District 3 County Commissioner Ray Vaughn got word recently that the county had been chosen the Phoenix Award winner from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 6. The awards are given around the country for brownfield development.

The state Department of Environmental Quality nominated the local project, which over five years transformed the former GM plant into an engine repair and maintenance facility for the U.S. Department of Defense.

The local project will be honored at a banquet next week in Atlanta, where it’ll be in the running for the grand prize or people’s choice awards. Kudos.

Protesters in Oklahoma (but not necessarily from Oklahoma) this week continued their childish antics of fastening themselves to construction equipment, getting arrested for it and — no doubt — tweeting about their heroics. Monday’s protest came on the final day of the U.S. State Department’s formal comment period for the project.

Also this week, the Environmental Protection Agency weighed in with the dog-bites-man news that it has major concerns about Keystone’s link between Cushing and Canada’s vast oil sands reserves. And a survey was released showing that nearly 75 percent of Americans support the project. This exceeds the 68 percent support registered in Canada.

While the Obama administration continues to dawdle on the northern leg, the route from Cushing to the Gulf Coast has the blessing of Barack Obama himself. He made a campaign stop near Cushing last year to announce his approval of the project. Yet the protesters keep showing up in southern Oklahoma to take a stand.

This week marked the fifth such effort. One protester said he came from Ames, Iowa, to defend the Red River. Really? Defend it from what? A Texas invasion?

The remark illustrates the mindlessness of this effort. Irrelevant comparisons to a pipeline break in Arkansas are about the only thing the protesters have going for them. We suggest that the Iowan head home and help defend Mississippi River towns from an extant flooding threat.

That would be productive and heroic.

A group that opposes the pipeline quoted the woman as saying she couldn’t sit still while “toxic tar sands are pumped down from Canada into our communities.” Zorn’s hope was that she might inspire others to join the fight.

She shouldn’t hold her breath.

Oklahomans strongly favor construction of the Keystone pipeline. They understand that building the pipeline means jobs, and that worries about pipeline safety are red herrings offered by anti-fossil fuel zealots.

Zorn is left with a story to tell her grandchildren, but not much else. The pipeline is coming, and it should.

Locally, legislation creating a $10 million Emergency Drought Relief Fund has gained House committee approval. The fund could pay for cleaning or building ponds, water conservation, water for livestock, rural fire suppression, getting rid of Eastern red cedar trees and other drought-relief activities identified by the governor.

In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry has called for tapping the state’s Rainy Day Fund to pay for water conservation projects. His plan may draw opposition from some tea party elements on the political right while also needing Democratic support on the left to get the two-thirds vote required — no sure thing.

So far, the Oklahoma proposal has received unanimous bipartisan support. Here’s hoping Oklahoma discussions remain centered on policy. This proposal should live or die based on merit and careful analysis, not the political version of inside baseball.

Nevertheless, Obama promised that the weather would be warmer at his second inaugural than his first. It was. An Associated Press writer took this too seriously — and too subjectively for a news reporter: “While his policies can lessen or worsen future projected global warming in a large scale, they cannot do anything about Washington’s daily temperature on Jan. 21.”

Just how does one affect something that’s not necessarily happening but is “projected” to happen? Does far-reaching government policy change the thing or the projection of the thing? For Obama and his fans, there’s no difference. He said it and that’s all that matters.

On its third weekend of release, this movie designed to raise awareness about hydraulic fracturing averaged only $774 per screen. By contrast, “Argo” averaged $2,021 per screen even though it’s been out for 14 weeks.

“Promised Land” has grossed less than $7 million to date, which is less than half of what it cost to make the movie. And that figure doesn’t include extensive marketing costs. No doubt, Damon won’t express regret for doing this regrettable movie and it won’t cost him more than money.

One of the Ten Commandments of Hollywood is to sometimes mix social awareness with all the big-budget movies whose characters ignore that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” thing.

David Ocamb, director of the Oklahoma Chapter of the Sierra Club, says “water is our state’s most precious resource” and claims animal feeding operations threaten water quality.

But large-animal feeding operations also depend upon a clean water supply. Without it, dead carcasses and diseased animals start to stack up and massive financial losses accrue. Agriculture producers in general are far more reliant on clean water than the average citizen.

It’s nonsense to claim the Department of Agriculture — or the agriculture industry as a whole — would turn a blind eye to potential water pollution. Environmentalists prefer the EPA not because it’s for clean water, but because its knee-jerk positions are often simply anti-business.

Here’s a “record” you may not be aware of: No tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma from June 1 through the end of September. That’s happened only once before, in 2003. But then the records date only to 1950. Before that, who knows?

Amid all the bad news about the weather this year, we can at least be thankful that the tail end of the spring tornado season wasn’t all that newsworthy.

Three town hall meetings are being held (the first is at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 6, at the Norman Public Library) to let residents do the talking.

“This might be the first time meteorologists have really tried to learn about other ways of thinking about tornadoes from local people,” said Kim Klockow, with the OU College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences.

Klockow said her colleagues are finding that what local people believe about twisters can influence how they react to them, as much or more than what forecasters provide.

“We know a lot about the weather, but we know much less about the beliefs or local knowledge of the local people who are experiencing it,” Klockow said.

It’s an interesting concept. Folks in Moore and Newcastle will want to mark their calendars. Town halls also are planned Sept. 20 in Moore and Oct. 4 in Newcastle, with locations and times to be determined.

Blame the mild winter on two outbreaks, one of West Nile virus transmitted by mosquito bites and the other of crickets.

The cricket explosion is blamed on ideal breeding conditions for crickets and less-than-ideal breeding conditions for the insect’s natural predators. Mosquitoes need water for breeding but not for living or for biting. The hot weather has actually spurred their development; it won’t stop until freezing temperatures hit.

West Nile symptoms typically start appearing three or more days after the bite from a carrying insect. The virus has taken the lives of five Oklahomans so far this season. Being forewarned means protecting your forearms and other body parts from mosquito bites as summer rolls into fall.

As for the crickets, they’re a nuisance but at least they don’t foster a dread disease.

The administration says the changes will leave us less reliant on foreign energy, save motorists money at the fuel pump and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney correctly points out that meeting the new standards will require more-expensive vehicles that will cancel out the savings consumers realize from filling up less frequently.

The gas mileage rules will be phased in gradually and will be reviewed in 2018. Perhaps by then we’ll be well on our way, under different leadership in the White House, to reaching oil independence through smart drilling and exploration programs instead of gimmicks.

Plans are to convert the gasoline-powered canal boats to run on electricity, using a federal grant to buy the engines. This would be a quieter, potentially cheaper alternative that also has the potential of being better for the environment.

Operators also won’t have to carry heavy fuel cans to the boats. Instead, they will plug them.

No one swims in the canal (at least not legally), but water and electricity will make a good mix for the water taxis running in Bricktown.

As we all sweltered this month, Oklahomans old enough to remember the original 113-degree day could offer some perspective. In 1936, air conditioning was a rarity. Indeed, in some parts of the country then, electricity itself was still in the future.

Conditioning the air has its roots in ancient Rome, but the forerunner of what we have now dates to early in the 20th century and Willis Haviland Carrier’s electric air conditioning system.

Oklahoma should set aside a day each year to honor The Father of Cool. Since his birthday is Nov. 26, when nature cools us without electricity, perhaps Aug. 3 — or Aug. 11 — is appropriate.

The heat wave/drought is an anomaly. It will break soon. In any case, this can’t be as bad as last summer. An El Nino will come to our rescue, just wait and see! Last year the heat broke around Labor Day and it started raining again in the fall. This will happen again!

Anger:

Let’s face it. This is as bad as last summer, the one that broke all records. Relentless triple-digit highs? We’re used to that. But not to relentless 110-plus days.

Depression:

Why us? Why is it hotter here than in Phoenix, in the “Valley of the Sun”?

Bargaining:

We will accept these miserable summers as a tradeoff if the winters will stay mild and ice-free and the storms in spring and fall bring just rain and not hail and high winds. Also, we’d like it not to rain at all during the State Fair, except between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. Also, no weather delays at OU or OSU home games.

Acceptance:

We will get through this. By late October, we’ll all be enjoying the autumnal breezes and complaining (if only mildly) that it’s a bit brisk in the early morning or that the skies have been overcast for three straight days.

Rachel, a 9-year-old from Bellevue, Wash., died last year in an automobile accident. At the time, she was trying to raise $300 to help bring clean water to Africa.

As her 10th birthday approached, she asked friends and family to forgo buying her presents and instead donate to a New York-based group called charity: water. News of Rachel’s quest spread following her death, and it resulted in nearly 32,000 people giving a total of $1.27 million.

This week, the girl’s mother, grandparents and others were in Ethiopia visiting the wells built with Rachel’s gift. That money will go a long way. Charity: water says a $20 donation can provide one person with clean drinking water for decades.

“There’s something about Rachel and her story that has touched people and inspired them,” her mother told The Associated Press. “She was such a special girl.”

Is this “proof” of global warming? Not really.

Ice core records show similar melting occurred in 1889 and indicate similar melts have happened every 150 years. Greenland’s history is filled with dramatic temperature change. The Norse Vikings arrived around 980, during a 300-year-long warm period. Then around 1100, the average temperature dropped 7 degrees Fahrenheit in about 80 years, driving the Vikings out.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that over the past 5,600 years the Greenland arrivals and departures of the Vikings and two other groups coincided with major, rapid temperature changes.

A changing climate is not proof that mankind is changing the climate.

Actually it’s the heat index, that measure of temperature mixed with the humidity. But with recent heating, the temperature is becoming a master over the moisture. Lower humidity may help 98 degrees feel more like, well, 99 degrees, but it also increases fire danger. That’s misery wrapped in a cocoon of concern.

The miserable company Oklahoma is now keeping is the 72 percent of the country labeled by the U.S. Drought Monitor as being in the “abnormally dry” category or worse. This is the largest geographic extent of drought or pre-drought conditions recorded since the Drought Monitor began in 1999, according to Associate State Climatologist Gary McManus.

“Odds favor more drought development as summer trudges ahead and a dry Oklahoma looks with anticipation toward the fall rainy season,” McManus noted last week in an Oklahoma Climatological Survey press release. Nearly half the state is already enduring drought conditions, he said, with the remainder “abnormally” dry, a precursor to outright drought classification.

Given the misery of the summer of 2011, this is discomfiting news. We’ve gone from “Surely it can’t be as bad as last year” to “Here we go again!”

At least the economic misery index (adding the unemployment rate to the inflation rate) doesn’t yet have the firefighters on high alert.