Four Nigerians have taken on an unlikely and outsized opponent, Shell Oil -- and on Shell's home turf.

The men live in villages in the Niger Delta, a sprawling region in the south of the country where the Niger River fans out to meet the Atlantic. The area is home to much of the oil-rich country's petroleum infrastructure -- refineries, etc. -- serving as the commodity's gateway to the rest of the world. The oil business in this region is often dangerous, and toxic and polluting.

The villagers, working with Friends of the Earth, say that leaks from a Shell pipeline ruined farmland, ponds, and the water supply. From the Associated Press:

"If you are drinking water you are drinking crude, if you are eating fish, you are eating crude, if you are breathing, you are breathing crude," one of the farmers, Eric Dooh, told reporters outside court.

"What I expect today is justice," he added. "I expect that judges are going to proceed in this matter, have sympathy and look into our environment -- tell Shell to apply the international standards where they are operating in Nigeria."

All summer, as the drought worsened and prices of staples like corn and soybeans spiked, there was a certain subset of America, already thinking about their costumes, with one worry: Are we going to run out of pumpkins?

Now that decorative gourd season is upon us, we have some good news. There's no shortage of pumpkins. In fact, we've got something like a bumper crop.

From the Associated Press:

The drought forced thousands of ranchers to sell off cattle because pastures were too dry to graze, and corn and soybean farmers watched their plants wither in the summer sun. But John Ackerman said most of the pumpkins he planted fared “fantastic” for a simple, single reason: Pumpkins dig dry weather. ...

Pathology may help explain why pumpkins coped better than most crops at beating the heat. A relative of squashes, cucumbers, watermelons and cantaloupe, pumpkins tend to thrive in warm, temperate climates that stave off fungus, mold and other rind-rotting diseases that spread in wet conditions, said Dan Egel, a plant pathologist with Purdue University’s extension.

Also, pumpkins grown from seeds -- the most common way -- have tremendous root systems that reach deep into the ground, enabling them to reach moisture that corn and other crops without taproots cannot find.

See? You learned something about pumpkins.

In May of 2011, our David Roberts deemed the Atlantic Wind Connection "a Big Deal." His capitalization. The project, funded in part by Google's energy-focused subsidiary, would install a massive transmission backbone along the Eastern seaboard connected to a series of offshore wind farms.

And according to a new estimate commissioned by project backers, it could create more than 70,000 new jobs. From the Associated Press:

The study released Wednesday said those jobs would be created by a new industrial base needed to manufacture, build, operate and maintain the towering wind turbines, and an additional 40,000 jobs would be needed to serve the supply chain. The job growth would be realized over a 10-year build out of the offshore industry. ...

Backed by the Internet titan Google and other investors, the Atlantic Wind Connection is moving forward with the construction of a 380-mile power line that would enable up to 7,000 megawatts of electricity to be produced at offshore wind farms from Virginia to New Jersey.

The study’s economic projections are based on the development of 7,000 megawatts of wind power, or enough to power more than 2 million homes in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Enjoying the bad press stemming from the arrest of landowners who are "trespassing" on their own land, TransCanada figured it would go ahead and have some journalists arrested, too.

From FuelFix:

Two New York Times journalists were detained briefly by law enforcement officers while reporting on demonstrations against the Keystone XL pipeline in northeast Texas, the newspaper said Thursday.

The journalists, reporter Dan Frosch and a photographer, were on private property with the permission of the landowner to report on protesters there on Wednesday, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said. She said she did not know the identity of the photojournalist.

Like the "landowner" gets to have any say over who can be on his land. Come on. What do you think this is, America?

If you are a person who eats food, you'll want to read Bloomberg's look at the system of self-regulation by food producers. Actually, no. You won't want to read it, unless you like stories of convulsive bloody deaths and details about the amount of human feces on your food.

In short:

During the past two decades, the food industry has taken over much of the FDA’s role in ensuring that what Americans eat is safe. The agency can’t come close to vetting its jurisdiction of $1.2 trillion in annual food sales.

In 2011, the FDA inspected 6 percent of domestic food producers and just 0.4 percent of importers. The FDA has had no rules for how often food producers must be inspected.

The food industry hires for-profit inspection companies -- known as third-party auditors -- who aren’t required by law to meet any federal standards and have no government supervision. Some of these monitors choose to follow guidelines from trade groups that include ConAgra Foods Inc., Kraft Foods Inc. and Wal-Mart.

The private inspectors that companies select often check only those areas their clients ask them to review. That means they can miss deadly pathogens lurking in places they never examined.

And they do.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar made an announcement yesterday. (If you aren't hooked by that intro, I don't know what it would take.) For the first time in over three decades, the United States is poised to permit construction of a new oil refinery. From the Interior Department's announcement:

As part of the Obama Administration’s all-of-the-above energy strategy to expand domestic energy production, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today announced approval of a ‘land-into-trust’ application from the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation. Today’s action is one in a series of necessary approvals that will enable the tribes to build the first U.S. refinery in decades, supporting American made energy -- including domestic resources from the Bakken Formation -- while also creating jobs. …

If all required approvals are granted, the proposed MHA Nation Clean Fuels Refinery would be the first new refinery built in the United States in more than 30 years. ... As proposed, the 13,000 barrel-per-day facility would refine Bakken Formation crude oil into diesel fuel, propane and naptha products for the U.S. market. Since the President took office, domestic oil and gas production has increased each year, with domestic oil production currently at an eight year high, and natural gas production at its highest level ever.

Emphasis added, to make a point. And I omitted the second paragraph, which quotes Salazar mentioning the president, "all-of-the-above," and jobs. Again.

