The driest 10-month period on record for Texas has devastated the state and its crops.  The National Weather Service warned Monday:

THERE IS LITTLE TO SUGGEST ANY END TO THE DROUGHT

Every state — along with much of Asia — has been hit by record temperatures this summer.  And thanks in large part to extreme weather around the globe, food prices are stuck at record levels, causing hardship for tens of millions:

Dr. Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, emailed TP Green, that while Gov. Perry may deny climate science:

There are dozens of credible atmospheric scientists in Texas at institutions like Rice, UT, and Texas A&M, and I can confidently say that none agree with Gov. Perry’s views on the science of climate change. This is a particularly unfortunate situation given the hellish drought that Texas is now experiencing, and which climate change is almost certainly making worse.

Global warming is certainly making the drought hotter, which creates a vicious cycle, since the higher temps dry out the earth, but the drier it gets, the hotter its gets, as the NWS explains below.

Yet, the dots aren’t being connected for the public by and large.  “In Coverage of Extreme Weather, Media Downplay Climate Change” as a Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting analysis recently concluded.

Indeed, I just saw NBC Evening News tonight, which explained that we are seeing record food prices and that extreme weather is a major contributor, but had no mention whatsoever of climate change.

The dividing line between good climate reporting and bad climate reporting is almost always whether the reporter talked to real climate scientists.  Typically, the more a reporter talks to, the better the story.

That’s a key reason why ABC News has been one of the few major media outlets to explain the connection between extreme weather and global warming (see links below).  And they did so last night.  Indeed, they went beyond the connection between global warming and extreme weather to the key climate impact on crops and food prices:

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In the decades since switching from supporting Al Gore in 1988 to becoming a Republican agriculture commissioner and George W. Bush’s lieutenant governor, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) has seen Texas undergo devastating changes in its climate. Texas has grown hotter and drier, with stronger wildfires and torrential storms as greenhouse pollution builds in the atmosphere. Now, 99 percent of Texas is in drought, with a staggering 78 percent in exceptional drought. The state’s farmers and ranchers are expected to lose about $10 billion this year to the killer climate, the worst in history.

However, Perry believes that the climate is still normal, unaffected by oil and gas pollution. On the campaign tour at the Iowa State Fair yesterday, Perry met with Gov. Terry Branstead (R-IA), who has been dealing with farmers devastated by record floods in his state. Perry told reporters that he’s personally troubled by the terrible drought, but that “you’re going to have good years, you’re going to have bad years.” In video recorded by ThinkProgress, he promised that “we’ll be fine” because the rain “always” comes back:

It’s hard to see these crops. [INAUDIBLE] You know, I was telling the governor, if you’re in the farming business, you’re going to have good years, you’re going to have bad years. It’s just our bad year coming. We’ve had some awful good ones, back in — and we’ll be fine. As my dad says, it’ll rain. It always does.

Watch it:

When Perry was the Gore campaign’s Texas chairman, Gore warned of “the threat to the Earth’s atmosphere from the burning of oil, gas and coal.” Climate scientist Jim Hansen testified before Congress that the frequency of hot summers would increase, and that “the greenhouse effect increases the likelihood of heat wave drought situations in the southeast and midwest United States.”

The future holds much more drastic changes, as the buildup of greenhouse gases has increased dramatically in the last twenty years, Texas’ own climate scientists warn. By 2050, Texas will have become a desert, too hot and too dry for any agriculture at all.

Only by considering the fatality risk to all drivers in an accident can an analysis determine the overall impact on safety of efficiency standards, as this Lawrence Berkeley National Lab analysis showed.

If falsely labeling fuel standards as job killers doesn’t work, why not call them people killers? That’s exactly what opponents of new fuel-efficiency targets are doing.  As we’ll see, the transportation community has moved beyond that tired myth with new analysis showing the overall benefit of well-designed standards to drivers, which in turn lead to well-designed cars.

On Fox Business last week, Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and show host John Stossel used outdated figures to claim new fuel standards will kill 2,000 people a year. Kazman — whose organization has received considerable funding from oil companies over the years — compared fuel efficiency targets to killing soldiers in war, saying that “at least we admit we’re putting lives at risk” for access to oil in the Middle East.

Watch it:

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by Rebecca Lefton

Today the Obama administration announced a joint initiative with the Department of Agriculture, Energy, and the Navy to increase the use of jet and marine advanced biofuels.  The plan is part of a broader goal to reduce dependence on foreign oil and improve energy security as laid out in a March Presidential directive, A Blueprint for A Secure Energy Future, which prioritized reducing oil imports one-third by 2025.  Increasing the use of biofuels is a key part of reaching that goal.

Making the announcement, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that the initiative will invest up to $510 million over three years split equally among the three departments to power military and ultimately commercial transportation with homegrown energy.

US Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said that every one dollar price of oil increase costs over $30 million in additional fuel costs.  In addition to supply shocks and high costs, Mabus said that the military sees fuel as a matter of national security.  Mabus pointed to the Defense Production Act of 1950 which states that if industries are not existent in the US but are vital to national security, then the government can help them to get off the ground.  The Secretary said he could think of nothing more vital than diversifying our energy.

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CNN’s Soledad O’Brien took a major look at mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, bringing national media attention to the “rape of Appalachia.” Unfortunately, her “powerful documentary on mountaintop removal and the struggle to save Blair Mountain from obliteration” is told primarily through “eyes and experiences of seemingly embattled strip miners who are afraid of losing their jobs,” ignoring “the already displaced coal mining communities afraid of losing their lives,” writes Jeff Biggers.

The documentary is presented in a “jobs vs environment” frame that is “devoid of any actual analysis of whether that frame is appropriate,” writes Appalachian Voices’ Matt Wasson. In reality, coal jobs disappear once mountaintop removal is instituted, since it requires fewer miners than traditional mining practices. Furthermore, the rise in mountaintop removal has done nothing to disrupt the long-run trend of declining production from the Appalachians.

Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. is sympathetic to the “pretty balanced overview,” but believes the documentary failed by presenting coal as “the only possible future” for West Virginia’s children:

The problem was most simple. CNN interviewed Art Kirkendoll, who has been a county commissioner in Logan County for 30 years. They let him go on about what God does or doesn’t want done with West Virginia’s mountains.

But they didn’t bother to ask him about the fact that Logan County’s poverty rate is twice the national average, or why the college graduation rate there is one-third of the national average … They didn’t bother to ask him why kids in Logan County don’t deserve more than one option in life.

“It’s not just about ‘how a mountain looks,’” Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard critiques O’Brien. “Even though the segment falls short of what I hoped for, I guess I am glad to see MTR getting any coverage on cable television. I just wish they’d done a better job of it.”

On Friday, I wrote that Perry is Obama’s dream opponent (see “Rick Perry Thinks America Desires Another Rigid, Anti-Science, Idealogue Governor From The Great State of Big Oil“).  Perry makes it easy for even a lame communications team like Obama’s to make this campaign about the past versus the future.

The only thing weaker than Obama’s brand is the GOP’s, and especially anyone with links to the Tea Party or Bush.  Why do you think Jeb Bush isn’t running??

Perry is a two-fer.  He is hard-core Tea Party — and another pro-pollution, extremist Texas governor.  Remember, even Bush shrewdly decided to disguise some of that in the 2000 “compassionate conservative” campaign, which is the only reason he eked out a loss win.

The WashPost asks “Is Rick Perry too George W. Bush-y?”  The Atlantic asks, “Is America Ready for ‘George W. Bush on Steroids?‘ ”  TP’s Faiz Shakir notes that Karl Rove just said that distancing himself from the still wildly unpopular Bush “Is Not Smart Politics Strategically Or Tactically” for Perry.  [No wonder they call Rove Bush's brain.]

But how precisely do you distance yourself from Bush when you served as his lieutenant Governor?  In theory  you do it with a well-crafted communications strategy.  But it turns out so far that Perry is dreadful at messaging.  He’s an undisciplined blurter, a guy who “shoots from the lip,” somebody who  just says whatever nonsense comes into his head.  The classic example of that is Newt Gingrich.

You’d think that with Perry  building up to this announcement for months he would have had a carefully crafted message and specific talking points he would repeat again and again.  But instead, in a widely criticized move, he questioned Obama’s patriotism and specifically his “love” of this country — when Perry himself has repeatedly raised the possibility of Texas seceding!

Worse, Perry threatened violence against the mild-mannered Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.” Treason is a capital crime.  Averting the economic harship of a double dip recession (caused first by Bush policies and then by Tea Party extremism) is the job of the Fed.  Tony Fratto, Bush’s former Deputy Press Secretary, tweeted that Perry’s remarks were “inappropriate and unpresidential.”

On Monday, Perry suggested a policy that would harm the health of our children and endanger hard-won victories that keep the air and water clean.  As TP Green reported, Perry called for “A Moratorium On All Regulations“:

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Our guest blogger is Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, associate professor at Texas Tech University and director of the Texas Tech University Climate Science Center. With her husband Andrew Farley, a Christian author and pastor of an evangelical bible church in west Texas, Dr. Hayhoe has written a book about what climate change means to people of faith.

ThinkProgress asked Dr. Hayhoe to respond to Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) argument that climate science is a “contrived phony mess” based on “so-called science” in a “secular carbon cult.”

The science of climate change is based on fundamental physical principles that we’ve known about for several hundred years. Every time we burn coal, gas, or oil, it produces carbon dioxide. By digging massive amounts of these fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them, we are disrupting the natural carbon cycle and causing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas; its properties can easily be measured in a lab (and I have done it myself). As it builds up in the atmosphere, it traps heat, raising the average temperature of the earth.

