Lauren Sommer at KQED reports on the state of solar power in the U.S.:

Talk to anyone in the solar industry and they’ll tell you: it’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. Solar installations are booming, but there’s also a looming trade war with China.

Let's look the booming: Employment in the U.S. solar industry is up more than 13 percent over last year, as we reported last week. And Danny Kennedy, president of Sungevity, makes the point that the solar industry is a much more robust job generator than its fossil-fueled competitors: "The coal industry has been around for over a century and provides more than a third of our power supply but employs just some 1.5 times as many people as solar companies. The solar industry currently provides about 0.5% of our power supply and already employs 119,000 Americans."

Over the coming year, growth in the U.S. solar sector is expected to continue, though not as rapidly. As Shayle Kann, vice president for research at GTM Research, told KQED, "We're looking at what we expect to be about 71 percent growth in solar installations in 2012 over 2011. So that's a strong growth rate, but it is slower than we've seen. In 2010 and 2011, the market more than doubled. So it's slowing down a bit, but solar is still growing fast throughout the US."

Solar production is also up in Germany, by about 50 percent over last year. But the U.S. and Germany seem to be bucking worldwide trends. Says Kann:

Globally, it's a tough year in solar. We have massive oversupply of solar panels, so it's been a really hard time for solar manufacturers. And demand on a global level is growing, but relatively slowly this year as compared to the past couple of years, where we've seen really massive growth. The big reason for that is that Europe has slowed down as incentives have been pulled back from European governments.

And that brings us to the looming trade war.

Tests performed by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection found no copper, zinc, nickel, or titanium in water samples taken near a fracking wastewater site.

Well, actually, that's not true. The Pennsylvania DEP didn't report finding any of those metals, because the department's oil and gas division didn't ask for data on them. But the DEP found the metals. From the New York Times:

Pennsylvania officials reported incomplete test results that omitted data on some toxic metals that were found in drinking water taken from a private well near a natural gas drilling site, according to legal documents released this week.

The documents were part of a lawsuit claiming that natural gas extraction through a method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and storage of the resulting wastewater at a site in southwestern Pennsylvania has contaminated drinking water and sickened seven plaintiffs who live nearby. ...

Taru Upadhyay, the technical director of the department’s Bureau of Laboratories, said the metals found in the water sample but not reported to either the oil and gas division or to the homeowner who requested the tests, included copper, nickel, zinc and titanium, all of which may damage the health of people exposed to them, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Ms. Upadhyay said that the bureau did not arbitrarily decide to withhold those results. “It was not requested by our client for that particular test, so we did -- it is not on our final report,” she said in a deposition on Sept. 26.

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.