at Pepperdine University's Davenport Institute (which is funded in part by Charles Koch) and, according to that poll, leads his nearest competitor, Democratic state Sen. Alex Padilla, by double-digits in the state's upcoming June 3rd "Top-Two" primary contest.

Earlier this month, Paul offered a wobbly position on Republican polling place Photo ID restriction laws, at first seeming to buck his own his own party's years-long strategy to impose such disenfranchising statutes in states around the country. "Everybody's gone completely crazy on this voter ID thing," the Senator told the New York Times during an an interview. "I think it's wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it's offending people."

On the day the NYT article ran, Peterson --- a Republican running for statewide office in a very "blue" state --- quickly allied himself with Paul, tweeting that he "agree[d] w Rand on his points re voter ID".

But, as we noted when The BRAD BLOG covered Paul's remarks, the Kentucky Republican and 2016 Presidential hopeful, was cagey in his comments to the Times. He didn't declare such laws to be wrong, per se, even though they may serve to remove the voting rights of millions of otherwise perfectly legal (and largely Democratic-leaning) voters. He said only that such restrictions were "offending people". He also later seemed to flip his position on the matter.

Just after the initial comments, however, and Peterson's tweeted claim to agree with him, we asked the candidate to clarify exactly what it was that he was agreeing with in Paul's remarks...

Early last week, with little attention in the media, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeal applied the brakes, for now, to one of the newest voter suppression schemes on the bleeding front edge of the GOP's ongoing War on Voting.

The insidious new Republican scheme, if it manages to overcome continuing challenges in court, such as the stay and appeal it now faces in the 10th Circuit, could result in thousands of otherwise eligible voters in Kansas and Arizona (and elsewhere, if the effort is allowed to move forward in KS and AZ) unable to even register to vote, much less cast a ballot on Election Day.

An investigative report by the Arizona Republic last year found the evidence for the purported basis of the new law --- claims by Republicans that non-citizens are casting ballots in the state --- to be "nearly non-existent".

Judith Brown Dianis, a civil rights litigator at The Advancement Project, described the nearly decade-long, coordinated, nationwide GOP voter suppression effort as "the largest legislative effort to roll back voting rights since the post-Reconstruction era". While appearing before a U.S. Senate Subcommittee in 2011, she described the effort as one designed to make "it harder to register to vote, harder to cast a ballot and harder to have a vote counted."

One of the primary GOP efforts to make it "harder to cast a ballot" can be found in the spate of polling place Photo ID laws that Republicans have sought to justify on the basis of what amounts to a phantom menace. Cases of in-person voter impersonation --- the only type of voter fraud that can be prevented by Photo ID --- are about as scarce as hen's teeth.

The same can be said about baseless GOP claims of an epidemic of voter fraud in the form of votes cast by non-citizens --- an allegation that is now being used as part of the new Republican ploy to prevent perfectly lawful citizens from even registering to vote...

California is making it slightly more difficult for millionaires and billionaires like the Koch Brothers to secretly and fraudulently influence elections in the state.

As the Sacramento Bee tried to report it...

"Leading some to describe"? It was dark money! The groups did not disclose who the donors were when they spent millions and millions of that dark money to try and fraudulently effect election outcomes in the state!

It was all money laundered through Koch Brothers front groups, as the SacBee failed to note for some reason, but as the Mercury News reported last year when the scheme finally came to light...

Over the weekend, Showtime's James Cameron-produced environmental documentary series, Years of Living Dangerously, released an online-only video segment focused on NJ Gov. Chris Christie's still-unexplained flip on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

RGGI is the very successful cap and trade system created by northeastern states to help curb global warming gasses. The video segment cites a piece of our exclusive 2011 blockbuster report featuring audio recordings of that year's secret Koch Brothers' Summer Seminar near Vail, CO, where Christie appeared as the billionaires' super-secret, superstar keynote speaker...

The video, as Grist describes it, "featuring food writer Mark Bittman grilling [Koch-funded] Americans for Prosperity henchman Steve Lonegan about climate change, muses on the possibility that Koch money funded Christie’s rapid retreat on New Jersey’s part in the regional cap-and-trade system RGGI." That is, of course, one of the issues we first posited when initially breaking the story, based on comments made during Christie's introduction at the seminar by David Koch.

Here is the complete audio (and transcript) of Christie's address and his intro by Koch, who calls the Governor his "true political hero" while describing another secret meeting the pair had in New York City before Christie suddenly pulled NJ out of RGGI in May of 2011, just weeks before the Vail confab.

"Another example of Governor Christie's commitment to the free enterprise system is that only a few weeks ago he announced that New Jersey would be withdrawing from the [Regional] Greenhouse Gas Initiative," Koch said proudly during his remarks to cheers and applause. The fossil fuel magnate then went on to lie to the crowd that RGGI "would have raised energy costs, reduced economic growth and led to very little, if any, benefit for the environment." On mention of the word "environment" a "boo" is heard on the audio from amongst the gathered millionaires and billionaires in attendance.

As I wrote at Mother Jones at the time (in the article seen briefly in the video as a clip of the Koch audio "obtained by a journalist" is played):

If you don't subscribe to Showtime, you can at least watch the first episode of the series, featuring Harrison Ford, Don Cheadle, Chris Hayes, Arnold Schwarzenegger and many other well-known journalists and scientists, online below...