Everybody needs more ice to freshen up their drinks on a warm day like today. Mining arctic ice and shipping it to the nation's finest watering holes and Seven Elevens are likely to be the next big thing.
"Last month Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. For his supporters, it provided evidence, at last, that the president is a man of his word. He may not have kept many campaign promises, but he kept this one. For his numerous critics it is just another sign of how little Trump cares about evidence of any kind. His decision to junk the Paris accord confirms Trump as the poster politician for the “post-truth” age."
"But this is not just about Trump. The motley array of candidates who ran for the Republican presidential nomination was divided on many things, but not on climate change. None of them was willing to take the issue seriously. In a bitterly contentious election, it was a rare instance of unanimity. The consensus that climate is a non-subject was shared by all the candidates who appeared in the first major Republican debate in August 2015 – Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee and Trump. Republican voters were offered 10 shades of denialism."
"If we stop our emissions today, we won’t go back to the past. The Earth will warm. And since the response to warming is more warming through feedbacks associated with melting ice and increased atmospheric water vapor, our job becomes one of limiting the warming. If greenhouse gas emissions are eliminated quickly enough, within a small number of decades, it will keep the warming manageable. It will slow the change – and allow us to adapt. Rather than trying to recover the past, we need to be thinking about best possible futures."
"According to the EIA, there’s no Big Oil collusion to blame. Rather, it’s a confluence of market, industry, and regulatory factors that affect everyone, not just those in luxury cars. In August 2016, premium gasoline reached a 12 percent share of all U.S. gasoline sales, a level not seen in 13 years. AAA said the demand for premium gas is due to more car owners “treating themselves” as pump prices drop. That’s true, up to a point. About 80 percent of all registered vehicles run fine on regular, according to AAA, and in a given year some 16.5 million people mistakenly believe premium gas will improve their aging hoopties or “clean out” engine deposits. But another factor driving demand is that more stringent fuel-economy standards have put downsized and turbocharged engines in more and more new cars. And most, if not all, of those engines, whether in a Mini Cooper or a Nissan Juke, require premium for the best power and mileage."
"The refining industry hasn’t been able to keep up. Greater domestic production of light crude oil has led to a surplus of naphtha, a lower-octane feedstock. When refiners convert naphtha into reformate, a high-octane component produced in a separate catalytic process, they’ve taken advantage of the naphtha surplus to produce more reformate. But these greater volumes of reformate are lower in octane than smaller volumes, the EIA says, and with the plastics industry turning away from naphtha, refiners have more of an incentive to blend the lower-octane stock into their gasoline. In turn, refiners haven’t increased their octane production with overall gasoline production. In 2016, refiners dedicated 30 percent of their total capacity to octane production, a three-point dip from 2007."
"Plutonium, named for the Roman god of the underworld and the dwarf planet at the edge of the solar system, is one of the world’s most dangerous elements. Inhaling just one particle will bombard internal organs, particularly the lungs and liver, with harmful alpha radiation for decades. For the most part, it isn’t naturally occurring. But until just over a decade ago, it was plentiful in this 5,000-acre patch of rolling hills and grasslands."
"From 1952 to 1989, this picturesque sanctuary was home to a factory that produced plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons ― a lot of them. Nearly all of the approximately 70,000 nuclear weapons produced in the United States include a part made at Rocky Flats."
"It was designated as a Superfund site in the early 1990s, and the radioactive materials have been removed. It’s scheduled to open to the public for the first time next summer."
"Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Monday he does not believe carbon dioxide emissions are the main driver of the earth's record-setting warming, a core finding of climate science. Instead, Perry said, the driver is most likely "the ocean waters and this environment that we live in."
"Perry became the second of President Donald Trump's cabinet members to go on television to publicly dismiss the importance of CO2 in global warming, ignoring the scientific evidence. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt rejected its role in answer to essentially the same question in March, also on CNBC's "Squawk Box."