On November 2, California voters defeated Proposition 23 by 61 to 39 percent, rejecting a suspension of of the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, otherwise known as Assembly Bill 32 (AB32).

California in general bucked a national trend on Election Day with all but one statewide office going to the Democrats. As of this writing, the Attorney General race has the Republican Steve Cooley slightly ahead in the vote count, but no official call has been made.

Pundits and politicians are making much about the Proposition 23 vote, but what does it really say? Equally important is the national message to be taken from the proposition’s defeat.

It is not what is being portrayed by the otherwise humbled Left environmentalists.

Mainstream Hype

Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund, said the Prop 23 defeat sends “a big signal” to the rest of the country and the world that Californians stand firmly behind the law, which would cut greenhouse gas emissions in the state to 1990 levels by 2020.…

Yesterday’s election clearly demonstrates that the American people reject President Obama’s handling of the economy.  Just as the 2008 elections were interpreted as a repudiation of President Bush’s agenda (particularly with respect to foreign policy), the 2010 mid-term election shows that America does not support President Obama’s domestic priorities.

Specific to energy and the environment, one clear message from the election is that cap-and-trade, top-down, command-and-control regulations are a losing argument with the voters.  Candidates who voted for cap-and-trade, with few exceptions, ran away from that vote.  Voters understand that cap-and-trade is a national energy tax.

With respect to energy policy, the election results will likely yield a modest and marginal improvement.  While it will certainly not be the “environmental doomsday” that the national environmental lobby claims, unless the Republicans have truly changed their stripes, it will also not be the dramatic improvement that some predict or hope.…

“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

– Paul Ehrlich, quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 35.

“As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”

–  Paul Ehrlich, The Machinery of Nature, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986, p. 274.

In the name of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and James Hansen (et al.) have made doom-and-gloom predictions about business-as-usual in an attempt to shock humanity into immediate legislative action and lifestyle changes.

It did not work. The elapsed predictions have failed to come to pass. Little wonder that new installments of climate alarmism, such as Juliet Eilperin’s “25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction: Global Assessment Paints ‘Bleak Picture,’ Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher” in the Washington Post (October 7), don’t register with voters.…

Several months ago, a study by the anti-nuclear group North Carolina Waste Awareness Network (NC WARN) gained worldwide exposure by concluding that solar power is cheaper today than  nuclear power.

The New York Times ran an article highlighting the findings, but the article was so criticized that the newspaper’s editors responded with what amounted to an apology.

NC WARN’s startling, untenable conclusion is the subject of this post, which is based on a longer paper.

The group’s central graph (Figure 1), which took the media hook, line, and sinker, shows a steep decreasing cost curve for solar over time coupled with a pronounced increasing cost curve for nuclear.

Figure 1. Generation costs from solar and nuclear power according to Blackburn and Cunningham (2010).

But nuclear power is less, not more, expensive than solar power.…