On Thursday night, Austin, Texas, was like a microcosm of modern urban American cycling. Downtown, people gathered at benefit concerts to raise money for the mounting medical bills of a local man struck and critically injured by a drunk driver in October.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,200 cyclists biked to the state capitol in a really, really sad kind of Critical Mass, with one cargo bike toting a large banner that read: "No More Deaths." The event was sponsored by the group Please Be Kind to Cyclists, which is about as passive as you can get when it comes to life-or-death street safety issues.

Here is a thing dumb people say about carbon dioxide pollution:

lol carbon dioxide isn't bad for you I totally exhale it and stuff. Also, plants need it to eat I read somewhere, and I hypocritically rely on that bit of science as a counterpoint to your asking that I stop burning tires in my toilet

Here is something you can say in response to such people, if you want to keep talking to them, which you should not: Too much carbon dioxide is bad for plants, too.

From the Max Planck Institute:

[T]he more carbon dioxide the better? The equation is unfortunately not as simple as that. The plants, which ensure our basic food supply today, have not been bred for vertical growth but for short stalks and high grain yields. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology and the University of Potsdam have now discovered that an increase in carbon dioxide levels could cancel out the beneficial effects of dwarf varieties.

For years, Juventina Villa Mojica worked to preserve the virgin forest surrounding her small Mexican town. Drug traffickers wanted to strip the forest to expand the area in which they could grow poppies and marijuana, but Villa Mojica and her husband led an effort to organize farmers in opposition to the gangs. Last year, her husband and two of her children were murdered. On Wednesday, she and her 10-year-old son met the same fate.

From the Washington Post:

A band of gunmen killed an environmental activist who had received death threats for standing up to drug gangs and had a police guard when she was ambushed in southern Mexico, authorities said Thursday. …

Villa and her children had ridden in an all-terrain vehicle near the top of a mountain where she could get a cellphone signal since there are no telephones in the village. They were ambushed despite the presence of 10 state police officers who were protecting them, state prosecutors said in a statement.

Five of the officers were in a patrol car ahead of Villa and her children and the other five where on foot behind them, the statement said. Villa got ahead of the officers on foot and that’s when the assailants fired their weapons, it said.

The Post notes that Villa Mojica had been uncommonly lucky; more than 20 members of her and her husband's families had been killed by drug gangs in the past year.

How sustainable are California oysters? Trick question: not sustainable enough, apparently.

A years-long battle over an oyster farm at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco ended this week in the farm's definite closure. The 70-plus-year-old Drakes Bay Oyster Company will be forced to vacate the area before year's end, turning it over in full to a colony of seals, who are adorable but kind of indifferent to all the people losing their jobs before the holidays.

The seashore area was added to the national parks system in 1962. Ten years later, a 40-year lease was granted to the oyster farm, with the understanding that it would then be returned from “potential wilderness” to the actual kind. The farm had been seeking a 10-year extension of its lease, but the feds decided to stick to the original plan.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced the decision yesterday. The Marin Independent Journal reports on reactions:

"This is going to be devastating to our families, our community and our county," [oyster farm owner Kevin] Lunny said. "This is wrong beyond words in our opinion." ...

The oyster farm has outspoken supporters, Sen. Dianne Feinstein among them.

"I am extremely disappointed that Secretary Salazar chose not to renew the operating permit for the Drakes Bay Oyster Co.," Feinstein said. ...

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune lauded the decision.

"We're thrilled that after three decades this amazing piece of Point Reyes National Seashore will finally receive the protections it deserves," he said. "Once the oyster factory operations are removed, as originally promised ... this estuary will quickly regain its wilderness characteristics and become a safe haven for marine mammals, birds and other sea life."

It's the strategy of every bad gambler: If you just keep betting more than you lost, you'll eventually come out ahead. Lose $10, bet $20. Lose that, bet $30. In a rigged game, though, a game where the odds are tilted however slightly against you, eventually you'll go broke, making one or two huge bets that don't pay off.

Which is the situation the U.N. finds itself in during its current climate negotiations in Qatar. When it comes to the carbon dioxide levels we need to maintain in order to avoid catastrophic temperature rises of 2 degrees C, we're deep in debt, meaning that we'd need steeper and steeper bets in order to win.

From Reuters:

"The possibility of keeping warming to below 2 degrees has almost vanished," Pep Canadell, head of the Global Carbon Project at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, told Reuters. ...

Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, have risen 50 percent since 1990 and the pace of growth has picked up since 2000, Canadell said. In the past decade, emissions have grown about 3 percent a year despite an economic slowdown, up from 1 percent during the 1990s.

