Most major oil companies have backed out of the retail business because selling gas generally isn’t very profitable.
According to IBISWorld, gas stations make an average net margin of just 1.4% on their fuel.
That’s far lower than the 7.7% average across all industries — and ranks beneath other notoriously low margin businesses like grocery stores (2.5%) and car dealerships (3.2%).
When the time comes, I think electric cars with fast charging will be vastly more profitable for gas stations. While there is costs to adding additional electricity capacity, and electricity is not free, it's actually a pretty inexpensive product when bought on open market. Combined with the longer times to fast charge, it's much more likely people will go into gas stations to buy food and other supplies while they wait for their electric car to charge.
With tens of thousands of people displaced by floods, wildfires and hurricanes this summer, researchers warn that the majority of untapped fossil fuels must remain in the ground to avoid even more extreme weather.
Fossil fuel producers should avoid extracting at least 90% of coal reserves and 60% of oil and gas reserves by 2050, according to a study published in Nature, to limit global temperature rise to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Even then, that gives the planet only a 50% chance of avoiding a climate hotter than that.
Global temperatures have already warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, which releases gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. As a result of the warming, droughts, storms and heat waves are becoming more extreme, causing a cascade of disasters.
Here's a sentence that's basically unintelligible to most people: Humans must mitigate global warming by pursuing an unprecedented transition to a carbon neutral economy.
A recent study that found some of the most common terms in climate science are confusing to the general public. The study tested words that are frequently used in international climate reports, and it concluded that the most confusing terms were "mitigation," "carbon neutral" and "unprecedented transition."
Just imagine the possibilities of politicians to lie on the left and right. It seems like people are claiming everything that is bad or problematic causes global warming. Likewise it seems like climate change is often blamed on individual actions rather than government policy, even though that's essentially a lie.
President Biden plans to visit New York and New Jersey on Tuesday to survey the damage wrought when remnants of Hurricane Ida struck several states in the Northeast with ferocity this week, thrashing the region several days after making landfall on the Gulf Coast.
At least 49 people are confirmed dead, and in some areas, the search continues for missing people. Recovery efforts remain underway.
There was "just the right mix of weather conditions" in place for Ida to unleash devastating floods and even tornadoes on parts of the region, Tripti Bhattacharya, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University, told NPR. Scientists say climate change is creating the conditions to make such storms more intense.
The ill-fated construction of new nuclear reactors in South Carolina—one of two such troubled Westinghouse reactor construction projects in the United States—was abruptly terminated on July 31, 2017, but the effort to determine legal accountability for the project’s colossal failure is only now hitting its stride.
The South Carolina legislature conducted hearings about the project’s collapse. But it has fallen to the United States Attorney for South Carolina to outline internal decisions that led to project abandonment—via court filings, plea agreements, and indictments. These filings are proving to be the best documentation so far of criminal behavior related to projects that were part of a much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” that began in the early-2000s but has since petered out in the United States.
On August 18, 2021, a second Westinghouse official was charged in a federal grand jury indictment filed with the court in Columbia, South Carolina. The charges outline “the scheme” to cover up key details about the problem-plagued project to construct two 1,100 megawatt (MW) Westinghouse AP1000 light-water reactors at the VC Summer site north of Columbia.
