It's your own fault, Bush tells Californians

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It's your own fault, Bush tells Californians as electricity crisis grows

By Malcolm Knox in Los Angeles

California's electricity system, already crippled by price gouging from out-of-State energy companies, discovered this week that the new regime in Washington would join the rest of America in ganging up on the Golden State.

George W. Bush, set to be inaugurated as the 43rd president tomorrow, allowed the Democratic Governor of California, Mr Gray Davis, to stew in the electricity crisis that saw rolling outages for a third straight day yesterday.

Mr Bush said there would be no further Federal action to curb energy prices, taking the view that California's failure to build new power plants at a time of sharply rising demand was the State's own fault.

"These are California utilities," Mr Bush said, adding that price protection was "not a fix" for the crisis, which hit about 1.8 million homes and businesses in northern and central California on Thursday.

The crisis snowballed into petrol supply on Thursday, with California's main pipeline inactive for more than 10 hours on the third straight day. Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Sacramento and rural areas as far south as Bakersfield suffered blackouts from early in the morning, and petrol refineries moved to the brink of curbing production.

Petrol stations moved closer to shutting down, and refineries warned of a halt to production, escalating the electricity shortage into a full-blown energy crisis.

Caught in the middle was Mr Davis, who on Thursday sacrificed one of his stated aims throughout the crisis, to resist a government bailout.

The State legislature passed a bill to supply $US400 million ($710 million) to keep the two key utilities, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric, from bankruptcy.

The crisis stems from a tenfold rise in demand for electricity in California since the utilities were privatised in 1996. In those four years California has been simultaneously the country's biggest user of electricity, due mainly to the growth of high-technology companies, and the State most resistant to building new power stations. As a result, the utilities have had to import electricity from as far away as Virginia and Texas, which have responded by raising prices. Their profits have risen by up to 600 per cent.

SoCal Edison and Pacific G&E wanted to pass on the rises to consumers, but the terms of the 1996 privatisation deal capped the prices they could charge, pushing them to the edge of bankruptcy, and a Davis-decreed 9per cent price rise last month has done little to stop the utilities' free fall.

Suppliers in the Pacific north-west and Nevada, meanwhile, are unwilling to sell more to the near-insolvent California utilities.

At the consumer end, there has been little response to Mr Davis's pleas to cut down on consumption. Polls show that consumers do not believe the shortage is real, and do not understand where electricity comes from.

Outsiders seem to understand better: California uses more than it makes, but it does not want to pay for the shortfall. For four years, the utilities have paid the price. Now the California Government is pitching in. The one group sitting pretty is the energy suppliers, which lie outside California's control.

One way or another, the Californian public is having to pay.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/20/world/world5.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 19, 2001

Answers

The poll result that California consumers "do not understand where electricity comes from" brings to mind this quote from Carl Sagan:

"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

It looks like California is now in a situation where public policy making is being seriously adversely influenced by the general technological ignorance of the voting public. Vox populi vox moroni?

-- Barb Knox (barbara-knox@iname.com), January 20, 2001.


The crisis stems from a tenfold rise in demand for electricity in California since the utilities were privatised in 1996. Tenfold? I find this very hard to believe.

Californians don't understand where electricity comes from? I find this hard to believe as well. And while some people there may indeed be wasteful, surely the state also has its conservationists? What is really going on? Wasn't the forced sale of the power plants a factor in the current (pardon the pun) situation?

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), January 20, 2001.


Petrol stations moved closer to shutting down,
and refineries warned of a halt to production,
escalating the electricity shortage into a full-
blown energy crisis.

Even having a solar home and being off the grid is
no protection from the ravages of this crisis. I
need fuel for the generator to complete my power
needs, e.g., washing clothes, pumping water. The
current drought conditions have exacerbated the
problem. Not only are the dams low but my back yard
spring has dried up.

allowed the Democratic Governor of California,
Mr Gray Davis, to stew in the electricity crisis

Now that's what I call a compassionate Republican :-§

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), January 20, 2001.


The breakdown of cooperation among elements of an empire is a factor that Tainter cites in his "Collapse of Complex Societieis" in the demise of civilizations.

Better Times Webzine Get your on-line sustainable living info while the internet is still going!

-- robert waldrop (rmwj@soonernet.com), January 20, 2001.


Robert Waldrop mentions Tainter's _The Collapse of Complex Societies_. Good book! Link to Amazon.com on this book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052138673X/qid=980187425/sr=2- 2/ref=sc_b_2/104-1530824-6070335

I just wanted to highly recommend Tainter's very readable book to anyone on this list (most of us, I assume) who is trying to see "the big picture."

