In other fossil-fuel-company-is-desperate-to-keep-the-good-times-going-despite-the-international-shift-away-from-fossil-fuels-(which-is-occurring-however-slowly)-and-therefore-is-insistent-on-its-employees-voting-a-hard-right-ticket-in-the-hopes-that-it-might-somehow-postpone-the-inevitable-degradation-of-the-planet-long-enough-to-wring-a-few-more-bucks-out-of-its-industry news, Koch Industries sent out a letter suggesting cool people for its employees to vote for.

From In These Times:

In a voter information packet obtained by In These Times, the Koch Industries corporate leadership informed tens of thousands of employees at its subsidiary, Georgia Pacific, that their livelihood could depend on the 2012 election and that the company supports Mitt Romney for president. The guide was similar to one the company distributed before the 2010 midterm elections, which Mark Ames and [Mike Elk] reported on in The Nation last year.

The packet arrived in the mailboxes of all 45,000 Georgia Pacific employees earlier this month. The cover letter, by Koch Industries President and Chief Operating Officer Dave Robertson, read: …

"If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects, and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills."

Enclosed with the letter was a flyer [PDF] listing Koch-endorsed candidates, beginning with Romney. Robertson’s letter explained: “At the request of many employees, we have also provided a list of candidates in your state that have been supported by Koch companies or by KOCHPAC, our employee political action committee.”

Coal miners who work for Murray Energy have one request for President Obama: stop lying.

Obama has been running an ad claiming that their employer, Murray Energy, forced them to attend a Mitt Romney rally without pay. If this issue sounds familiar, it's because we've mentioned it before.

On Friday, the miners held a press conference asking the president to pull the ad. Here's the press conference:

It quickly became a 30-second attack ad, by a group called "Checks And Balances For Economic Growth."

Checks And Balances For Economic Growth is registered at the Washington, D.C., address of the law firm Webster, Chamberlain & Bean -- an address shared by a number of conservative organizations, including, at one time, Tom DeLay's former political action committee. Thanks to the murky world of PAC contributions, it's not clear if Checks And Balances For Economic Growth is linked to Murray Energy PAC, the PAC run by mine owner Robert Murray to which, it seems, employees are forcefully encouraged to contribute.

There's little doubt that the miners in the video are concerned about their jobs. There's good reason to be. And it seems likely that the miners at the press conference appeared there willingly, though, as mentioned above, the company is apparently not averse to encouraging political action by its employees.

If you're eating something right now, you're going to want to stop. Not because this post is gross. Because you might want to save that to eat when the world runs out of food in a few months.

From The Guardian:

Failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and other countries this year have eroded reserves to their lowest level since 1974. The US, which has experienced record heatwaves and droughts in 2012, now holds in reserve a historically low 6.5% of the maize that it expects to consume in the next year, says the UN. ...

With food consumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves from an average of 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to under 74 days recently.

Prices of main food crops such as wheat and maize are now close to those that sparked riots in 25 countries in 2008. [The UN Food and Agriculture Organization] figures released this week suggest that 870 million people are malnourished and the food crisis is growing in the Middle East and Africa. Wheat production this year is expected to be 5.2% below 2011, with yields of most other crops, except rice, also falling, says the UN.

Here's a scary map (which you can click to enlarge):

The Bangor Daily News has the story:

A group of environmental advocates believe they have evidence that oil giant ExxonMobil — and perhaps even [Maine] Gov. Paul LePage [R] — are backing a plan to push controversial tar sands oil through an aging pipeline across Maine. ...

Representatives of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environment Maine, the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Council of Maine, among others, told reporters Wednesday morning during a news conference in Portland that research into the corporate parentage of the Portland Pipe Line Corp. shows a direct line to ExxonMobil, a company the environmentalists described as a major player in the field of Canadian tar sands oil extraction.

Six Western states could soon see big, new solar-power projects on public land, thanks to a plan finalized Friday by the Interior Department. The Hill reports:

The Interior Department set aside about 285,000 acres for commercial-scale solar in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. The federal government will offer incentives for development, help facilitate access to existing or planned electric infrastructure and ease the permitting process in the 17 zones. ...

If fully utilized, Interior predicts the zones could produce 23,700 megawatts of solar energy, enough to power 7 million homes.

Interior tried to be sensitive to conservation issues in developing the plan, as AP explains:

[T]he chosen sites have fewer of the environmental concerns — such as endangered desert tortoise habitat — that have plagued other projects.

Tax that rig.

Here's something that could only happen in Scandinavia. The Guardian reports:

Norway is to double carbon tax on its North Sea oil industry and set up a £1bn [$1.6 billion] fund to help combat the damaging impacts of climate change in the developing world. ... one of the most radical climate programmes yet by an oil-producing nation ...

Norway will also plough an extra £1bn into its funds for climate change mitigation, renewable energy, food security in developing countries and conversion to low-carbon energy sources, Environmental Finance reported.

It will step up spending on new projects to combat deforestation in developing countries ...

With demand for coal in the U.S. at a new low (thanks to fracking and natural gas), coal producers are anxious to ship their stocks abroad. Anti-coal activists, in turn, are anxious to stop the construction of coal export terminals, especially in the Pacific Northwest.

Now those anti-coal activists have some forceful new friends, as The New York Times reports:

Many environmental groups and green-minded politicians in the Pacific Northwest are already on record as opposing a wave of export terminals proposed from [the northwest coast of Washington] to the south-central coast of Oregon, aiming to ship coal to Asia. But in recent weeks, Indian tribes have been linking arms as well, citing possible injury to fishing rights and religious and sacred sites if the coal should spill or the dust from its trains and barges should waft too thick.

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.