A day after the San Francisco Giants beat the Texas Rangers in the World Series, California voters showed up at polling places around the state and sent this message loud and clear: We're not going to let some Texas Big Oil corporations come in and try to take away our green jobs and clean energy economy!

Yesterday, Californians turned out to defeat California Ballot Proposition 23. And their rejection of this ugly petroleum-backed measure, which aimed to repeal California's climate and clean energy law, was huge—the proposition was defeated 61.2% to 38.8%. The power of the people in this state, and the potential of a thriving clean-energy economy that will provide long-lasting jobs for the people of California, defeated the deep pockets and big money of dirty out-of-state polluters, who spent $10 million to try to unravel the state's air pollution laws.

Meanwhile, Californians cast a second vote for their state's clean energy economy and green jobs by electing a candidate for governor, Jerry Brown, who has long been pushing for such innovation in his state. His opponent, former Ebay exec Meg Whitman, campaigned against the state's climate change initiatives and far outspent him, spending $141 million of her own money during the campaign. Brown beat Whitman 54%-41%.

An open pit coal mine on public land in Wyoming. Bureau of Land Management photo.

NPR recently ran a story reporting that most Republican candidates for U.S. Senate assert that human activities are not contributing to climate change.  One has even called climate change a "hoax." Never mind that the facts show otherwise.

And, armed with these beliefs, many in the GOP are preparing for an all-out assault on the EPA's proposals to protect our air and planet.

What's happening here?  Some see fundamentalism. But others point to political contributions from Big Coal, among others.  As Tim Rutten of the LA Times observed on Saturday, Big Coal and Big Oil appear to be stealing pages from Big Tobacco's playbook:

Today, six months from the day the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded 42 miles off the Louisiana shore, much is still unknown about the effects of the nation's biggest oil spill, which gushed for 95 continuous days and spilled nearly 200 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. (See a visual timeline of the oil spill.)

In early August, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report on the whereabouts of all the oil from the spill. Its report shows that half still remains in the Gulf, unable to be removed by burning or skimming—some of it in residual forms that are tough to extract or collect (tar balls, oil washing ashore, oil buried in sand or stuck in shore vegetation), some of it dispersed by chemicals, and some dispersed naturally.

No matter in what form, that oil still exists in the Gulf and still poses a grave threat to wildlife and the health of ecosystems. Most of the dispersed oil exists in microscopic droplets floating in the depths of the Gulf waters, which serve as a breeding grounds for much ocean life in an area scientists refer to as the "deep water column."

Smoggy sunrise over San Joaquin Valley

After years of fighting with the EPA and the local air district to improve air quality in California's smoggy San Joaquin Valley—and often feeling like all of our progress was being made in court—we're finally seeing some change, at least at the federal level.

Through persistent administrative advocacy, we were able to convince EPA to reject the local district's do-nothing regulation covering sources that burn coal, petcoke, tires, biomass and municipal solid waste in the Valley.