Nearly six months after a Chevron refinery erupted in flames in Richmond, Cailf., there's a tiny bit of charred justice for residents of the San Francisco East Bay area.

In an announcement Wednesday, California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) said it would be fining Chevron $963,200 for the fire -- the biggest fine ever levied by the agency, and the biggest fine Cal/OSHA was even legally able to levy.

Cal/OSHA enforces workplace-safety law, and this judgment stemmed directly from 25 violations the agency said Chevron had committed. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The state said 11 of the violations were willful and that Chevron had disregarded known and obvious hazards, a category that carries a fine of $70,000 per instance. Twelve other violations were deemed serious, with fines ranging from $6,000 to $25,000 apiece. The other two violations were minor.

Cal/OSHA found that Chevron officials ignored their own reliability department's urging in 2002 that they replace the pipe that ultimately failed. Company inspectors told managers that the line was vulnerable to corrosion.

The line had lost more than 80 percent of its thickness to corrosion when it finally ruptured, a separate federal investigation has found. ...

Ken Willman was walking along Morecambe Beach near Lancaster, England, when his dog started paying eager canine attention to something marine-oriented and stinky. The guy poked at it and was like, oh, whatever. And then he went home and checked out Google. And then he thought, "Hmmm ... Better go check that thing out more closely," and good thing he did, because that seemingly yucky thing was a chunk of this sticky bad-smelling by-product of whale digestion called ambergris that just happened to be worth about $70,000.

Despite getting run over, doored, harassed, and generally being treated as second-class citizens of the road, bicyclists are the happiest of all commuters. Go figure!

The finding comes via an Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium study released this month. Those who walk to work, the study found, are nearly as happy as cyclists, who are about three times happier than solo car-drivers.

Of course, your commute happiness is improved if you're on your way to a good job that makes you a lot of money, but income gap aside, even rich workaholic bikers still had safety concerns that chipped away at their smile scores.

New York Daily News columnist Denis Hamill sees your safety concerns, cyclists, and he raises you a head injury, because that's the only explanation I have for Hamil's ragey column on New York's bike lanes that, he says, have "disfigured the city in a logistical and aesthetic way."

You can't make electricity without water. I mean, you can, but you have to use things like "solar panels" or "wind turbines," and who's going to do that? (Lots of people, I guess, but that doesn't help my point.) A 2009 study suggested that half of the freshwater we use goes to energy production, boiled to create steam to turn turbines, or used to cool off reactors. When we run low on water -- or when the water gets too warm -- the ability to generate electricity declines or halts. (Except from wind turbines and solar panels; I'll just keep pointing that out.)

According to the International Energy Agency, the amount of water we use for energy is about to go up. A lot. From National Geographic:

The amount of fresh water consumed for world energy production is on track to double within the next 25 years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects. …

If today's policies remain in place, the IEA calculates that water consumed for energy production would increase from 66 billion cubic meters (bcm) today to 135 bcm annually by 2035.

That's an amount equal to the residential water use of every person in the United States over three years, or 90 days' discharge of the Mississippi River. It would be four times the volume of the largest U.S. reservoir, Hoover Dam's Lake Mead.

For better or worse, the Superbowl is upon us. Domestic violence will go up. People will tweet about Beyonce. And -- most importantly -- Americans will eat shitloads of wings.

We will pay dearly for the pleasure of chomping into those spicy, tender vittles, however, because chicken wings are now wholesaling for $2.10 a pound. That's right,  wholesaling -- that price that means nothing to you because it's some fraction of what you will pay for them, which is about $2.52 a pound, up from a little less than $2 last year.

According to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the single food most likely to make you sick isn't ground beef or ground turkey but rather ... leafy greens! In other words, the “good for you” stuff. Dang.

In the 10 years between 1998 and 2008, produce caused 42 percent of food-borne illnesses, according to the study, with leafy greens alone accounting for 23 percent. Most of the produce-related illness was norovirus, which for most people is a nasty, messy, but brief experience. Produce was also the cause of 41 percent of hospitalizations and 24 percent of the deaths from food-borne illness -- though as a group meat, dairy, and eggs were responsible for more of each.

