Well, it's done. The New York City Board of Health voted unanimously (with one abstention) to ban the sale of large, sugary drinks -- with a few caveats.

The measure, unless blocked by a judge, will take effect in six months. The health board vote was the only regulatory approval needed to become binding in the city, but the American soft-drink industry has strongly opposed the plan and vowed this week to try to fight the measure by other means, possibly in the courts. ... The soda measure would bar the sale of sweetened drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces, smaller than the size of a common soda bottle. It would affect a range of popular sweetened beverages, including energy drinks, presweetened iced teas and common brands of nondiet soda. The restrictions would not affect fruit juices, dairy-based drinks like milkshakes, or alcoholic beverages; no-calorie diet sodas would not be affected, but establishments with self-service drink fountains, like many fast-food restaurants, would not be allowed to stock cups larger than 16 ounces. Only establishments that receive inspection grades from the health department would have to obey the rules, a group that includes movie theaters and stadium concession stands. Convenience stores, including 7-Eleven and its king-size “Big Gulp” drinks, would be exempt, along with vending machines and some newsstands.

We've been talking a lot about the ice loss in the Arctic. It’s a broadly understood marker of climate change, an immediately tangible metric that shifts every day (it hit a new all-time low yesterday!).

But this year's unprecedented melt could also have direct effects on you this year.

From Nature:

[T]his year’s record sea-ice melt might foreshadow a harsh winter in parts of Europe and North America. Recent research, although preliminary, suggests a connection between late-summer Arctic sea-ice extent and the location of areas of high and low atmospheric pressure over the northern Atlantic. The highs and lows can remain relatively fixed for weeks, shaping storm tracks and seasonal weather patterns such as extended cold surges.

Ralf Jaiser, a climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, found a significant correlation in 1989–2011 meteorological data between late-summer Arctic sea-ice extent and atmospheric-pressure anomalies that favour extreme weather such as prolonged cold snaps in winter. He reasons that in autumn, the open Arctic Ocean sheds heat to the high-latitude atmosphere. The warming tends to reduce the large-scale atmospheric-pressure gradient and weakens the dominant westerly winds in the Northern Hemisphere. Those winds normally sweep warm, moist Atlantic air to western Europe; their weakening leaves the region more prone to persistent cold.

“The impacts will become more apparent in autumn, once the freeze-up is under way and we see how circulation patterns have influenced the geographical distribution of sea ice,” says Judith Curry, a climate researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. But, she adds, “We can probably expect somewhere in the mid/high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere to have a snowy and cold winter.”

Congratulations, Death Valley! You are the new record-holder for hottest temperature ever recorded -- for a day in 1913.

Photo by ejharaldseid.

Here's what happened. On Oct. 7, 1913, Greenland Ranch in Furnace Creek, Calif., recorded a temperature of 134 degrees F (56.7 degrees C). Just for the sake of emphasis, consider a balmy 67-degree day in early summer. The temperature in Death Valley was twice that.

That all-time high temperature stood for nine years, until a reading in the northwest corner of Libya, at a trading post called Al Azizia, recorded 136.4 degrees F (58 degrees C). Death Valley was bumped to No. 2.

Until 2010. Christopher Burt, a blogger at the Weather Underground, wrote a post with the matter-of-fact title, "A challenge to the validity of the world record 136.4°F (58°C) at Al Aziza, Libya." Burt detailed the long history of questions concerning the Al Azizia reading, noting statistical aberrations from the weather station around the time of the reading.

Midwest Energy News profiles the push to build the Wildcat wind farm in Elwood, Ind.

Timber.

[A] major construction project is under way on these 1,700 acres of central Indiana farmland. The goal: build more than 100 wind turbines, each 30 stories tall, and get them running by midnight on December 31 … Access roads have to be built into farm fields; foundations have to be excavated. To hold up a single turbine it takes 400 cubic yards of concrete and 36 tons of rebar—meaning the entire wind farm will use enough concrete to pour a 3-foot-wide, 4-inch-thick sidewalk from central Indiana to St. Louis. Each of the five sections of each 300-foot tower is transported to the site on a semi, then stacked in place with the sort of crane used to build skyscrapers.

The nacelle—a fiberglass-encased box with more than 70 tons of equipment inside, including the electricity-generating components of the turbine—is placed atop the tower. Then each of the 160-foot blades must be mounted on top of the tower.

All this work means jobs, and lots of them, [construction manager Mike] Behringer said. One hundred seventy people, including iron workers, crane operators, laborers, and linemen are all employed building the first phase of the Wildcat wind farm, which will have the capacity to produce 200 MW of energy.

Why that Dec. 31 deadline? On the last day of the year, the production tax credit (PTC) for wind power expires, eradicating a significant support for the growing industry. By some estimates, the expiration of the PTC could cost nearly 40,000 jobs -- as Midwest Energy News notes:

Photo by Gonzalo Déniz.

