I know you mean well, Proposition 37 campaign. I know things have been hard lately. I know some days you don't even want to get out of bed in the morning because god it's just so hard out there. I get it.

But what the hell is this?

This is, in fact, a Prop 37 campaign image that's currently circulating on Facebook and in advertising to push for a yes vote on the GMO labeling measure tomorrow. From the caption:

Does your ham contain human genes? You wouldn’t know unless it’s labeled ... Pigs with human growth genes are among the creatures that food scientists have invented. Experimental life forms are sold today as “all natural” food. Does that sound natural to you?

Wind farms are now far cheaper to operate than they were four years ago. From Bloomberg:

The cost of running and maintaining wind farms has fallen 38 percent in four years as competition among contractors increased and turbine performance improved, bringing closer the day that the technology matches fossil fuel.

The average price of operation and maintenance contracts for onshore farms this year slid to 19,200 euros [$24,600] a megawatt from 30,900 euros [$39,500] in 2008, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said today.

Great news. But it's not much consolation in the United States, where the sector is withering while Congress fails to extend a production tax credit for wind power, a key tool allowing wind to compete with entrenched fossil fuel generators.

We know Mitt Romney is itching to roll back environmental regulations, but what would he do about cities? You know, where the rich people live in the tall shiny buildings and the rest of the rabble live in the tall not-shiny ones.

The Atlantic Cities brings us an only slightly scaremongering roundup of Romney's positions on cities and transportation.

The issue pages on Romney's website make no mention of transportation, public transit, poverty programs, smart growth or climate change ...

Romney has left literally no trail -- in opposition or support -- on the individual federal programs, such as the Partnership for Sustainable Communities and Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants, that have been designed over the last four years to help local communities creatively tackle the intertwined challenges of housing, transportation and the environment. Mitt Romney the Management Consultant could very well find something to love in such silo-busting, locally nimble initiatives. Sprawl is, after all, the very definition of inefficiency.

While Floridians battle to cast an early vote, Ohioans wait in lines stretching for blocks, and voters in a variety of states fight for the right to vote at all, North Dakota is different. In North Dakota, the problem is that they have more voters than they know what to do with, thanks to the oil industry.

From the Associated Press:

In North Dakota, the only state that does not have voter registration, any citizen over 18 who has lived in the same place for at least 30 days can cast a ballot. That would include oil field workers who may actually be living elsewhere and commute home to see their families.

Democrat Heidi Heitkamp and Republican Rick Berg, candidates for the U.S. Senate, are both pitching hard for the votes of energy workers. In a final campaign swing last week, Berg visited an oil field trucking service company, a natural gas processing plant and a coal mine in western North Dakota.

Heitkamp talks up her advocacy for North Dakota’s oil and coal industries when she served as North Dakota’s attorney general and tax commissioner. In one of her television ads, she speaks over the noise of a passing train of oil tanker cars while promising to support development of a new North Dakota refinery to process crude.

Last week, we somewhat pessimistically suggested that President Clinton's advocacy for Michigan's renewable energy ballot measure wouldn't be enough to get it across the finish line. And, sure enough, a new poll from Public Policy Polling suggests that Prop 3, which would require 25 percent of electricity be renewable by 2025, is going to lose, 31 percent to 62 percent. PPP broke the data down by party:

To which we say: oy.

The likely defeat of Michigan's bolstered renewable energy standard (RES) is bad for renewable energy, but at least it's being looked in the eye while it's killed. In other states, renewable standards are getting knifed in the back, thanks in large part to the ongoing, ceaseless efforts of ALEC, the charming conservative policy organization that brought us "Stand Your Ground" laws.

Some really good news for the storm-battered Northeast: There probably won't be another big storm in your area for at least a couple of days.

From the Capital Weather Gang:

There is now consensus among computer models that a strong fall Nor’easter will begin forming election night and then move up the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coast Wednesday and Thursday. ...

[F]rom the North Carolina Outer Banks to the shores of New England, it’s becoming more certain that the storm will whip up high seas and gusty winds, leading to a new round of coastal flooding and beach erosion on the heels of Superstorm Sandy -- though not as severe.

I mean, that's the standard? "Coastal flooding and beach erosion -- but don't worry, less than the biggest hurricane in history that killed all those people." Oh, whew.

Near my home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, there's a row of cars double-parked, running about six blocks long. At the end of the line, there's a gas station that finally has fuel in stock.

One week after landfall, Sandy lingers in New York, even in areas like mine that were relatively unaffected. On the fringes, the parts bordering the ocean, the effects are immediate and visceral. The Rockaways, the thin spit of land stretching southeast along the Atlantic, was ripped apart by the storm. Staten Island looks frayed, its southern and eastern edge in shambles while the middle of the island is relatively normal.

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran several articles outlining the challenge the city faces in rising sea levels.

In a story titled "Protecting the City, Before Next Time," the Times looks at some of the myriad proposals for softening the effect of tidal surge -- including abandoning places like the Rockaways.

Of all of the reasons that climate change is a drag, perhaps the biggest is that the weather effects we currently see are the result of carbon dioxide pollution from decades ago. There's a lag between when we pollute and when the climate gets warmer. So when we see things like Sandy, and consider how the superuberstorm could have been lessened, or the record temperatures in California (90-plus degrees in November!), we should probably be chastising our parents. (You know, for those of us who are young enough.)

And our grandkids may want to thank us for temperatures being an unbelievable 11 degrees warmer than they are today.

It will now be almost impossible to keep the increase in global average temperatures up to 2100 within the 2C target that scientists believe might avert dangerous and unpredictable climate change, according to a study by the accountancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

An analysis of how fast the major world economies are reducing their emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels suggests that it may already be too late to stay within the 2C target of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it found.

To keep within the 2C target, the global economy would have to reach a "decarbonisation" rate of at least 5.1 per cent a year for the next 39 years. This has not happened since records began at the end of the Second World War, according to Leo Johnson, a PwC partner in sustainability and climate change.

Are you ready to vote? Have you voted already? There's a lot at stake, so listen to this wise baby walrus and make sure you get your asses to the polls.

Looking for info about the candidates and initiatives on your ballot? Search the Grist site. Check out endorsements from the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club and ConservAmerica (formerly Republicans for Environmental Protection). Read up on the positions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and Jill Stein.  And get more election enlightenment from the nonpartisan Project Vote Smart.

Don't disappoint the walrus.

It's been a tough couple weeks for California's Proposition 37, which would require that all genetically modified foods carry special labels.

The most recent polling on the measure, released three days ago, shows 39.1 percent in favor of the proposition, with 50.5 opposed. Undecideds were 10.5 percent, with a 3 percent margin of error. That's just a few days after we last reported 44 percent in favor and 42 percent opposed.

In that time, opposition has raised an additional $3.3 million for advertising. Big food and chemical companies are pumping big cash into the no-on-37 campaign faster than you can say National Frozen Pizza Institute (shockingly, they're in the no camp). In the last days leading up to the election, the spending has only intensified. Just yesterday, Coca-Cola contributed $235,000 and Biotechnology Industry Organization sent $250,000. No on 37 ads are clogging everything from Facebook to Hulu, even for green junkies like me.

There's a bit of movement on the other side, including support from the Whole Foods camp. From Napa Valley Patch:

Whole Foods officials formally announced the company's support for Prop. 37 in September. But as the election approaches, additional signage is going up at its stores and employees throughout the state have been trained on GMOs and the ballot measure, [co-CEO Walter] Robb said ... Whole Foods has put the bulk of its Yes on 37 efforts into social media and also has some radio ads that will become more prevalent in the days before the election.

Today the Proposition 37 campaign released new commercials aimed at debunking the assertion of big corporations in the anti-prop camp: that the measure would increase food costs.