North Dakota struggles to cope with its oil-boom prosperity | StarTribune.com

Gordon Weyrauch, manager of Williston Home & Lumber, said it's hard to keep good employees even at $16 an hour: "Seems like when you get somebody that's really good, there's always another company stealing them away."

A sign outside the local Wal-Mart advertises starting wages of $17 an hour.

Is There a Green Side to the Super Bowl? - NYTimes.com

“With so many people glued to the couch during the game, fewer households are using electricity for cooking, cleaning or anything else other than watching the tube,” wrote Barry Fischer, who edits Opower’s blog. And viewers tend to gather in front of just one screen, something he refers to as TV pooling.
...The energy savings over the three and a half hours of the football broadcast could be worth upwards of $3.1 million, the company said. However, some of the energy use could simply be shifted to another time – like the laundry chore – and the study does not attempt to calculate whether extra gasoline was burned, or extra natural gas was used to bake all those chicken wings.

Instapundit » Blog Archive

ATLAS THUGGED: Who Is The Real “Big Oil?” “The Big Picture is that over 70% of the world’s reserves are produced by National Oil Companies (NOCs). These are companies with reserves and production that dwarf those of ExxonMobil or Shell, and with names you have probably never heard unless you are in the bidness. These are companies like PDVSA, Aramco, PetroBras, CNOOC, Gazprom, Yukos, and Pemex.”

What’s interesting is that the national companies somehow seem to get a pass on environmental problems and price-gouging. It’s only the private companies that are evil, apparently.

THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: New paper finds climate models offer little beyond simulating a random walk

A paper published today in the Journal of Climate finds that climate models have little to no ability to provide skillful forecasts of global surface temperatures on timescales of a decade or more. According to the author, "These results suggest that current coupled model decadal forecasts may not yet have much skill beyond that captured by multivariate red noise." Translation: state-of-the-art climate models that simulate the ocean and atmosphere together [called "coupled models"] offer little predictive ability beyond simulating a random walk [also called "red noise"] over periods of 10 or more years.