At a time when energy realists need to take the high ground, corporations are bringing us low. Some of this is old fashioned rent-seeking; some greenwashing; and some just political correctness (as if California was the world).

For weeks, Siemens has been running full-page ads for wind technology. Last week Chevron and Weyerhauser, in full-page ads, agree “IT’S TIME OIL COMPANIES GET BEHIND THE DEVELOPMENT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY.”

The same slush is coming from GE, AES, BP, Shell, NRG, and a legion of corporations whose fundamental commodity is fossil fuel.

Do these multinationals really believe that wind and solar will put a dent in their fossil fuel market share? Or is something else afoot? One should note that nowhere does this renewable ballyhoo from today’s energy goliaths mention a word about saving the world from the devastation of climate change wrought by the consequences of fossil fuel use, although this was the tack Ken Lay took to steer Enron’s aggressive renewables course.…

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.…