But before you toss the contents of your produce drawer into the compost heap, let’s consider a few things.

Climate Central reports that a weather-related record ended yesterday morning: the longest the U.S. has gone without a tornado-related death, 220 days.

[A] large and powerful tornado struck Adairsville, Ga., killing at least one person in a mobile home park. That tornado, which may rank as an EF-4 -- the second most powerful on the Enhanced Fujita Scale -- overturned cars on I-75 and damaged numerous buildings in downtown Adairsville, which is about 60 miles northwest of Atlanta.

A local news broadcast included a helicopter flight over the area damaged by the twister.

The Wall Street Journal sat down with Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant in what were probably some very nice chairs for this comfy little edited Q&A. The global agriculture giant is "battered, bruised, and still growing," according to the WSJ, whose cup runneth over with pathos for poor Hugh. The interview kicks off with: "What's the harm in disclosing genetically modified ingredients to consumers?" Yes, Hugh, please tell us about the harm.

Grant says California's Proposition 37 -- which would have required GMO foods to be labeled, and which Monsanto spent millions to defeat (weird, WSJ, y'all left that bit out!) -- "befuddled the issue." But Grant says he's personally "up for the dialogue around labeling." Why? Because he thinks GMOs are so great of course! (Come on, you knew that answer.)

They're the most-tested food product that the world has ever seen. Europe set up its own Food Standards Agency, which has now spent €300 million ($403.7 million), and has concluded that these technologies are safe. [Recently] France determined there's no safety issue on a corn line we submitted there. So there's always a great deal of political noise and turmoil. If you strip that back and you get to the science, the science is very strong around these technologies.

GMO haters gonna GMO hate! And Grant would rather be in the future than in the past. "I think some of the criticism comes with being first in a lot of these spaces. I'd rather be there than at the back of the pack." On the whole, Monsanto has "mended a lot of fences" and "turned things around" recently with the general public, according to Grant, in part because of "consistent messaging." I will give him that!

One of Grant's and Monsanto's messages, apparently: Vegetables taste crappy. This should definitely help the company with the 18-and-under crowd, at least.

The rate of piracy off the coast of Somalia in East Africa has dropped significantly over the past few years. The International Chamber of Commerce maintains a live map of attacks; the plurality at this point are off the coast of India. Earlier this month, a Somali pirate kingpin announced his retirement using that traditional pirate tool: the press conference.

At the same time, attacks along the western coast of Africa have increased. One key target? Oil. From Quartz:

The East Africa attacks were also sometimes on oil tankers, but with the goal of squeezing out large ransoms from the cargo-owners. The difference now is that the West Africa attacks are after the oil itself. On Jan. 21, for example, a tanker called ITRI was captured by pirates near Cote d’Ivoire; it has not been heard from since. Most of the oil attacks are off the coast of Nigeria, where pirates ply the Niger Delta.

Want to be able to tell the difference between a natural fish and a genetically engineered frankensalmon in the dystopian food future? It looks like you may not be required to live on the crunchy West Coast for that.

After California's GMO-labeling Proposition 37 failed to pass last fall, bills that would require labels for genetically modified food are rolling in Oregon and Washington, and similar initiatives are picking up steam in Minnesota, Missouri, and New Mexico, as well as in Connecticut and Vermont, where GMO-labeling legislation failed to pass last year amid threats of legal action from Monsanto.

New Mexico could be the first state to pass such a law. State Sen. Peter Wirth of Santa Fe, who is sponsoring the legislation, says the bill is aimed at "leveling the playing field" for food actually grown in fields.

Minnesota is home to the headquarters of General Mills, Hormel, Cargill, and Land-O-Lakes, which were all big contributors to the fight against Prop 37, but citizens groups are pushing legislators to pass a label law there too (and the local Fox affiliate covers them pretty appropriately). Meanwhile, Missouri's legislation would just target genetically modified meat and fish.

The most interesting take on the national GMO label fight comes from the belly of the beast: the International Dairy Foods Association, which just had its annual meeting. From Meat Poultry News: