It is earnings season, that every-three-months ritual in which publicly traded companies reveal whether or not they made money while stock owners hold shaky fingers over mouse buttons, cursors resting on "sell."

If the company is an oil company, the question is not whether it was profitable but, rather, how excessively profitable the company was. Did Dinosaur Oil top its $18 bajillion quarter of last year as analysts expected? Traders hold shaky fingers over mouse buttons, hoping the enormous profits were enormous enough.

This morning, Shell stepped up to the plate. From the Financial Times:

Shell said its profits on a clean current cost of supplies basis, which strips out changes in the value of oil inventories, and excluding identified items, stood at $5.6bn compared with $4.8bn a year ago -- an increase of 15 per cent.

$5.6 billion in profit. That's $62 million a day over the last three months. It's $720 every second. Meaning that Shell would have earned:

Last week, a much discussed new paper in the journal Nature seemed to suggest to some that we needn’t worry too much about the melting of Greenland, the mile-thick mass of ice at the top of the globe. The research found that the Greenland ice sheet seems to have survived a previous warm period in Earth’s history -- the Eemian period, some 126,000 years ago -- without vanishing (although it did melt considerably).

But Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box isn’t buying it.

At Monday’s Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., Box, who has visited Greenland 23 times to track its changing climate, explained that we’ve already pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide 40 percent beyond Eemian levels. What’s more, levels of atmospheric methane are a dramatic 240 percent higher -- both with no signs of stopping. “There is no analogue for that in the ice record,” said Box.

And that’s not all. The present mass-scale human burning of trees and vegetation for clearing land and building fires, plus our pumping of aerosols into the atmosphere from human pollution, weren’t happening during the Eemian. These human activities are darkening Greenland’s icy surface, and weakening its ability to bounce incoming sunlight back away from the planet. Instead, more light is absorbed, leading to more melting, in a classic feedback process that is hard to slow down.

“These giants are awake,” said Box of Greenland’s rumbling glaciers, “and they seem to have a bit of a hangover."

Recently, a friend of mine raised the kind of question that stops you in your tracks, opens your eyes, and makes you take a good, hard look at life as you know it -- a question that poses a fundamental challenge to values that date all the way back to childhood. Namely: How often do you really need to wash your clothes?

She was specifically concerned about her 2-year-old’s seemingly sparkly clean T-shirts. “There are days when his entire outfit is spotless,” she mused. “I feel weird putting it in the washer, but then I wonder if I’m being a negligent mom.”

Huh. Before this illuminating question, I confess I hadn’t really thought about it. Of course you wash most of your stuff after wearing it, right? Otherwise it’s gross ... right? Dirty? I mean, “the great unwashed” is not a compliment.

But then again, who says I do need to launder my '90s-era No Doubt Tragic Kingdom tour T-shirt after just one afternoon sitting at a desk? Could some kind of detergent mafia be operating in the shadows of my laundry room right this minute?

If I’ve learned anything as the Greenie Pig, it’s that assumptions -- that you need shampoo, say, or that there’s something wrong with enjoying a donut straight from the trash -- should always be challenged. So I set out to find out just how many wearings my apparel could stand, and, by proxy, how much water and energy I could save by delaying the spin cycle.

It's a good thing that unexpected California frost didn't freeze out the state's avocado crop. It's not just the Golden State that loves nature's butter. Americans' appetite for avocados has exploded over the last decade, jumping significantly in 2012 alone, in no small part due to marketing campaigns by foreign avocado growers. This weekend, Americans are expected to eat several tons of avocados on "Guacamole Sunday" while watching the Super Bowl.

Twilight Greenaway at the Smithsonian's Food Think blog:

Last year, according to the produce industry publication The Packer, about 75 percent of the avocados shipped within the U.S. in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl came from Mexico. Most of the rest came from Chile. And that translates to a lot of the creamy green fruits. This year Americans will eat almost 79 million pounds of them in the few weeks before the big game -- an eight million pound increase over last year and a 100 percent increase since 2003.

A bit of surprising news this morning: The economy actually shrank in the fourth quarter of 2012. It was only down by an annual rate of 0.1 percent, but it had been expected to grow by 1.1 percent. And it didn't drop because of burdensome regulation or slow job growth. It dropped because of the Pentagon.

From The Washington Post:

[F]ederal defense spending fell at an astounding 22.2 percent annual rate in the quarter, which subtracted 1.28 percentage points from GDP growth. That was in part a reversal from the unusual 12.9 percent gain in the third quarter. But when the two quarters are averaged together, the defense sector was a drag on the economy in the second half of 2012 -- and that’s before a “sequester” of automatic defense cuts goes into effect this year if Congress doesn’t act to avert it.

That "sequester" is the result of a poison pill that Congress administered to itself. Last year, knowing full well that Congress couldn't be trusted to get anything done without some sort of threat hanging over its head, Congress decided to force Congress to act, passing a bill that created huge, automatic spending cuts unless Congress got its act together and figured out a budget package. Well, Congress was not smart enough to avoid Congress' trap, so now those $1.2 trillion in budget cuts are slated to go into effect.