Two months after a series of massive protests in Tokyo, Japanese anti-nuclear activists appear to be close to victory. During a debate this morning, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda suggested that he supported a phaseout of nuclear power within the next few decades.

From the Washington Post:

[Noda] said the new policy, expected by end of the week, would be a major shift from Japan’s decades-long advocacy of nuclear power.

Japanese media reported Wednesday that Noda and key Cabinet ministers have agreed that the new energy policy will include an abandonment of nuclear power by the 2030s, mainly by retiring aging reactors and not replacing them.

Based on the party proposal, the new policy would include a 40-year cap on reactor lifespans, no construction of new nuclear reactors, and strict safety checks before any reactors are restarted. It also says Japan should make greater use of renewable energy and undertake greater conservation efforts, such as using smart grids.

There are two things you notice when you see a Google Maps view of a big-box store: a lot of parking lot and a lot of roof. That first thing is a problem: Big-box stores are a symptom and a facilitator of sprawl, encouraging people to drive in and consume. For most such stores, even someone living across the street would have to walk about five minutes across asphalt before they could make a purchase.

Panels on a Sam's Club in Puerto Rico. Walmart (parent company of Sam's) has a large gallery of images of its solar rooftops.

But those roofs? The roofs are an opportunity -- for the company and for the environment. As The New York Times reports:

Led by the likes of Walmart, Costco and Kohl’s, commercial installations of solar power have increased sharply in recent months. More than 3,600 nonresidential systems were activated in the first half of 2012, bringing the number of individual solar electric systems to 24,000, the report said.

Whether driven by brand identity or cost concerns, almost half of the top 20 commercial solar customers are major retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond and Staples.

Ikea, one of the chains in the top 20, plans to have solar arrays on almost all of its furniture stores and distribution centers by the end of the year, Joseph Roth, a spokesman, said.

This is obviously good news. Looking down on a big-box site and seeing a parking lot surrounding an array of solar panels isn't ideal, but it's better.

Every country should be so lucky as to have Sweden's problem: It doesn't produce enough garbage.

As reported by Public Radio International, Sweden has a remarkably effective recycling program. Only 4 percent of the country's waste ends up in landfills, with the other 96 percent being reused in some way. There is one problem with that, however: The country has incinerators that burn waste to create heat (a must-have in the region) and electricity. And too little waste means not enough fuel for those fires.

Sweden's electricity production, in kilowatt-hours by population. Note that the country is increasingly using incinerated biofuels and waste (green line). (Data from Wikipedia.)

Catarina Ostlund, Senior Advisor for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, said the country is producing much less burnable waste than it needs. ...

However, they’ve recently found a solution.

Sweden has recently begun to import about eight hundred thousand tons of trash from the rest of Europe per year to use in its power plants. The majority of the imported waste comes from neighboring Norway because it’s more expensive to burn the trash there and cheaper for the Norwegians to simply export their waste to Sweden.

Today in Washington, politics happened. From The Hill:

An Environmental Protection Agency official said during a Tuesday hearing that a House Republican-sponsored bill would “cripple” the agency’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This concern failed to change the Republicans' minds.

An international team of scientists had a warning last week: A massive amount of methane trapped in Antarctic ice could be released into the atmosphere.

Which probably prompted some energy companies to think: We gotta get our hands on that.

Gas hydrates are crystalline gas (often methane) molecules surrounded by a "cage" of water in a solid that resembles ice. As it melts, the gas is released. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, methane hydrates are stable compounds in water at a depth of greater than 300 feet.

Click to embiggen. (Image courtesy of USGS.)

At right is a map of methane hydrate deposits located off the coast of South Carolina. Right there, just off our coast, all that methane, ready to burn. But who is going to invest in figuring out how to tap into these reserves?

Your rich Uncle Sam, that's who. Late last month, the Department of Energy announced more than $5.5 million in investments granted primarily to universities for research into how the methane in these hydrates could be used.

Let's say I give you a million dollars. Cool, you'd say. Probably also: Thanks.

And now I say: You need to use that money to make a product. Say, baskets. You're all, OK, cool, I can make baskets. Good.

So you set up a system to make baskets. You invest that million dollars in a factory and some workers and so on (I have literally no idea what goes into basket-making -- wicker? straw? whatever) and start cranking out baskets. You decide to sell them for $100 a piece. You make 100 to start, and sell all 100 of them. Boom. You've got $10,000 in hand. Not bad.

But if Reuters is doing the math, you're losing $9,900 on every basket you sell. After all, the Reuters reporter would suggest, mansplaining away: You made 100 baskets but it cost you $1 million to make them. That's $10,000 a piece, from which you only earned back $100.

To which you would say: What, Reuters? What? Do you need a calculator, Reuters? Reuters! Come on, man! And so on and so on, forgetting completely about your basket business, letting your clothes fall into disrepair as you gnash your teeth and wail at the unforgiving sky.

Chevy Volt, as it says on the tin.