The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long. (Photo by Timo Palo.)

The New York Times has a story that's getting a lot of traction today: The melting Arctic has set off a gold rush. Which … we knew. The Times article's focus, though, is largely on one player: China.

While the United States, Russia and several nations of the European Union have Arctic territory, China has none, and as a result, has been deploying its wealth and diplomatic clout to secure toeholds in the region.

“The Arctic has risen rapidly on China’s foreign policy agenda in the past two years,” said Linda Jakobson, East Asia program director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia. So, she said, the Chinese are exploring “how they could get involved.” …

To ... improve relations with Arctic nations, its ministers visited Denmark, Sweden and Iceland this summer, offering lucrative trade deals. High-level diplomats have also visited Greenland, where Chinese companies are investing in a developing mining industry, with proposals to import Chinese work crews for construction.

One point the Times raises (which I hadn't thought of) is that last month's successful voyage through the Northwest Passage by China's icebreaker Snow Dragon was probably as much a test run as anything.

Mitt Romney, reeling from leaked footage from a fundraiser at which he derides low-income Americans, this morning released two ads emphasizing his support for the coal industry.

As we've mentioned before, Romney's affection for coal is a relatively recent development. But Big Coal is not a fan of the president, so Romney's doing what he can to stoke the fires.

Here, via the Washington Post, is one of the spots.

The spot is called "War on Coal," in a nice little bit of subtlety. Oh, but wait. Did you see this shot?

That was filmed at Romney's August rally in Beallsville, Ohio. Compare it to the image at the top of this Toledo Blade story about the rally, for example, or any of these from a Google image search.

The Beallsville rally, you may remember, is the one at which miners were told that attendance was mandatory -- and they were docked a day's pay for the privilege of showing up.

After all, it's wind power that creates the foam on your coffee. (Photo by Ben Adams.)

On Tuesday, a group of 19 companies, using the silly name of BICEP, sent a letter to congressional leaders. The ask? Save the wind production tax credit (PTC), due to expire at the end of the year -- a key incentive for the wind power industry.

The letter reads, in part:

In the past decade American businesses have significantly ramped up their purchase of American wind energy. For consumers of wind electricity, the economic benefits of the PTC are tremendous. Electricity rates, which reflect marginal costs for power plant operations and fuel prices, consistently decrease when wind enters the market. Because wind prices can be locked in up front, businesses incorporating wind into their energy portfolios are better equipped to hedge market volatility in traditional fuels markets caused by supply shocks. We are concerned that allowing the PTC to expire will immediately raise prices for the renewable electricity we buy today.

Signed by Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Johnson & Johnson, and Pitney Bowes, among others, the letter was no doubt promptly placed into a manila folder and then filed away forever, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style.

We learned last week that the tax credit is all but dead -- thanks to the inaction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and, of course, to a completely intransigent House.

The companies that signed the letter are lobbying to save a few bucks on their electricity bills. Wind companies, meanwhile, are lobbying to avoid financial ruin and massive layoffs. For many, it's too late.

Residents of Alaska, the state once governed by conservative firebrand Sarah Palin, will each receive $878 from the state's Permanent Fund this year. The Permanent Fund was created in 1976 to collect and distribute revenues Alaska generates from publicly owned resources: sales of oil and natural gas, etc. In other words, it's an example of the government holding a resource and distributing the proceeds from that resource to the entire population. It's like -- what's a good example? -- it's like how some entire nations used to maintain ownership of businesses and then distribute goods and services from those businesses to the citizenry. There's a name for that sort of government that escapes me.

The oil industry wasn't as good to Alaska this year as in years past. The peak of the government's munificence came in 2008, the same year that then-Gov. Sarah Palin ran for vice president while assailing Barack Obama's imaginary predilection for redistributing wealth. In 2008, Alaskans got an extra $1,200 due to windfall oil proceeds. The $1,200 was proposed by Palin, shortly before she hit the campaign trail alongside people like Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher.

Last week, Palin was on Fox News. From Yahoo!:

Fox News contributor and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is urging Mitt Romney to make his criticism of President Barack Obama "personal," and agreed that he should begin using words such as "incompetent, dangerous, socialist" to describe the president.

There's the word I was looking for earlier!

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission proposed new guidelines for advertisers marketing food products to children. With the obesity rate for children between ages 6 and 11 at 20 percent, the goal of the proposal is to "encourage stronger and more meaningful self-regulation by the food industry and to support parents’ efforts to get their kids to eat healthier foods." By limiting kids' exposure to pitches for deeply unhealthy foods, the intent is that kids will eat fewer of them. Aiming for implementation by 2016, the (voluntary) restrictions [PDF] would apply to TV, radio, print, websites, and "advertising and product placement in movies, videos, and video games."

A scene from the "Icee Maker" game. (I choose a Christmas-themed lid.)

Unmentioned in the proposal: iPhone apps. Particularly: iPhone apps that are nothing but ads for unhealthy food products targeting kids. From the Wall Street Journal:

Like many children, 4-year-old Anna Woltjen pesters her mother during shopping trips for sweets and snacks. She has a fondness for all kinds of goodies but saves the hard sell for her favorite brands: Cookie Dough Bites, SuperPretzel and Icee frozen treats.

The New Jersey preschooler also asks for her mother's iPhone to play some of her favorite games, including "Cookie Dough Bites Factory," "SuperPretzel Factory" and "Icee Maker."

For the sake of emphasis: 4 years old.

In 1831, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, a piece of legislation that "encouraged" Native Americans to head away from their traditional land in the east and Plains states. The rationale was heavily economic -- the final stop for most tribes, Oklahoma, was dusty, dry, and poorly suited for agriculture. Not worth much of anything.

But that was before Oklahoma became a major player in the oil industry, both for the deposits underground and the pipelines that run above.

Now TransCanada is in the tricky situation of dealing with Native American tribes as it tries to build the recently approved southern leg of its Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline route from Cushing, Okla., to south Texas stretches across the historic territory of numerous tribes, though the pipeline would be built on private land.

A friendly pipeline welcomes visitors to Cushing, Okla. (Photo by freewine.)

From the Washington Post:

Ready to matriculate.

The day after graduation -- or, more realistically, after one last summer off -- every college student hopes to start a new, high-paying job. Of late, not a lot of them do; a report a few months ago suggested that more than half of new grads were either unemployed or working only part-time.

One way to increase the odds of getting a good job and salary on graduation is to choose the right university. A graduate of Harvard, for example, is far more likely to quickly land a high-paying gig than a graduate of, say, the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology.

Just kidding.

Those leaving the college of 2,300 students this year got paid a median salary of $56,700, according to PayScale Inc., which tracks employee compensation data from surveys. At Harvard, where tuition fees are almost four times higher, they got $54,100. Those scheduled to leave the campus in Rapid City, South Dakota, in May are already getting offers …

The North Pole, surrounded by pools of water. (Image courtesy of NOAA.)

Cambridge professor Peter Wadhams has a prediction.

Wadhams has spent many years collecting ice thickness data from submarines passing below the arctic ocean. He predicted the imminent break-up of sea ice in summer months in 2007, when the previous lowest extent of 4.17 million square kilometres was set. This year, it has unexpectedly plunged a further 500,000 sq km to less than 3.5m sq km. "I have been predicting [the collapse of sea ice in summer months] for many years. The main cause is simply global warming: as the climate has warmed there has been less ice growth during the winter and more ice melt during the summer.

"At first this didn't [get] noticed; the summer ice limits slowly shrank back, at a rate which suggested that the ice would last another 50 years or so. But in the end the summer melt overtook the winter growth such that the entire ice sheet melts or breaks up during the summer months.

"This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free. The final collapse towards that state is now happening and will probably be complete by those dates".

Wadhams knows more than I do, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this. Normally, I'd think that this year's record melt is a blip on a longer, slower trend. Here's what the ice loss looks like over time:

Percentage of ice loss, by year.  Click to embiggen. (Image by Jim Pettit.)

It's possible that the black line, indicating the overall trend, could reach 100 percent by 2015, to be sure. 2012 could be an anomaly, or it could be the cliff's edge.

Earlier today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its monthly assessment of our rapidly degrading climate.

We'll start with the good news: 2012 is on pace to be only the ninth-warmest year in recorded history! This is good news in the sense that, over the 133 years records have been kept, 2012 has so far been warmer than only 123 of them.

And now the bad news.

A work crew in Texas would love your help in finding a little gadget they lost. They need it to find good places to frack, so it's kinda urgent. Oh, also, don't go near it because it's radioactive.

The thing that's missing. At bottom. At top is a tape measure. (Photo courtesy of Texas Department of State Health Services.)

From Bloomberg:

FBI officials working with the Texas Department of Transportation questioned three employees who were unable to locate the device this week after it went missing on a 130-mile (209-kilometer) route from Pecos to Odessa, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission incident report today.

“The FBI would only say that they believed there was no criminal activity involved with the missing” tool, Halliburton told state officials according to the NRC report. A well near Pecos, where the device was last used, has been searched three times, it said. ...

Oil-field service companies lower the radioactive units into wells to let workers identify places to break apart rock for a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which frees oil and natural gas. While the loss of such a probe occurs from time to time, it has been years since a device with americium-241/beryllium, the material in Halliburton’s device, was misplaced in Texas, Van Deusen said.

Oh, did we mention that the crew works for Halliburton? Because of course they do.