There are many lines of evidence we rely on to document the long-term warming of the earth in response to human activities. Thermometers and satellites are just two of these. For many of us, we only have to look in our own backyards to see the evidence with our own eyes. Trees are blooming earlier in the year, winters are getting warmer, summers are getting hotter, extreme heat is becoming more frequent, birds, insects, and other animals are moving northward … in all, more than 25,000 independent lines of physical and biological evidence point to a warming world.

None of us are happy with the idea that humans are altering the average conditions of the planet. If I had my druthers, I know that I would much rather it be a natural cycle that we couldn’t do anything about! But the truth is this: if our planet were being controlled by the sun, or by natural cycles, it would have cooled over the last few decades as we’ve received less energy from the sun than we did before. Instead, the planet has only gotten warmer.

Shooting the messenger who brings bad news is an old habit; but we all know it does nothing to change the news itself. In the same way, dismissing hundreds of years’ worth of science because it doesn’t give us the answer we want to hear will not change the facts.

Humans are altering the average conditions of the planet. So what can we do?

We can continue to challenge the reality of the issue; or we can seize this as an opportunity to wean ourselves off our dependence on the old, dirty, inefficient, and limited fuels of the past. Instead, we can make wise choices — conserving the resources we do have, and investing in our own economy to develop clean sources of energy that will not run out on us and will ensure a better lives for our children. Who doesn’t want that??

At a campaign stop in Iowa last night, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) claimed that the Obama administration is “trying to scare people” about natural gas fracking. He told the attendees of a house party in Cedar Rapids that natural gas drilling with hydraulic fracturing has never damaged groundwater, and expressed concern that Iowans would miss out on the natural gas boom:

You have this administration talking about stopping hydraulic fracking, trying to scare people, saying that hydraulic fracking somehow or other is going to damage the groundwater, and so we’ve got to stop this. Not one time that I’m aware of has hydraulic fracking impacted groundwater. And if we don’t have the ability to frack, then all of the Pennsylvania Marcellus shale — you know, we don’t know what’s under the surface here in Iowa. There may be copious amounts of natural gas down there. Because the Eagle Ford in Texas, no one knew it was there until four or five years ago. New technologies finding new ways to bring this energy source. And we need to be, we need to be talking about ways to make America as independent energywise as we can. And it covers the watershed.

Watch video shot by ThinkProgress:

Under President Obama, natural gas drilling has enjoyed a renaissance, so much so that overproduction has led to a collapse in natural gas prices. The heads of the Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency have all praised the “important energy resource” of natural gas and have expressed confidence that fracking can be done safely.

Criticism of the explosion in fracking has primarily come from concerned citizens, who have seen their water catch on fire, their land seized by drillers, their rivers contaminated by spills, and found wells gone dry or poisoned. Most of the damage is caused by other steps in the drilling process than the deep, high-pressure injection of a secret mixture of toxic fluids that is fracking, but the EPA documented contamination of groundwater by fracking in 1987, when Ronald Reagan was president.

The Obama administration is considering whether to enforce clean air laws at drilling sites, which have blanketed Wyoming with poisonous haze. An industry-friendly panel for the Department of Energy recommended that frackers stop using diesel fuel and that they disclose the ingredients in fracking fluid. Perry might not be aware of the dangers of unregulated fracking, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

– Chris Mooney, with an Important News Update by Joe Romm

Washington, D.C.—In a move that came as a shock both in this city and throughout the planet on which it is located, Standard & Poor’s late Monday downgraded Earth from its unique HHH rating—the only one in the galaxy—to HH+.

The coveted HHH rating—meaning, “extremely habitable”—has become indefensible, the ratings agency said, due to continuing failures to balance the atmospheric carbon budget and an increasingly toxic political debate that renders better policies unlikely any time soon.

“Atmospheric carbon inputs continue to outweigh carbon outputs (or sinks), leading to a growing and unsustainable carbon ‘surplus,’” wrote S&P. “Unlike fiscal surpluses, this surplus is very dangerous and is already triggering rising temperatures, heat waves, droughts, and extreme weather patterns.”

Under the new HH+ rating, the Earth is still considered “highly habitable” for humans. However, S&P also changed the planet’s outlook to “negative,” suggesting the possibility of further downgrades.

Critics Cite Dearth of Spaceships

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Report: German electric vehicle goes 1,014 miles on a charge

Recently, the Schluckspecht E took to Bosch’s 2,945-meter (1.83-mile) test track in Boxberg, Germany. Some 36 hours and 12 minutes later, the all-electric Schluckspecht came to a halt. In that amount time, the Schluckspecht reportedly covered 1,631.5 kilometers (1,013.8 miles).

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