At the end of 2012, the Pentagon saw those cuts looming; this week, it announced 46,000 layoffs. If the full weight of the cuts go into effect, the damage to the economy could be severe.

Enter Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) with an idea. From Environment and Energy Daily:

And that's that. From CNN:

A federal judge in New Orleans Tuesday approved a $4 billion plea agreement for criminal fines and penalties against oil giant BP for the 2010 Gulf oil spill, the largest criminal penalty in U.S. history.

U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Vance imposed the terms that the Justice Department and BP had agreed to last November, which include the oil company pleading guilty to 14 criminal counts -- among them, felony manslaughter charges -- and the payment of a record $4 billion in criminal penalties over five years.

Once you add in the $1.4 billion levied against Transocean, the total bill for polluting the Gulf of Mexico and killing 11 workers is $5.4 billion. Or, if you're so inclined, $5.3 million a day since the explosion on April 20, 2010.

A clever new study [PDF] from the World Future Council attempts to do something I haven't seen before: quantify the cost of not using renewables.

The idea is pretty simple. When we use finite fossil fuels to generate energy, rather than the inexhaustible, renewable alternatives, we make those fossil fuels unavailable for non-energetic uses (think petrochemicals) in the future. In other words, when we burn fossil fuels for energy, we are needlessly destroying valuable industrial capital stock.

You can read the paper for more on methodology and assumptions. The paper uses current market values for fossil fuels rather than attempting to predict future prices, so the estimates are likely conservative.

Here's the conclusion:

Protecting the use of increasingly valuable fossil raw materials for the future is possible by substituting these materials with renewables. Every day that this is delayed and fossil raw materials are consumed as one-time energy creates a future usage loss of between 8.8 and 9.3 billion US Dollars. Not just the current cost of various renewable energies, but also the costs of not using them need to be taken into account. [my emphasis]

Got that? Every day we use fossil fuels for energy, we steal $9 billion from future people who will need those fossil fuels for non-substitutable industrial uses.

It's a good news day for peer-to-peer car-sharing, and those hideous and somewhat disturbing furry pink mustaches I keep seeing around San Francisco.

Today the California Public Utilities Commission said it has reached an agreement with Zimride, the parent company of fast-growing California ride-share purveyor Lyft, to suspend a cease-and-desist notice and $20,000 citation against the company. The PUC is still reviewing its regulations on car-sharing programs in the Golden State and hasn't yet reached similar deals with Uber or Sidecar, which are technically still outlaws, though they don't have the creepy mustaches to match.

This was good timing for Lyft, which announced this morning that it would be expanding to Los Angeles neighborhood by neighborhood in an attempt to cover all that concrete sprawl. And it's not just Lyft that has its sights set on bigger and better car-sharing markets. From Techcrunch:

The move into L.A. marks the first expansion market for Lyft, which became available to riders in San Francisco last summer. To expand into Southern California, the company sent a team to recruit drivers and build the initial community infrastructure in the city. That means interviewing drivers, inspecting their cars, and generally attempting to instill the Lyft culture into the new market. ...

Lyft isn’t the only ride-sharing service that is looking to broaden its footprint. San Francisco-based competitor SideCar recently launched its service in the Seattle area, and is looking to expand even more aggressively in the coming months.

The Gallup Organization -- purveyors of fine polling products such as its Nov. 5 prediction that Romney would win; employers of possible future Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel (join the club); defendants in a lawsuit filed by the federal government alleging that the company inflated its prices -- released a poll yesterday. Let's look at it!

The top headline was that Republicans and Democrats differ more in their opinions on gun laws than on any other topic: 28 percent of Democrats are satisfied to some extent with existing laws on guns, compared with 59 percent of Republicans. Fine. Not surprising.

Here's what's interesting: The numbers related to "quality of the environment" -- a poor replacement for environmental laws, mind you -- broke down as 51 percent satisfaction among Democrats and 61 percent among Republicans. On "energy policies," 44 percent of Democrats are satisfied compared to 31 percent of Republicans.

Americans spent $16 billion last year bailing out farmers affected by the drought. Which might lead a sensible person to wonder whether farmers advocate policies meant to prevent future droughts, thereby potentially saving money -- and their yields -- over the long run.

The New York Times offers an answer:

To understand the complicated politics of climate change in the United States, you may want to talk to Pamela Johnson, president of the National Corn Growers Association’s Corn Board. …

Ms. Johnson’s main concern, and that of most other growers in the association, is not about how to deal with a changing climate -- how to slow the pace of warming and how to adapt to a warmer world with more erratic weather.

Rather, growers worry that political support for crop insurance might flag after a year in which taxpayers paid billions in subsidies to farmers while virtually everybody else faced deep budget cuts.

“We are Americans before we are farmers,” Ms. Johnson said. “We know we have budget problems.” Still, she added: “For our farmers, crop insurance is the main concern. It helps keep us in business.”

The Times article focuses on the failure of the U.S. to use energy-related taxes, like a carbon tax, to address climate change. While such a tax couldn't "single-handedly" win the fight, as the article claims, it could certainly have an effect.