ON AUG. 21, TEXAS OIL INDUSTRY CEOs gave Mitt Romney $7 million at a fundraiser. Two days later, the Republican presidential nominee announced the most pro-oil, anti-environment energy policy statement in history. What a sham, and what a shame.

The Aug. 23 release of Romney’s energy plan touting the formation of three million jobs wasn’t even a thin cover for the greed and avarice of an industry that has enjoyed billions of dollars in American taxpayers subsidies. The fact that Romney didn’t at least put a few more days between the handover of $7 million and the announcement that if elected he would shred decades of environmental protection laws is most likely the result of Republican eagerness to pull the media spotlight off Rep. Todd Akin’s misogynistic babblings.

(By the way, where do the Republicans get these clowns? Why would any woman vote for a candidate from a party with positions that are so disrespectful to women?)

Besides shredding the EPA, Romney’s plan would increase the nation’s reliance on “dirty” energy — oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear reactors — and eliminate investments in energy efficiency and clean energy. It would open the Atlantic Coast and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to development. It would let states decide who should exploit federal land and how such exploitation would be conducted, effectively eliminating all viable environmental oversight. Worse, it would weaken public health regulations, and it ignores the threat of global warming.

Noted nonprofit Friends of the Earth described Romney’s proposal as “like an Easy-Bake recipe for cooking the planet — double down on dirty energy … and wait for the timer to go off on out-of-control climate change.”

Sadly, Romney’s energy policy statement reflects how thoroughly the Republican Party has repudiated its legacy values of respect for Mother Nature, and instead embraced the wealth of Big Oil and America’s extraction — that is, dirty — economy.

Most modern observers have forgotten that Republicans have a historic connection to environmental protection that dates to 1864, when John Conness, a Republican senator from California, authored legislation to preserve and protect Yosemite Valley. Abraham Lincoln, setting a precedent that a nation could value nature enough to protect and preserve it, signed Conness’s legislation. This was not an isolated case. Corrupt as Ulysses S. Grant was, he created Yellowstone National Park. Another Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt was known as the father of America’s national park system and an environmental champion.

Even the nefarious Richard Nixon left a strong environmental legacy. Nixon gave our nation most of the core legislation governing the protection of our air, water and wilderness by signing the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, creating the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and signing the Clean Air Act Extension of 1970, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.

But the Republican legacy of good environmental stewardship took a near death blow under President Ronald Reagan and his infamous Interior Secretary James Watt, and the party went from environmental protectionism to their current rapacious stance. There was a brief respite under George H.W. Bush, who led a partial revival after years of Reagan neglect by strengthening the Clean Air Act in a way that led to a cleanup of coal-burning acid rain and a reduction of smog. But then, sadly, with the election of his son in 2000 the party again lost its way — and the environment paid the price. Environmental advocates had to go so far as to sue the administration of George W. Bush over its failure to enforce the very laws passed by his GOP predecessors.

Now, Mitt Romney has adopted the chant of “drill, baby, drill” — the cost, apparently, to get nominated by the radicalized Republican Party.

Sadly for the American people, the Big Oil guys keep shoveling buckets of money into Republican super PACs and lobbying activities, Mother Nature be damned. Once proud of their environmental legacy, the Republican Party has shamelessly leaped into the arms of wealthy men who have made their fortunes by pillaging and ransacking our environment.

Instead of proposing a national energy policy that moves us toward sustainability and ensures equitable use of our precious national resources, Romney’s plan would strip away federal protection of the environment. He would turn exploration and development of federal lands over to the states, resulting in chaos and corruption. Further, Romney’s plan would revoke many of the laws regulating offshore drilling.

Of course, most of the plan is just plain hooey. In the first place, it is highly unlikely any president would be able to reverse current environmental laws and turn regulatory authority of federal land over to the states. The Supreme Court would be bogged down for decades with the subsequent lawsuits. Secondly, I doubt even British Petroleum would be stupid enough to drill in the Atlantic Ocean off the southeast coast of the U.S. — the middle of Hurricane Alley.

The most emotionally appealing aspects of Romney’s plan have to do with the idea that somehow we can drill enough oil on American soil to become energy independent, and that this unleashed torrent will create large numbers of jobs.

In the first place, the oil industry doesn’t know or care where a barrel of oil comes from. Oil is a “fungible” commodity, like the currency markets. This means that a barrel — just like a dollar, yen, euro or pound — is exchangeable, or replaceable, in whole or in part, by another barrel (or dollar, yen, euro or pound).

Imagine a huge swimming pool. Producers pour oil in; consumers take oil out. Except in the cases where an individual producing country has a direct contract with a consuming nation for a tanker or two, most oil is bought on the world’s spot market. The whole process is enabled by the large international oil companies that determine what happens to the oil when it enters the global market. So a barrel of oil could come from Bakersfield or it could come from Saudi Arabia, and there is no practical way of controlling where it ends up.

The problem is not supply, but price. Recently, the volume of oil imported to America has dropped significantly — more domestic supply and more efficient autos — but the price has risen sharply. For the most part, OPEC sets what it considers the fair price of oil based on what is needed to satisfy OPEC nations’ social and political needs, or in the case of the Saudis, to maintain the monarchy. Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, this “fair price” keeps rising based on the threat of revolution, and to a lesser degree, economics. Supply is regulated by the oil producers, and is withheld or increased based on keeping the fair price intact.

So when the price of oil spikes, it spikes for everyone. Which is why oil analyst Charles Maxwell said in the February 2011 issue of Barrons magazine that, based on simple supply and demand, the price of oil will climb to $300 a barrel by 2020.

So Romney’s notion of American oil self-sufficiency and the resulting reduction in the price of gasoline is little more than political bunting. It’s just wrong, and surprising to hear from a business guy who went to Harvard. That university has some bright guys specializing in oil price theory who might be willing to explain to him how things really work.

Romney’s other claims — that eliminating federal protections on the environment and letting the oil companies run amok will create three million high-paying jobs and return $500 billion to our economy — are similarly silly.

In the first place, the oil exploration and refinery businesses are highly evolved and technologically sophisticated. They are not labor-intensive industries anymore, like they were when I was growing up in Kern County. Hordes of roustabouts and roughnecks have been replaced by more durable and smarter equipment in the fields, and engineers with computerized equipment are running the refineries.

In fact, many more jobs could be developed by a commitment to the new green industry.

The green industry is emerging. It is attracting new money, and big job growth is ahead, not behind it like petroleum and other mature industries.

Likewise the pixie-dust notion that an oil exploration free-for-all would put $500 billion back into our economy. Reducing government oversight of the oil industry might make the oil companies — already the world’s richest — even richer, but the fallout would be tragic. We had a glimpse of this future recently in the Bay Area with the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion and the Chevron refinery fire. Petroleum products are explosive, volatile and ruinous to water supplies and human health. We need more and better controls over these industries, not less. Frankly, they — along with the coal companies — should pay a tax on their carbon emissions so we can clean up our air and reduce the number of asthma cases that are so costly and detrimental to our children.

Even legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens griped about Romney’s plan. “It’s all about oil,” Pickens beefed to the New York Post, noting that natural gas got lost in the plan. But while Pickens was right to note how little attention Romney paid to natural gas, there was even less attention paid to renewable energy.

Grist, an online news source, did an analysis of Romney’s plan. Their senior editor, Lisa Hymas, counted the number of mentions each energy source got in the plan. Oil was mentioned 154 times. Natural gas was second at 36. Solar? Down the list with 14 mentions — and not all of them complimentary. Wind, with 10 citations, barely beat out nuclear. Energy efficiency was mentioned once; sustainability and climate, not at all.

Finally, in his plan Romney utterly ignored scientists’ concerns that the burning of fossil fuels poses a grave threat to Earth by releasing greenhouse gases that are causing warming and other climate changes. Of course, in a remarkable twist of fate, the recent Republican convention was almost overshadowed by Hurricane Isaac, itself most likely a product of global warming.

Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and enormous amounts of energy to portray Mitt Romney as an exceptionally capable and honest family man. He’s tall, dark and handsome, with beautiful white teeth. He has an aw-shucks image that reminds one of Andy Griffith, and his narratives describe America in Mayberry terms. More time and money went into portraying Romney as a self-made corporate wizard who at the same time is the champion of America’s economic base of small business. He’s a Mr. Fix-it with super leadership skills who can miraculously grow jobs, shrink the deficit and reduce the size of the federal government. And hey, he’s overly generous to his friends and church, too.

But the reality is that Romney is a legacy member of the America’s rich elite with a personal fortune estimated at more than $200 million. He has no connection to small business; his father was the 43rd governor of Michigan, wealthy and successful in industry.

Romney, through his company Bain Capital, was a corporate raider, a ruthless and profit-above-all-else businessman. He and the other raiders sliced and diced their way through the American corporate landscape during the two decades of the 20th century, buying companies with enormous leveraged debt, tearing them apart, outsourcing the work force, selling off the pieces and rewarding themselves with enormous amounts of money. If there was anything left, the companies staggered along servicing the debt and paying even more money to the raiders. Most companies raided by Bain ended up broke and in bankruptcy.

Romney has nothing in common with America’s small business owners. His world is dressage, or horse ballet, not a football game over chips and soda or a game of golf with the guys. He doesn’t have a home in the suburbs; he has three mansions in different states. His money isn’t in a local community bank where it is invested wisely to help grow the community; it is in the Cayman Islands.

Worst of all is that as a member of the super-rich, Romney is taxed at a lower rate than the rest of us. Because he is taking advantage of the Bush/Republican capital gains tax breaks, Romney is paying about a 15-percent tax rate. Most salaried folks or pensioners are paying 25-28 percent. What other shocks might those hidden tax returns reveal?

Why should you or I pay a higher rate of taxes than a super-rich guy? Why should we subsidize his three mansions, his fleet of cars, and his dancing horse, then turn around and elect him president? What sort of goofy world is this?

But it may be the $7 million Mitt Romney took from Big Oil CEOs that rankles the most. He wasn’t even ashamed that he took it, and 48 hours later he came out with an outrageously pro-oil, anti-environment energy policy statement. It is a level of brazen behavior that is hard to stomach from any politician — much less one who wants to be president.

Grant Cooke is a long-time Benicia resident and CEO of Sustainable Energy Associates. He is co-author, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Woodrow Clark, of “Global Energy Innovation: Why America Must Lead,” published by Praeger Press. Cooke and Clark are currently writing a second book titled, “The Green Industrial Revolution.”