The shorter version of Salazar's statement: Go vote for my boss! After all, in three and a half weeks, voters head to the polls, and the president wants to secure every possible vote. The new refinery is in North Dakota -- a state that will vote for Romney by about 114 percent -- but the Obama campaign certainly hopes there might be one or two voters in Ohio or Florida who will hear about this and be knocked off the fence into his arms. It's politics.

Last week, a new patch of oil popped up on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone was like, "Gee, I wonder if that's from the BP spill," all sarcastically. BP was all, "Woah woah, guys, the jury's out! Let's just wait and see! Maybe there's a new type of fish that is turning into oil spontaneously or something. Our scientists say it's possible!" And the scientists were like, "Yeah, that's possible," as they were depositing their big paychecks. (This thing about the oil fish is just a joke, I guess I should point out.)

Anyway, the oil was from the Deepwater Horizon spill, surprising no one. From the Washington Post:

The oil in a slick detected in the Gulf of Mexico last month matched oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill two years ago, the Coast Guard said Wednesday night, ending one mystery and creating another.

“The exact source of the oil is unclear at this time but could be residual oil associated with the wreckage or debris left on the seabed from the Deepwater Horizon incident,” the Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard added that “the sheen is not feasible to recover and does not pose a risk to the shoreline.” One government expert said the thin sheen, just microns thick, was 3 miles by 300 yards on Wednesday.

Some oil drilling experts said it was unlikely that BP’s Macondo well, which suffered a blowout on April 20, 2010, was leaking again given the extra precautions taken when it was finally sealed after spilling nearly 5 million barrels of crude into the gulf.

Right. And BP's anti-spill precautions have a sterling track record.

Not quite as cheap as it used to be.

A trade skirmish over solar panels has pitted the U.S. against China. And pitted one wing of the American solar industry against another. And pitted one presidential candidate against another. And here you thought tariffs were boring!

Here's the latest news from The New York Times:

The Commerce Department issued its final ruling Wednesday in a long-simmering trade dispute with China, imposing tariffs ranging from about 34 percent to nearly 47 percent on most manufacturers of solar panels and cells imported from the country.

For most of the Chinese manufacturers, the penalties are somewhat higher than those announced by the Obama administration earlier this year, when the government determined that Chinese companies were benefiting from unfair government subsidies and were selling their products below the cost of production, a practice known as dumping ...

Wholesale prices [for solar panels] have declined by nearly three-quarters since 2008 as Chinese companies expanded capacity and production much faster than the growth in worldwide demand. ...

About a dozen panel makers in the United States, as well as a similar number in Europe, have gone bankrupt or closed factories since the start of last year.

Think: Solyndra.

With autumn upon us, the outrageous extremes of heat we've been enjoying will only be outrageous extremes in the context of the time of year. Which is kind of sad for those of us who like to sit and watch the thermometer all summer, looking to see when the mercury crests over the most recent high, like marking a kid's height in a door frame. Our little climate's growing up / becoming a living horror scene.

Each month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cobbles together a helpful compendium of all of the ways that the previous month's weather was horrible. It just released the data for September. Turns out we've had the hottest "warm season" -- April-to-September stretch -- in U.S. history, and the year so far has been the warmest ever.

Other highlights, such as they are:

• The average contiguous U.S. temperature during September was 67.0°F, 1.4°F above the 20th century average, tying September 1980 as the 23rd warmest such month on record. September 2012 marks the 16th consecutive month with above-average temperatures for the Lower 48.
• According to the October 2, 2012 U.S. Drought Monitor, 64.6 percent of the contiguous U.S. was experiencing moderate-to-exceptional drought, slightly larger than the extent of drought at the end of August. The percent area of the nation experiencing exceptional drought, the worst category of drought, remained nearly constant at about 6 percent.
• The contiguous U.S. warm season, defined as the six-month period from April-September, had temperatures that were record warm. The six-month average temperature of 68.2°F for the Lower 48 was 2.6°F above average.
• The January-September period was the warmest first nine months of any year on record for the contiguous United States. The national temperature of 59.8°F was 3.8°F above the 20th century average, and 1.2°F above the previous record warm January-September of 2006. During the nine-month period, 46 states had temperatures among their ten warmest, with 25 states being record warm. Only Washington had statewide temperatures near average for the period.

It's worth also looking at the list of temperature anomalies, year-to-date. It will take a while to scroll down.

Last time on Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, Is a Remarkably Sketchy Person, we discovered that he was facing potential investigations into his practice of coercing managers into making political donations to Republicans while simultaneously helping Mitt Romney shoot ads featuring coal miners who were forced to go to a Romney rally without pay.

But, Robert Murray insists, he's the victim of persecution. Like Jesus, he'd probably argue, though he didn't explicitly here.

From The New Republic, which broke the story about Murray's coercion of his managers:

The company's general counsel denied that Murray was pressuring employees to give or rewarding them in any way for their contributions, as ... sources had described occurring. Now comes Murray himself with, as far as I can tell, his first public comments on the matter, in an interview with Erich Schwartzel of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "It's timed to shut me up. It's a dishonest, totally false and fabricated group of charges to embarrass Gov. Mitt Romney, my family, our company and me." …

Murray also denied an account that had emerged in the weeks prior to my article—that he had forced miners in southeastern Ohio to attend Romney's speech at the Murray mine in Beallsville, Ohio in August. … Murray told the Post-Gazette he had shut down operations not to help build up the crowd but because of safety concerns: "Secret Service snipers had positioned themselves around the location, and the event logistics made it impossible to continue work, Mr. Murray said. 'I'm not going to put anybody in a coal mine when I can't rescue them,' Murray said."

The Secret Service is trained to shoot any first responders to industrial accidents.