Chevron, owners of a refinery that exploded over the summer resulting in possible criminal charges, decided to make a strategic investment that it clearly hopes will prevent future, similar headaches.

It gave $2.5 million to a pro-Republican super PAC.

Chevron’s donation accounts for the bulk of the $3.1 million the group raised between Oct. 1-17, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission released Thursday.

California-based Chevron, in a statement, said it “exercises its right to participate in the political process through various contributions” and emphasized that all of the company's political giving is fully disclosed. …

The Chevron donation appears to be the largest by a publicly traded company since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, according to Public Campaign Action Fund, a group that promotes the public financing of elections.

The lucky PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, has spent $4.1 million against Democratic candidates so far this cycle. Here's one of the ads it funded, dinging a Democratic incumbent on cap-and-trade.

If you were to go to Congress and say, "Hey, Congress. I know a way to stem significant drags on the nation's productivity," they'd probably say, "Great, let's hear it." And then you'd say, "Let's work to fight climate change and limit the number of droughts the country experiences," and they'd tune out as soon as you said "climate" and go back to tallying their checks from oil companies.

From the Bureau of Economic Analysis [PDF]:

Real [gross domestic product (GDP)] increased 2.0 percent (annual rate) in the third quarter of 2012, following an increase of 1.3 percent in the second quarter. …

BEA’s GDP estimates reflect the effects of this summer’s extreme hot weather and drought in the Midwest on farm production. For the most part, these effects are embedded in the regular source data that are used by BEA. When the source data do not completely reflect the effects of the drought, BEA attempts to supplement these data, applying methodologies similar to those used in the past. While the drought could indirectly affect many components of GDP, such as personal consumption expenditures and exports, it is only possible to separately identify its effects on a few components, such as the change in farm inventories.

Adjusting for inflation, the change in farm inventories subtracted 0.42 percentage point from the third-quarter change in real GDP after subtracting 0.17 percentage point from the second-quarter change.

Emphasis added. We noted the second-quarter GDP drag last month; the slowdown this quarter was even more significant.

[sigh] Hello.

I know you're tired of hearing about Hurricane Sandy. Or maybe you're not. Who knows. If you are, I'm sorry. I can't help it. I live on the East Coast. This, this thing is bearing down on me. I bet it was just as hard for Damocles not to always be blogging about swords. And since I made the first Sandy-related GIF several days ago, by the laws of the internet, I own the story.

Here's where we are this morning.

As you can see, the anticipated track continues to shift west and south. The storm should make landfall Monday night, probably somewhere near Delaware. But as it has over the past few days, that track could change.

Without question, residential rooftop solar is a boon: economically, environmentally, aesthetically (if you're into that sci-fi thing). But there's a drawback to democratizing power generation -- it's hard to count. A company building a new coal plant is easier to learn about than the Smiths putting a solar panel on their roof. Figuring out how many solar panels there are is tricky; it means coming up with new ways of generating approximations.

The Energy Information Association, a branch of the Department of Energy, thinks it's figured out how to add it up. On Wednesday, it released the first such accounting. How much rooftop solar is there? A lot.

This graph is confusing, so let's start with the toplines. There is about 3,500 megawatts of photovoltaic capacity in the United States. Of that, about 1,000 megawatts are utility-scale, massive, utility-owned facilities.

The rest of the capacity is on-site, either residential or commercial. Commercial installations, like those atop big-box stores, have about 1,500 megawatts in capacity. Residential has about 1,000 megawatts -- equivalent to about four coal-powered plants.

Man, geoengineering is trendddyyyyy these days!

(A quick review: The term "geoengineering" refers to attempts to fix the planet's environmental problems by mucking around with the planet. For example, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere somehow.)

Last week's goat was Russ George, who dumped a bunch of iron in the ocean. His goal was to create a massive algal bloom (which he did) which would absorb carbon dioxide. The main thing he did, though, was piss everyone off.

Now David Keith is the geoengineer of the hour, with an interview at Quartz and providing the quote-of-the-day to Foreign Policy:

There are two distinct approaches [to global warming] under consideration -- sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, or creating an artificial sun shield for the planet. The former, which involves reversing some of the very processes that are leading to the climate problem, is expensive. The latter just sounds scary. David Keith, a leading thinker on geoengineering, calls it "chemotherapy" for the planet. "You are repulsed?" he says. "Good. No one should like it. It's a terrible option."

Energy companies got all excited last month when the Department of Energy started handing out investments to explore gas hydrates on the ocean floor off the East Coast. These hydrates are basically methane gas trapped in little pockets of ice (basically), so of course energy companies want to bring them up, thaw them out, and set them on fire.

There's just one little problem: The extremely warm water off the coast may already be melting the hydrates.

From NBC News:

Temperature changes in the Gulf Stream are "rapidly destabilizing methane hydrate along a broad swathe of the North American margin," the experts said in a study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Using seismic records and ocean models, the team estimated that 2.5 gigatonnes of frozen methane hydrate are being destabilized and could separate into methane gas and water.

It is not clear if that is happening yet, but that methane gas would have the potential to rise up through the ocean and into the atmosphere, where it would add to the greenhouse gases warming Earth. …

"It is unlikely that the western North Atlantic margin is the only area experiencing changing ocean currents," they noted. "Our estimate ... may therefore represent only a fraction of the methane hydrate currently destabilizing globally."

In July 2011, a TransCanada natural-gas pipeline in Wyoming exploded. The Canadian Broadcasting Company found internal company documents explaining how it happened: negligence.

“We are in trouble on the Bison project,” the pipelines’ construction manager wrote in a Sept. 18, 2010, internal email that lists problems related to welding and inspection. Construction of the project had started in August 2010.

The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) inspected the Bison project in September 2010, and took issue with the quality-assurance of inspections, the qualifications of people working on the pipeline and the procedures used to test the coating on the pipe. …

CBC News also obtained an all-staff internal memo issued by TransCanada CEO Russ Girling on Aug. 11, 2011, in which he acknowledged problems with an earlier phase of the existing Keystone line, and the ill-fated Bison pipeline.

"We have experienced some challenges with the startup of our Keystone and Bison pipelines which has been disappointing for both TransCanada and its customers,” he wrote.

Publicly, the story was different.

Didn't like the official presidential debates? Underwhelmed by the third-party debate? Fine. Here's a report-back from another debate, this time only about energy and the environment, using high-profile surrogates for the candidates. If you aren't happy now, you may as well resign yourself to your handcrafted "Debates 2012” playset in which you do the voices for both Obama and Romney and also the dial-testing.

Well, to clarify, you should only be happy about this in the sense that you're getting a debate on energy and the environment. The answers to the questions posed aren't gonna thrill you. And only happy if you like very, very brief summaries.

The surrogates:
Joseph Aldy, representing Obama. Faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School, formerly served as special assistant to the president for energy and environment. Here is a story about how he climbed a mountain to say goodbye to some glaciers.
Oren Cass, representing Romney. Domestic policy director for the campaign, formerly of Bain & Co. Here is an article Cass wrote about how Obama is killing oil production (spoiler: as if), just so you get a sense of the guy.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog did a good job pulling out the key components. Like a delicious sauce, we will reduce those key points even further, to get to the yummy essence of each campaign, to spread out over your ballot. (If you're "one of those," here is the full (long) transcript. I dare you to read the whole thing. Dare you.)

If I asked you to go out in your yard (sorry, city dwellers -- a "park") and dig up some rocks, you'd say: no big deal. You go out, grab a spoon, dig out a rock. If I asked you to do it again, in the same spot — no problem. Maybe you need a trowel, but you go and bring me a rock. But then if I ask you to do it in the same spot for 50 years? Eventually getting rocks becomes a giant, expensive pain in the ass.

And that’s the metaphor I’m using to explain how mining costs are knee-capping the coal industry.

We've discussed how Big Coal is on its way out, pushed by super-cheap natural gas. But even if gas weren't cheap, coal is getting more expensive -- in large part (as we noted last year) because the easy-to-access coal has already been mined.

From the Washington Post:

Although it’s commonly said that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal with more than 200 years worth of reserves, digging up those coal reserves and delivering them to customers has been getting more expensive.

That’s because of rising costs of transportation, explosives, wages — and geology. In most areas, companies first dig coal from areas that are easiest to access and that have the thickest, richest seams. Over time, however, it becomes more expensive to mine — and more difficult to do so profitably.

Yesterday, we wrote about Tropical Storm Sandy, making jokes about a European agency that wrote with tangible agitation about "THE STORM’S MENACE- A POWERHOUSE CAPABLE OF WHIPPING THE ATLANTIC INTO A FRENZY AND CHURNING UP DANGEROUS TIDES." Caps in the original, of course.

We laughed it off. LOL, wacky Europeans. This thing is headed out to sea! All this talk about it being a "billion dollar" storm, or a "snor'eastercane" (snow + nor'easter + hurricane), was unwarranted!

Well, yesterday, it became a hurricane. And this morning, NOAA updated its forecast track.

Oops.