The most startling thing to me about the election of 2012 was how spookily accurate polls were.  Social scientists in one camp want to dismiss determinism while the other camp has biology-envy but either the deterministic side got a big boost on Tuesday or the opposing sides in this election were so entrenched there was virtually no reason to vote, other than to see who had the best Get Out The Vote campaign. As I discussed in How Accurate Are Those Political Polls?, that is where the magic happens.  Could polls predict how successful a Get Out The Vote campaign is?

Maybe. I know one party is scrambling to see what went wrong.

Energy companies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are required to buy some solar power each year. 

They are required to overpay for that solar power.

In return for overpaying, they get Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs) which let them  pass the extra cost onto local families and taxpayers. 

When I was a young guy living in Florida, on one station we used to get reruns of a television show called "The Saint". I liked the stick figure cartoon and the halo that would appear above his head in the beginning. Roger Moore was cool.

He became the third actor to play Ian Fleming's British super spy James Bond (and the longest-running) and was the perfect choice. Yet most people remember the 'cartoon-y' James Bond films that came on his watch. He is unfairly derided as the worst James Bond now, and that is saying something in a roster that includes George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton.  "The Spy Who Loved Me " holds up pretty well, the recurring actors all have at least one good movie.

Climate change was ignored for all but the last week of the American presidential election. Then, a hurricane hit and it mobilized voters who were otherwise disappointed that neither party cared about science or the climate. 

Yet it's hard to have a real talk about climate change when activist groups are so anti-science about energy and energy produces a lot of emissions.  While Hurricane Sandy may have been the 'October surprise' that re-elected a president (1) but it may also have done something that even an earthquake in Japan could not do; force a real, adult conversation about nuclear power.

Something happened last night that you don't see very often - almost all of the polls were right. Nearly everyone predicted the state electoral results correctly and that, my friends, is truly rare.