It was originally published in 1985, if I recall correctly, and was apparently reprinted in 1990. Joseph Tainter is an academic who, like a few other archaeologists and sociologists, tries to look in a rational manner at the sweep of human civilizations for clues as to why civilizations collapse over and over again through the ages, and what this might or might not say for all of us today.

His thesis (I think) boils down to “declining marginal return for additional effort.” He suggests that increasing complexity inherently leads to increasing difficulty keeping a society going, to the point where the rate of return is collectively not worth it--it just takes too much “energy” in every sense of the word to keep the civilization alive (this may apply regardless of the specific threats at hand, external or internal). Collapse ensues.

I think Tainter at once explains everything and nothing. He is certainly very thought-provoking, as a serious academic trying to address the issue in a logical manner. The book is not a history lesson per se (nor a survival manual!), rather an attempt to synthesize a theoretical framework to understand the big picture. The last chapter does indeed directly address the current world, without drawing a clear conclusion.

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), January 22, 2001.



"Mr Bush said there would be no further Federal action to curb energy prices, taking the view that California's failure to build new power plants at a time of sharply rising demand was the State's own fault."

January 23, 2001

Bush intervenes in California power crisis

WASHINGTON - President Bush will extend for at least two weeks two federal orders requiring power and natural gas companies to keep supplying California's cash-strapped utilities, administration officials said Tuesday.

California Gov. Gray Davis had requested that the federal directives - issued by the Clinton administration on a week-by-week basis since December - be kept in force for two weeks to give the state more time to work out power purchasing arrangements with wholesale suppliers.

It was not clear exactly how long Bush would extend the federal orders that require electricity generating companies to continue shipping power into California and for natural gas suppliers to sell fuel to Pacific Gas and Electric.

Related stories:

California receives power reprieve today, future blackouts still likely

Oregon state offices begin aggressive energy conservation

Submit your energy saving tips to katu.com California officials had sought the federal mandate after a number of power and natural gas suppliers threatened to withhold sales into the California market, fearing they would not get paid by the utilities facing bankruptcy.

Key Cabinet officers, including Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, met at the White House to discuss the California situation and what actions might be taken to help the state cope with its power supply problems.

California's Independent System Operator, the agency that manages the state's power grid, had appealed to the administration to extend the Clinton orders to keep electricity flowing into the state.

The power directive has been in effect since December, renewed on a weekly basis. Last Friday, outgoing Energy Secretary Bill Richardson directed that natural gas suppliers also continue shipping fuel to Pacific Gas & Electric, for retail use and to fuel power stations.

Richardson cited concerns that because of the California utility's precarious financial situation the suppliers might cut off service because of fear they would not get paid.

But the federal edict to supply California's power market has been criticized by officials in several other Western states, especially in Oregon and Washington where authorities fear the demand for power in California might cause electricity shortages in the Northwest.

Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, and Gordon Smith, a Republican, questioned why Oregon's businesses and consumers should be put at risk to supply California power.

The deadline on the Clinton directives comes as the administration is facing growing pressure from California's congressional delegation, including a number of Republicans, for some federal action to help the state stave off rolling blackouts and possible utility bankruptcies.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., circulated a letter Monday urging other GOP members of the delegation to join in calling for wholesale electricity price controls - an option that the president so far has rejected.

"The pressure is definitely there. It's a situation that is going to have to be addressed," said Mark Harrison, a spokesman for Hunter.

Hunter, along with Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., introduced legislation that would give the energy secretary power to cap wholesale power prices if the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission refused to do so. The administration has not endorsed the bill.

California Gov. Gray Davis and the state's cash-strapped utilities have criticized FERC for failing to cap the wholesale price of electricity sold in California, charging that out-of-state generating companies are price gouging. The generators deny that they're demanding unfair prices, even though wholesale electricity costs have soared.

In an interview last week, Bush expressed his opposition to imposing price controls in the form of FERC-mandated price caps in the California market, saying they would be counterproductive. Hebert, 38, who has been at the commission since 1997, has been an outspoken critic of price intervention by FERC, arguing that the free market should dictate both wholesale and retail power prices.

The state regulating agency, not the federal commission, "holds the ultimate power to end the electricity crisis that now looms over California" by removing restrictions on retail prices, he has argued.

http://www.katu.com/news/news_story.asp?ID=8569

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 23, 2001.


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