Clean Start: July 15, 2011

Welcome to Clean Start, ThinkProgress Green’s morning round-up of the latest in climate and clean energy. Here is what we’re reading. What are you?

Arkansas U.S. Reps. Steve Womack and Rick Crawford Thursday defended a Republican plan to steer $1.5 billion in high-speed rail funds to Midwestern climate disaster relief. [Arkansas News]

The heat wave that has encompassed many Southern states this week is not expected to loosen its grip in the coming days, and will bring “extreme out-of-the-ordinary temperatures for Minnesota.” [CNN]

A heat wave in Eastern Europe caused its first fatality on Thursday when a woman who had sought treatment at a hospital in Bosnia collapsed in its emergency room, and caused France’s ambassador to faint in Romania. [AP]

The standards chosen by the George W. Bush administration to protect people from smog are “not legally defensible,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson explained to Congress. [Greenwire]

Thousands of Somalis have fled into neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia seeking aid in recent weeks, in the wake of the Horn of Africa’s worst drought in decades that has left millions of people facing starvation. [AFP]

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman will be the keynote speaker at the second annual Theodore Roosevelt Banquet thrown by Republicans for Environmental Protection. [E&E News]

David Legates announced this week that he was asked to step down as Delaware State Climatologist, a position he held for seven years. [DeSmogBlog]

A huge oil spill off the Chinese coast has now contaminated an area around six times the size of Singapore, state media reported Friday, as the government said it may seek compensation for the leak. [AFP]

An Exxon Mobil pipeline that ruptured, leaking oil into Yellowstone River, may have sometimes carried a heavier and more toxic tar sands crude, federal regulators said on Thursday. [Reuters]

The U.S. Interior Department approved the construction of four renewable energy projects on government-owned land in Oregon and California to fast-track the development of wind and solar power plants. [Bloomberg]