The Market, Energy, And Political Page, T+22 -- September 3, 2018

Pre-market, Sunday night: the Dow, irrelevant, is up 50 points in futures this evening.

From tomorrow's Wall Street Journal:

• coal shows resilience in global comeback; Asian and African countries are counting on carbon to expand access to electricity -- wow, I just blogged about that earlier today --
• Alberta walks away from Canada's global warming plans -- previously posted; not at WSJ
• are you paying too little? I pay for very few things from Amazon any more; everything is paid for with points on my credit card that I would have used anyway - gasoline, groceries
• free trade? Not in Argentina. Argentina will impose "temporary" tax on exports -- wow
• blink? after warning from Trump, EU says it is open to "more US beef"
• swine fever spreads in China; pork supply is choppy; China will come back to US for pork 
• Brazil's national museum in Rio completely destroyed; sounds like fire department responding was right out of "Keystone Kops"
• Maersk tankers turn to wind power to cut soaring fuel costs; "high-tech" sails o their huge tankers are being tested; 100-foot-tall rotating cylinders that are effectively high-tech sails that could cut the vessel's fuel bill by up to 10%;
• late to the game? Dunkin' Donuts to invest $100 million; 50 US test stores to test "to-go" and mobile ordering; that's all I see at McDonald's and Starbucks any more: "to-go" and mobile ordering; a few of us still go to PlayPlace -- the rest? seniors stopping at McDonald's for 50-cent-coffee; what a great country; and, the president is making it better.

Speaking of which.

This past week I linked a lot of financial sites to my bank. Wow. I can now afford Starbucks.

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The Book Page

River: One Man's Journey Down the Colorado, Source to Sea, Colin Fletcher, 1997.

From page 9: The author explains how he decided to raft the Colorado River, from the source to the ocean. And then goes on:

That done, I had to define "the Colorado."

The name originally applied only to the waterway below the junction of the Green and the Grand Rivers.

Then, in 1921 -- the year of my conception -- under pressure from booster politicians in the state of Colorado, the Grand was renamed: the main river and the former Grand became, together, "the Colorado."

But because the Green is 300 miles longer than the former Grand (it also drains a larger area), geographers regard it as the "master stream," and its headwaters in Wyoming as the source of the Colorado. I was happy to go along with the geographers -- especially as all reports had the Green wilder and less spoiled, with a source more befitting a major river.

A great time to review the geology of the Grand Canyon and the timeline of the earth.

Quick: why did the Colorado River cut a  mile-deep gorge rather than a broad valley that most rivers form? The link above answers the question. It also explains why the very small creeks in western North Dakota cut such sharp mini-canyons.

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Seasons In The Sun

Seasons in the Sun, Terry Jacks