Enviro News Wrap: Rick Perry – an American Idiot? Keystone Pipeline Gets State Dept. Thumbs-up; The Economics of Declining Oil, and more…

GlobalWarmingisReal contributor Anders Hellum-Alexander wraps-up the climate and environmental news headlines for the past week:

• Rick Perry, my new favorite American idiot. Ricky Perry thinks Climate Science is a farce. We should learn more about this man so we can more fully understand people that replace facts with belief. Science has been fighting people like Perry for hundreds of years, it is amazing that people like him are left in our society.
• Back in Rick Perry’s state of Texas an epic drought is underway. Scientists won’t make definite claims as to the source of such an impactful drought but instead always highlight that in climate models these sorts of events occur more often and more intensely. A glaring fact about many climate change deniers is that they say that climate change is false and then do not prepare their region for weather events that are happening now. Rick Perry’s response to the drought is to pray, if prayer worked then prayer would have prevented the drought. At least Obama has hope, all Rick Perry has is a reliance on miracles.
• Climate Change modeling is obviously not perfect, is this article in the Economist illustrates.
• The Tar Sands in Canada are the 2nd largest deposit of oil known to man and extractable at current market prices. The Keystone XL pipeline is a proposed project to bring that oil straight across the midwest US to Texas. President Obama has not yet approved the pipeline, but a highly controversial State Department finding released on Friday claims there are “few environmental risks” with the Keystone pipeline project, making it look increasingly as if Obama will ignore the concerns of many experts and citizens. Bill McKibben recently got arrested at the White House for protesting the pipeline and he wrote about the experience.
• With overall oil consumption increasing, our economy requires more oil despite growth in the renewable energy market and efforts in energy efficiency. An article from MotherJones proposes a future that follows the pattern of previous recessions where the price of oil rises suddenly and then when people react and stop using oil the price falls, this follows with some years of stability and then the cycle starts all over again. Maybe due to an economic catastrophe Michelle Bachman will have accidentally predicted a future where the price of oil is $2/gallon.
• Obama increased the standard for fuel efficiency of cars sold in the US to 54.5 mpg by 2025.This target can be accomplished without any great advances in any technology. Wow, have car makers been holding?
• General advances in technology make humans more able to create a sustainable future, it’s a paradox then that the closer we get to the technological feasibility of sustainability the further we get from reigning in our use of technology to destroy the natural cycles of earth that we depend on.
• Besides being an affront to our environment the over-consumption of processed meat and meat in general is a great health risk, the World Cancer Research Fund recommends that parents stop feeding processed meat to their children.
• The overuse of fossil fuels is melting the arctic, in that now exposed area humans want to drill for more  fossil fuels.
• Changes like the technology in this article are the future of a society that stays rich and approaches sustainability without overhauling the Western lifestyle.