Photo by Toby Alter.

Yesterday, we reported that Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan asked the Obama administration to provide money from the stimulus package to Wisconsin clean energy organizations in 2009.

We regret to announce that the report was in error. Today, Ryan told a reporter in Ohio that he'd never requested stimulus money.

Rep. Paul Ryan told a Cincinnati television station in an interview airing on Thursday that he “never asked for stimulus” money made available by the Recovery Act, contradicting documents that show he advocated for Wisconsin companies that were seeking funds.

“I opposed the stimulus because it doesn’t work, it didn’t work. It brought us deeper into debt. It was about $1.1 trillion when you add the borrowing cost, it put us deeper in debt and further out of work,” Ryan told WCPO in an interview. …

Ryan similarly denied requesting stimulus money in a 2010 interview with WBZ’s Nightside with Dan Rea, The Boston Globe reported.

Here's the clip, via ThinkProgress. Jump to the 3:50 mark.

A directional drilling natural gas well northeast of Denver exploded yesterday afternoon.

The accident, which killed one man and injured three others, appears to have been from an unexpected release of high-pressure gas.

From the Denver Post:

A Flight for Life helicopter responded to the well site ... Medical crews performed CPR on the 60-year-old victim but he could not be revived, [sheriff's office spokesman Tim] Schwartz said.

A deputy leaving the scene of the accident Wednesday afternoon said the dead man was from Wyoming. He said two of the workers with minor injuries were taken for treatment in private vehicles. …

The dead man and the two workers who had minor injuries were employed by a company contracted to Encana.

The worker who is hospitalized is an Encana employee.

Honestly, how anyone could not want to kill this thing is beyond me.

Last week, Dallas declared a state of emergency after the city's ninth West Nile death in 2012. Today, that number stands at 16.

As we noted then, West Nile is now present in each of the lower 48 states. As the Guardian notes, 43 states have so far this year reported people, birds, or mosquitoes infected with the virus. But no place is as affected as Dallas.

"Right now, Texas has half the West Nile cases in the nation," Dr David Lakey, the Texas state health commissioner, told local reporters this week. "Dallas County has half of the cases in the state of Texas. So, about a quarter of all the cases in the United States are in this county. So, this isn't business as usual."

According to Texas department of state health services figures, 381 West Nile cases have been confirmed in Texas this year, including 16 related deaths – on track for the most cases since the disease first reached the state a decade ago.

The state's solution is simple, but controversial. Tomorrow night, twin-engine planes will fly over the county, releasing a pesticide called Duet.

Residents are understandably nervous, but local media outlets have put out story after story after story noting that such efforts have not caused notable problems in other areas.

OK, so this drought. I made a joke a while ago about how Gristmill could just turn into the all-drought headquarters ha ha ha because the drought was so bad. That was a month ago. Since then, the drought has gotten worse. It's so bad now that the official law office of America should be Drought, Drought & Bobbitt -- which is a real firm in San Antonio. San Antonio's Bexar County, like every other county in Texas, is a disaster area due to drought. (Drought, Drought & Bobbitt is doing its part by representing oil companies.)

Anyway. Here's America, as of yesterday [PDF]!

The latest drought map. It's different from the last one, we promise. (Click to embiggen.)

The red bits are the counties that have been declared disaster areas. It's kind of like that game Pandemic, where everyone sees the plague creeping up on them. "Madagascar County has closed its borders." That sort of thing. Seventeen states have been designated as disaster areas in their entirety, with Illinois and Iowa just succumbing this week. South Carolina is near full contagion; Minnesota is looking south with a tangible sense of concern.

Because the situation is so remorselessly and unrelentingly dire and because there is so much of it, we figured we'd create our own drought-assessment index, which ranks a slew of news stories on several key metrics.

Weather.com: "Drought Rises in Historical Rankings"
Summary: The drought is getting worse, now covering more area than all but four other droughts.
Key quote:

The intensity of this year's drought continued to worsen as well. The percentage of the country in "severe" to "extreme" drought increased from 32.7% in June to 37.6% in July.

In these more serious categories, the 2012 drought grew from the 10th-largest on record in June to the sixth-largest in July, but still trails the 2002 drought in terms of the area covered in severe to extreme drought.

Maps and charts: 4
Images of farmers or crops: 0
Cause for concern (10 being highest): 6

There is no reason that I should prepare an introduction to the Ocean Health Index when Harrison Ford is perfectly capable of doing so. Watching this video will make you feel like you’re a sixth-grader on a field trip to an aquarium.

The Ocean Health Index is an endeavor by Conservation International, the New England Aquarium, and the National Geographic Society to establish a measurement system for the health of the world's oceans, a baseline index against which future changes can be measured. The project's (absolutely gorgeous) website explains up-front how we're doing. On a scale of 0 to 100, our oceans are at 60.

So what does that mean? The OHI assesses how the ocean areas off countries' coastlines are faring according to 10 goals: water cleanliness, biodiversity, food provision, artisanal fishing opportunities, natural products, carbon storage, coastal protection, coastal livelihoods, tourism, and sense of place. To compute the scores for each goal, several dozen components -- things like coral reef health, fisheries management, marine jobs, acidification -- were evaluated by researchers from the University of Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia. Each country is scored on each goal on a 0-to-100 scale.

Map of ocean health by country. Greener is better. (Click to embiggen.)

A tree stump, in case you weren't clear what we were talking about.

Ugh. Another hippie "revolutionary" is using her crazy liberal politics to try and stop Enbridge from helping America (by building a tar-sands pipeline to replace the one that … broke). From the Detroit Free Press:

Trees were knocked down on Debora Hense's property in Livingston County, but crews installing a new pipeline for Enbridge have moved off her land for now.

Hense said the workers left after she called 911 Wednesday morning and Livingston County sheriff's deputies arrived. She said as many as 50 trees were being cleared when she returned home from a brief trip -- even though negotiations with the pipeline company had stalled over using additional space on her land in Tyrone Township, southwest of Fenton, and expanding the permanent easement.

Jeez, hippie! Enbridge tried to negotiate with you to buy your land, but you wouldn't let them. What are they supposed to do, resolve every single problem before they start tearing down trees on private property? Get with the program!

And besides, they totally made it up to you!

Hense said the company sent her attorney a check for $810 after she and her husband failed to act on what the company called its final offer -- $18,000. She said the first offer was for $40,000. …

Yesterday, the Boston Globe had a big scoop. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) -- the Republican vice presidential candidate and vocal foe of government spending -- sought millions in stimulus funding for Wisconsin organizations working on energy conservation.

In 2009, as Rep. Paul D. Ryan was railing against President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package as a “wasteful spending spree,” he wrote at least four letters to Obama’s secretary of energy asking that millions of dollars from the program be granted to a pair of Wisconsin conservation groups, according to documents obtained by the Globe.

The advocacy appeared to pay off; both groups were awarded the economic recovery funds -- one receiving a $20 million grant to help thousands of local businesses and homes improve their energy efficiency, agency documents show.

Photo by Gage Skidmore.

As the Globe notes, this advocacy runs directly counter to the rhetoric Ryan employed on the floor of the House. During debate on January 27, 2009, Ryan explained his opposition to the stimulus bill.

Mr. Chairman, we can do better than this. We're losing tens of thousands of jobs a week in this economy. This is the worst recession we've seen in generations. And what are we about to vote on? We are about to vote on a trillion dollar spending package -- yes, a trillion dollars, because the Congressional Budget Office just told us today just to pay for the interest on this bill is another $350 billion. We're going to vote on a trillion dollar spending package that amounts to basically a spending wish list for all the special interest groups out there. …

[W]e need to come together with an economic rescue package that actually helps the economy. This bill is not worthy of our new President's signature. We can do better than this. This is not something that should come to the floor.

This guy could have saved a few bucks if he'd dragged his bathtub outside on Monday. (Photo by jthezel.)

If you have a hot tub, it's recommended that you keep it at between 98 and 103 degrees F. Maybe you like it a little warmer than that. Fine. Take it up to, I dunno, 110. Point is, you only want it so hot.

If you live in Needles, Calif., there was an easy way to fill up your hot tub earlier this week: leave it outside.

A searing heat wave rare even for the Desert Southwest sent temperatures soaring to record levels on Monday, with Needles, California tying its record high for the date of 118°F (47.8°C). The temperature might have gone higher in Needles, but a thunderstorm rolled in at 3:20 pm, and by 3:56 pm PDT, rain began falling at a temperature of 115°F (46.1°C). Most of the rain evaporated, since the humidity was only 11%, and only a trace of precipitation was recorded in the rain gauge. Nevertheless, Monday's rain at 115° in Needles sets a new world record for the hottest rain in world history.

Emphasis added, but probably not needed.

Remember last month when NASA described an "extraordinary" melt across 97 percent of the surface of Greenland's ice sheet? Caused a big furor, people bugged out?

It's actually worse than that. From City College of New York:

Melting over the Greenland ice sheet shattered the seasonal record on August 8 -- a full four weeks before the close of the melting season, reports Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York.

The melting season in Greenland usually lasts from June – when the first puddles of meltwater appear – to early-September, when temperatures cool. This year, cumulative melting in the first week in August had already exceeded the record of 2010, taken over a full season, according to Professor Tedesco's ongoing analysis. …

This spells a change for the face of southern Greenland, he added, with the ice sheet thinning at its edges and lakes on top of glaciers proliferating.

Professor Tedesco noted that these changes jibe with what most of the models predict – the difference is how quickly this seems to be happening.

Melting ice in Greenland. (Photo by Christine Zenino.)

A coal mine in West Virginia.

From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Kentucky coal producers have reached an agreement to export 9 million tons of coal annually to India for the next 25 years in a $7 billion deal.

Gov. Steve Beshear’s office announced Wednesday that New Jersey-based FJS Energy LLC signed the deal with India’s Abhijeet Group to purchase coal exports from Kentucky and West Virginia through Kentucky-based affiliates FJSE Marshall and FJSE River Coal.