Based on current emissions growth and rapid industrial expansion in developing nations, emissions are expected to keep growing by about 3 percent a year over the next decade.

For the talks to have any chance of success in the long run, emissions must quickly stop rising and then begin to fall. Temperatures have already risen by 0.8 C (1.4 F) since pre-industrial times.

If we can just slash emissions by 3 percent, by 5 percent, by whatever percent next year, we can avoid disaster. Avoid coming up broke.

Your quote of the day comes from the BBC.

There's no sugar-coating this, I imagine there would be spills, and no spill is OK. But will there be a spill large enough to impact people's subsistence? My view is no, I don't believe that would happen.

That's Shell's Alaska vice president, Pete Slaiby, discussing the company's new, fraught drilling operations off the North Slope of Alaska. During the summer, the company had a near-daily series of screw-ups that did little to inspire confidence in its ability to successfully extract oil from the ocean floor without spilling it all over themselves and the ocean and the animals in the ocean and probably you, too, somehow. So I'm not sure if Slaiby's admission is a refreshing demonstration of realism or a heart-attack-inducing statement of indifference.

I do however love his statement that, yeah, there'll be spills, but, don't worry: minor ones. How … does that work? The entire context for the BBC article is that Native populations in Alaska are nervous about the prospect of drilling and a spill.

A miner in West Virginia was killed last night.

From Ken Ward, Jr., at the Charleston Gazette:

The accident occurred at about 1:30 a.m. today at White Buck Coal Co.’s Pocahontas Mine near Rupert. This is a former Massey Energy operation now controlled by Alpha Natural Resources.

According to state officials, the miner was caught between a scoop and the continuous mining machine -- a type of accident that is becoming all too common in the coal-mining industry [PDF]. Unfortunately, we’re still waiting for the Obama administration to move on two regulatory proposals that would help prevent these sorts of fatal accidents.

State officials have identified the miner who was killed as Steve Odell of Mt. Nebo. He had three years of mining experience and was a certified electricial.

As Ward also notes, the White Buck mine was once run by David Craig Hughart, who this week pled guilty to two counts of conspiracy including one related to violations of health and safety standards.

You may remember the tenure of Bill Johnson as CEO of Duke Energy. It was a halcyon time for the corporation, that one day in July before Johnson was ousted by Jim Rogers.

There were some people who thought it was kind of weird that Johnson should serve one day, "resign," and take home $44 million for his hard work. People like the North Carolina Utilities Commission, which has now demanded that Rogers take a hike, too.

From the Associated Press:

Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers will step down as head of the largest U.S. electric utility by the end of 2013 as part of a settlement with the North Carolina utilities regulator that ends an investigation into the company's takeover of in-state rival Progress Energy. ...

Hours after the merger was completed July 2, Duke Energy's board ousted Progress Energy CEO Bill Johnson, who was supposed to take over the combined company. It had promised to keep him in place throughout the 18-month process of merging the two Fortune 500 energy companies headquartered in North Carolina. The deal created the nation's largest electric company. …

While Duke Energy denied wrongdoing, the utilities commission said the settlement includes the company issuing a statement acknowledging it has "fallen short of the commission's understanding of Duke's obligations" as a regulated utility.

The important/good/interesting news for the people of North Carolina: Duke will also use $25 million in merger-related savings to lower rates as opposed to paying stockholders.

One of the reasons that Keystone XL has faced so much opposition is the threat of a leak. Nebraska forced TransCanada to reroute vast stretches of the proposed pipeline to avoid a key aquifer.

But no pipeline doesn't mean no leaks. As our Lisa Hymas noted yesterday, oil companies have massively increased rail use to bring oil to market. It's more costly, yes (think Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood), but it gets the job done … until those trains fall in waterways.

From the South Jersey Times:

Four railroad tank cars have been dumped into the Mantua Creek and are leaking vinyl chloride after the train bridge collapsed at about 7 a.m.

Ambulances are being sent to the Paulsboro Marine Terminal where approximately 18 people are reported to be experiencing breathing difficulties at 7:40 a.m.

Initial responders report seven cars overturned and derailed near the 200 block of East Jefferson Street, between North Delaware Street and the creek.

Have you been sleeping on the couch to avoid your toxic mattress? Well, stop that. Because your couch is probably poisoning you right now. Unless you're at work, in which case right when you get home.

That's the takeaway from a new study in which scientists found flame-retardant chemicals linked to cancer in 85 percent of the couches they tested. New couches were actually worse, with 93 percent testing toxic. Almost a quarter of sofas tested positive for a chemical banned from kids' clothes in the 1970s, but still allowed in mattresses and car seats. Mother Jones reports: