Revolution in Boulder

It is a month now since voters in Boulder approved a city charter amendment to create a green utility. The City hired Local Power Inc., a year ago to advise them on a strategic framework for evaluating its energy options due to the expiration of its franchise with energy giant Xcel, based in Minneapolis. We suggested that they focus their efforts on "energy localization" rather than "takeover," and the City Council embraced this vision - a new business model focused on decarbonization, local jobs, customer-ownership, and demand reduction: Local Power not in our usual formula of a Community Choice Aggregation (Colorado has no CCA law), but a new kind of municipal utility.  If you are interested, LPI's "Localization Portfolio Standard," which outlines the economic and technical feasibility for energy localization in Boulder, is posted on the City's web site.  Our company press release is here. Boulder produced a great video here. Van Jones gave a speech on the campaign here.

Last week, city staff affirmed the City's intention to go ahead with the localization paths we identified in the Localization Portfolio Standard, and we look forward to working with the City in its efforts to implement. Sarah Laskow of Good magazine said "this week's vote was the energy equivalent of closing an account at a national bank in order to buy into a local credit union. Instead of just one person leaving the utility, though, this is an entire community." An excellent metaphor, comparing Boulder's green power revolt to the Occupy Movements community bank revolt, except Boulder's plans would not merely take over and imitate the old institution, but create an entirely new one, reverse-engineered: a municipal utility designed anew, with a new business model focused not on selling power and gas to service its debt (the traditional model for utilities public and private), but instead focused building on selling the utility's new plant to its customers - in Community Solar arrays and other neighborhood-scale renewables, while standardizing technologies to reduce everybody's energy consumption, and making every building in the City a "smart building."

Boulder's vote in November is historically significant not only as one of the only major votes for municipalization in America since WWII, but more so for the fact of its positive motivation. Like CCA communities in San Francisco, Marin, Cape Cod and elsewhere, the Boulder City Council put the 2B and 2C items on the ballot for the same old reasons that the traditional municipalization battle was fought: not because of hatred for Xcel, nor for high rates. It was a new campaign, motivated by the community's near-unanimous support for green power and economic localization - a desire to innovate in a way that utility monopolies have proven themselves unable, or unwilling, to do. Just as with PG&E's inability to stop CCA in California with Proposition 16 last year despite over $60 Million in campaign expenditures, Xcel was unable to stop Boulder, I believe, because the old slogans and strategies, designed for the old municipalization battle, were ineffective against the positive platform erected by the mayor and city council.

Economic localization initiatives like Boulder may prove the most compelling path for energy. The climate crisis goes on unabated, nuclear proliferation mounts, the mountaintop removal and fracking grow day by day in a collapsed political world that neither Obama, nor governors, can impact with policy or plan. In comparison, using local control authorities like a franchise, a local election, or Community Choice offers a relatively direct, simple, and trustworthy means of proving that democracy is not inconsistent with clear thinking and bold action.

The Real Marin Taliban: Stewart Brand's Nuclear Revival

Stewart Brand, a fellow Marin-ite who is internationally famous for leading the nuclear industry revival in the United States over the past decade, and helping President Obama embrace Dr. Strangelove, embodies the odd combination of cool hippy and self-hating liberal that defines Marin's post-hippy, über-yuppy chic. After the Fukushima disaster Brand was asked by interviewer Arnie Cooper if his pro-nuclear remarks still stand from his interview with The Sun, and Mr. Brand insisted he was unmoved by the meltdowns of Tokyo Power's plants. So was the Obama administration, coincidentally, which recently announced its continued support for nuclear power  at the United Nations after the Fukushima disaster. Even though many Americans oppose plants here, this apparent refusal to learn from Fukushima has caused a nuclear rush by China, India and Russia, portending 125 new nuclear plants there and causing a global uranium mining boom.

So the stakes of Brand's nuclear vanguard are high, and real. As the Marin Energy Authority is now the first big effort of a California county to go solar under California's Community Choice Law, AB117 (San Francisco and Sonoma not far behind), and Brand has likely been offered (as I am) 100% renewable energy from that new service, I am compelled to examine Brand's repeated statements in his Sun interview that renewable energy is unfeasible, and that only nuclear power can save the world from climate change:

"Solar doesn't add a whole lot of power to the grid, but it's valuable in individual situations. We have a solar electric fence." (p.11, the Sun, 9/13/11)

Indeed, Brand's attitude emerges from monotonal platitudes to a kind of noir chic. In one moment he complains that solar farms take up too much desert; in the next he proclaims that nuclear power is....perfectly safe. The outraged silence surrounding his expressions appear as poetry, as the gesture of a liberated mind. As with much New Age thought, Brand's has a mesmeric quality, and with great success. Stewart Brand has done more than perhaps any other American to raise nuclear power to respectability, much as he has brought similar legitimacy to the companies seeking to sell Genetically Modified foods (GMOs) in the U.S. (Europe bans them), while opposing even labeling. In many ways his posture is the classic self-hating liberal,  poo-pooing his former allies the environmentalists - you can't handle the truth, etc.. Crowded with eco-intelligentsia, it is shocking that Marin accepts America's nuclear revival preacher still today as a cool sort of New Ager rather than an apostate Taliban - and that there is so little controversy here about his decisive role in selling nuclear revival to the world. Did he refuse Marin Energy Authority service? Is he still a PG&E customer? Will he similarly ignore San Francisco's efforts to localize power supply and secede from PG&E's power plants, all while giving world tours on the impossibility of green power? Of energy localization, energy independence? Did he bother to vote against Prop 16 last year - the PG&E ballot initiative that would have blocked California's energy localization movement?

The political naiivety of Brand's nuclear revival is particularly shocking unless you consider its casualness - with a New Age lightness, even cavalier, about the causes of global economic and ecological meltdown. "So I don't buy the idea of profit being evil," he told interviewer Arnie Cooper of The Sun. "The same goes for large corporations. Size isn't everything. There are lots of mean, harmful, little companies that are not public and have no real accountability to anyone. They're dumping poisons in the ground, and nobody tries to stop them because they're just little companies."

Trained in his futurist art by the author of The Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich), the "co-evolutionist" blames human over-population, not industrial and political collusion, as causing the ecological problems of our time. Never mind Occupy Wall Street - deforestation in the Amazon, he says, is caused by small subsistence farmers, not the longstanding imperial prerogative of global corporations to exploit the regions for cheap food, rubber, oil or jungle DNA. Like Alice in Wonderland, Brand ate from the mushroom and cannot ascertain scale or size - it is all the same, depending on the moment.

Brand's grand solution is ultimately very similar to Obama's - put sulfure dioxide into the atmosphere to offset warming, a global nuclearization, and GMOs. His implicit directive is, how must society adapt to allow continued hyper-growth. Rather than question the technologies and more importantly the hyper-growth, corporate-controlled and globalist energy policies of America during the decades of Brand's tenure in American intellectual life, the very policies that have caused the mass extinction, climate collapse, ocean death, human displacement, social and cultural collapse of the past half century, Brand says implicitly there is nothing to be done (the patient is addicted, administering opium) - but turn it to ten BABY! 

On the other hand Brand's idea of public opinion is naively oblivious to the role of corporations in preventing energy independence and green power, localization. "Unfortunately climate change has become a partisan issue," he says to explain American doubt about climate change. "If liberals and environmentalists think something is critically important, conservatives automatically dismiss it. They're blinded by the mistaken idea that climatologists have some sort of hidden liberal agenda." In other words Brand regards the economic policy choices of governments in the context of Climate Collapse to be defined by psychological misrepresentations rather than propaganda by corporations larger than most governments in revenue and political power - rather like my own experience - aka California's Community Choice movement - being attacked with $68 M by Pacific Gas & Electric through Proposition 16 last year. The largest industrial sector, energy corporations are the embodiment of corporatism following decades of globalization, deregulation, off-shoring, financialization, and oil diplomacy (war). So this is no small oversight.

In the program Brand advocates, the "comprehensive designer" - intellectuals who transcend specialized knowledge and taking a systemic approach to making technological breakthroughs into "tools for human happiness,"  Brand's platitudinousness resurfaces, a latter day, post-industrial Jeremy Bentham, embracing whatever technology develops, viewing it as a tool, like the global nuclear industry revival he champions and has successfully finessed here and in the developing world. The nuclear happiness machine even extends to Iran's nuclear program in the interview, so divorced from military realities associated with uranium enrichment.

Like Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the thought of so many market fundamentalists of the last twenty years, Stewart Brand's thought is product and producer of his era and assigns permanence to the hypergrowth of recent decades - it is part and parcel of his political naivety.  "People who live in the developing world are moving towards more grid power and electricity, thus putting more carbon into the atmosphere." This is the hyper-growth capitalism version of "shit happens." Brand glides effortlessly from bland platitude to yawning directive; "that's why nuclear power, which doesn't create much carbon pollution, looks good to me. Climate change is a planetary problem, and the responses need to be planetary."  Rather than question globalization as the official policy of the United States government for decades, Brand snores through his economic fundamentalism; ultimately he finishes his tune with the little ditty that a planetary problem needs a planetary - that is to say, "big" - solution. And nuclear plants are big. Solar panels and building retrofits are small, so cannot address big problems. 

In light conflations, Brand falls waking forward into a sleep of the Zeitgeist - of historical political and philosophical history, humanity's consciousness of itself, in this case a sleep of Death - ultimately the worship of Death. Brand appears to regard Mexico City-size giga-cities and depopulation of the countryside to be an ecological restoration policy. Displacement is thus reinterpreted as green - here Brand shows the kinds of syllogism that makes some people fear ecologists as anti-human - 'eco-nazi'. The ghetto-ization of America is interpreted as "adaptive" behavior, rather than a failure of civilization, and an evil to be feared and avoided. Brand is ultimately a dystopian thinker, highlighting a future darkness so as to elicit fear and thus lower expectations, making pliable and compliant those who once boasted to be an enlightened democracy - the United States of America. All boats drop with Brand's tide, embracing catastrophe on a great death-centric view which he has christened The Long Now - a longer term thinking beyond the horizon of written human history.  

Mr. Brand's Buddhist rhetoric appeals to Catholic pessimism, an obsession with human sinfulness, failure, and the need for cruelty and ultimately war and holocaust. This mind would accept any lowering of the cultural or aesthetic bar, would smile upon dictators and toast war generals. He has no feeling, is disembodied; beneath the LSD countenance is a cold, hard steel. The new hippy vision is thus ultimately a strain of eco-dandy-ism, as I have pointed out in longer pieces on Brand and the other leading nuclear revivalists - "Philosopher Pawns"(2011) as well as "Climate Panic" (2004).

The Jim Jones-ist wacko-plex of my childhood, from Sausalito to Berkeley, or Oakland, where I was born, and have worked in politics during the past 20 years, has included spending some time with Brand's contemporaries and green capitalist ilk, including Paul Hawken. I would once have counted these people as allies, but environmentalism must mature into more coherent ideas that redefine "green" friends as opponents who would embrace nuclear, or war, or GMOs, in the name of green. As with other ciphers of other crusades, Brand's syllogisms include valuable victims, including the re-introduction of wild nature into urban areas, and more effort to conserve water, but he conflates these simple accouterments of public utilities with provocatively mad extremisms, appealing to the intellectual anti-political types (why he is successful?) but ultimately daft.

The lightness of Brand's being is, indeed, unbearable. There is no they there, in this futurist vision - it has a stoned Turkish quality, to recycle a discarded expression. A "let them eat cake" hurled at the collapse of modernity, a shrug to nuclear catastrophes, and ipods for refugees. He obviously does not care very much for anything in particular at the great Archimedian distance from which he speaks, and as with many other Bay Aryan sorts, regards this emotional detachment as an intellectual virtue - the maniacal transcendence of the New Ager, EST variety - the karmic absence of desire or connectedness to the living world - and lording this attitude over those of us who are afraid and want actual solutions to the fundamental problems now facing us all.  

Et Tu, Jerry?

There have been some positive developments on the energy front recently. The California CCA Crimes Bill, AB976, was delayed for another year in the California legislature following vocal opposition from California municipalities and Community Choice activists at the legislative hearing. This is good news - no dirty tricks got through this year. Germany and Japan are learning the lesson of Fukushima even if President Obama cannot - that is a consolation anyway. And Jerry Brown has recently indicated that his administration will now focus its efforts on implementation of the new Governor's energy policy to bring an historic amount of renewable distributed generation to California's communities.

This is also good news. But Governor Brown III is going to need some new help, and some better advice than he has received recently based on his public remarks, if he is to pull anything off. He told the New York Times that "(W)hen local communities try to block installation of solar like they did in San Luis Obispo, we act to overcome the opposition." Jerry mischaracterizes the true opponents of renewable distributed generation - PG&E and the would-be power monopolies of California who appear to be advising him that environmentalists are actually the problem.

Sound new and smart to you? I remain concerned. Meanwhile, Governor Brown has remained studiously silent on Community Choice programs in Marin, San Francisco, and Sonoma, where real efforts are underway to bring real, scaled renewable distributed generation to California in a big way. There is much of Northern California looking to implement energy localization with CCA but Jerry's silence is reminiscent of former Governor Schwarzenegger, who liked to get along and go along with the big boys, make a nice speech, hang out with celebrities and super-rich, while having all the right opinions. It is political fence-sitting. Unfortunately, the governor appears to be taking a "Lite Green" approach reminiscent of former Governor (and Brown aide) Gray Davis, with an Obamasque absence of coherence that distinctly smells of PG&E, dissembling, and misdirected hubris.

Bad news started shortly after Brown's election when he hired former Number 2 at PG&E Nancy McFadden as the Number 3 in his new administration (Former PG&E Number One Peter Darbee then shortly thereafter resigned from PG&E in disgrace - largely for what he did with Ms. McFadden on Prop 16). Considering that Ms. McFadden's $46M corporate anti-CCA missile was the ultimate threat to renewable distributed generation in California last year, I could not help feel provoked by this apparent indifference to the actual outcome in California's infamous, prolonged energy policy crisis. It reeks of America's chronic political problems with corporate domination of government, and  I cannot help but think that a contradiction has begun to appear putting Brown at variance with his ambitious campaign materials on energy policy.

Having written Jerry's mayoral platform when he first ran for mayor of Oakland in 1998, I am familiar with the dynamics of forgetting campaign promises, and the Governor's saber-rattling talk about crushing environmentalists like those on the Mexican border who opposed the Sunrise Powerlink, or San Luis Obispo, where activists opposed a huge solar power plant but are actively proposing local distributed renewable generation to actually serve San Luis Obispo communities, which my company Local Power is now in fact helping San Luis Obispo County to analyze. To discuss NIMBYism out of context is dangerously misleading, because Jerry is blaming environmentalists for blocking green power when in fact his friends at PG&E are blocking it with everything they've got. This behavior is not good news for solar in California.

PG&E crushed and marginalized energy efficiency and blocked greener competition ruthlessly while Brown was Attorney General in recent years. The governor knows all about PG&E's corporate governance problem, deregulation, utility gaming and market manipulation, the bankruptcy bailouts, Prop 16 and abuse of the political process, San Bruno, and the rest. But today he shows not a sign of genuflection. He should know how to judge whether to place hope in California's mega-utilities to deliver energy decentralization in California - or to focus his mental laser beam attack on actual market barriers like PG&E that sling multi-million dollar budgets like a six-shooter, not Sierra Club volunteers defending their land.

There is scent of a bully here - and inside every bully is the heart of a coward.  If Jerry chickens out and pretends he can patsy-cake PG&E, Edison and Sempra into doing the right thing, while being tough on environmentalists! Alas, he is sadly mistaken. Gray Davis failed and was recalled because he was bullied by PG&E and the utilities, and didn't have the courage to confront bad actors and use the power he had to force real change on an industry that has totally succeeded in blocking change for decades. Instead Governor Davis tried to do a deal and fake it to the public, and got wiped off the map - will Jerry learn from Gray's Christmas Past?

AB 976: RoboCorp Attack on Local Power Inc.?

California’s statewide International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has found a Los Angeles-based junior Assembly Member to file legislation, to be heard in the California Assembly this month, that would create a new crime in California – a crime that regulates what I do for a living. My small California-based company, Local Power Inc., is a longtime consultant to the city of San Francisco as well as Sonoma County helping prepare these communities to implement Community Choice (CCA). After a dozen unpaid years pushing for CCA in Marin County, we opted not to try to be a consultant, and instead bid to actually provide power and localize energy production. With broad stroke language, AB976 would appear make it illegal for my company to help these cities implement their CCA programs.

Government consulting is a competitive business with much stricter fairness and transparency than a monopoly like PG&E offers. We competed against Shell and lost for Marin’s business - Local Power Works lost, and Shell got to eat PG&E’s lunch. That is American competition no? I raised the money to pay for organizing our consortium of local companies and spent $150K to write Local Power Works' bid. AB976 would police my clients for doing business with us and prevent us from working if our programs are successfully implemented. Hm?

Local Power Inc. is not criminal for creating CCA and forcing competition on PG&E. To PG&E or the IBEW or the bill's sponsor, competition is criminal - and small companies like Local Power Inc. are sleazy consultants trying to fleece local governments in California. PG&E is free to write bills like AB976 or Prop 16 and pay to get them passed - like proposing a constitutional amendment to preempt local governments doing CCA, or a law to criminalize PG&E's competitors. It is PG&E that should be policed, not local governments or Local Power Inc..

LPI is not criminal for writing San Francisco’s solar bond authority and seeding the solar finance movement in America. PG&E does have issues that call for policing – it runs a political machine that is hostile to the green power efforts of communities in Northern California.  Enron was no better, but PG&E has become comparable in its banality - its use of the 'good government' ruse to harm the public. Peter Darbee didn’t resign last month for nothing. But does America have a political memory? Now with Assembly Member Hall's bill, the IBEW would banish memory itself  – making it illegal to work for a decade or more for a government to design and implement CCA. This bill would amount to criminalizing the CCA movement in California.

AB976 would invent a new crime just for us.  I live in the Bay Area living in Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, San Francisco, and Marin. I work for these local governments because this is where I live - part of our true interest in localism. Is this a crime? Local Power has spent thirteen years in San Francisco preparing its H Bond and CCA Program, Marin County thirteen years too, and Sonoma County six years. Funny that the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers would come for my job!  Would they like similar restrictions on PG&E, a mega-corporation? Unions – against local governments and for monopolies? Our medieval fathers would weep.

I am not accustomed to playing the special interest, so I suppose the IBEW, (was PG&E behind this? I do not know) is teaching me a lesson for being such as high-handed activist: it appears that my small business, extant for 15 years but still very small, is being branded as a potential criminal. Goliath calls David bully – when in fact the real bully has a black eye for being playing RoboCorp with California governments less than a year ago.

The bill is now in third reading after passing unanimously out of committee. Assembly Member Hall is sponsor, and it has passed the Assembly Appropriations committee.  The bill would make it a crime for Local Power Inc. (localpower.com) to help cities implement the plans we are helping them make for large-scale energy localization – through “CCA” – Community Choice Aggregation. PG&E has been fighting the right of communities to purchase their power from competitive suppliers. They have spent hundreds of millions on Public Relations to fight Community Choice in the Bay Area ($46M on Prop 16 in 2010), as much on lawyering and lobbying, and have lost at the voting booths. Whereas Prop 16 required supermajority support for a municipality to even investigate CCA, AB976 would now propose to criminalize the companies that work for CCAs: in effect, to police local governments, which are already subject to Brown Act and Sunshine Act laws.

The bill says any consultant performing work for a CCA in preparation for implementation of a local energy service, would be classified as criminal for helping the same government implement that program.

Last year PG&E failed in its floating of Proposition 16.  They put it forward as a good government bill to prevent government abuse, but it was recognized for what it was: corporate attack on the government’s ability to govern where it has any impact on PG&E’s quasi-monopoly revenues. The voters rejected Prop 16. Assembly member Hall’s bill, AB 976, is a test of the legislature’s stupidity – would it accept the proposal of a corporate market abuser (CEO Peter Darbee just got fired for what he did on Prop 16) as if to prevent CCAs from being criminal? Failing to win public approval of the state to police local governments who dare implement the 2002 CCA law, PG&E’s handlers now shuffle forward a bill and ask the legislature to criminalize the firms that work with local governments

PG&E has no such requirements -  energy monopolies are quietly left out of AB976. PG&E can continue to consult the local governments in its service territory on any energy of energy efficiency programs they have or want to have (witness PG&E’s foray into Zero Energy Cities)  but also control the electricity services that are physically provided for all of Northern California: and have controlled them for a century.

What is worse, unlike municipalities, which are elected and transparent, California’s electricity monopolies have closed meetings and are Wall Street oriented. Who is policing whom?  Corporations over local government. Sounds like globalization to you?

Philosopher Pawns: Climate Change, Nuclear Revival - Market Fundamentalism Ignores Local Power

As Fukushima poured its iodine clouds eastward toward the West and its millions of gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific, a famous ecologist burst forth publicly with enthusiasm for nuclear power. George Monbiot, the British Climate Change authority and journalist, felt compelled to declare his support for nuclear power plants, he said, in order to pre-empt a rising tide of opposition to the Nuclear Industry's revival, which I have written about since the 1990's.

Fukushima, Monbiot feared, would cause the construction of more coal-fired power plants to make up the difference in an ever-growing global demand for electricity supplies.

His dread was expressed most profoundly in the inability of renewable energy to provide an economically feasible alternative to coal power - "the baseload problem," Monbiot and others like to say. The intermittency of renewables is perceived to pose an insurmountable problem.  Monbiot's fatalism about coal, understandable in a global Race to the Bottom in all policy arenas from Washington to London, Berlin to Beijing, not just in energy policy - yet Monbiot's platitudes are based on profoundly poor, even superficial understanding of energy economics, blinding him to the dramatic opportunities for renewables to replace coal or nuclear baseload plants worldwide in the immediate term - without increasing the cost of energy even in cheap energy markets based on coal-fired power at the center of America’s economy.

By over-depending upon economic figures from the fosil/nuclear/import-oriented incumbent energy industry (whose way of doing business has caused climate change) Monbiot thus reproduces the desperately narrow mentality of said Race to the Bottom. This is the error of coming out for a nuclear solution to Climate Change; it is hysterical – a panic reaction. Let's take a comparable policy challenge - reducing smoking. Governments do not ask Tobacco companies how much it will cost to reduce smoking. When the U.S. turned against smoking, the political alienation happened over night. The day before it was King Tobacco; the following day those interests became pariahs unwelcome at Washington social engagements. The idea that the government would ask the tobacco industry to please reduce smoking by its customers would have been ridiculed as irresponsible. But with Climate Change, the mainstream policy debate has studiously ignored the question of causing economic harm to power plant owners, who (ahem) own the large concentration of fixed capital in the world. Their prerogative to remain profitable despite Climate Change is the major political problem defining the economics of renewable localization, because the systems they adopt to comply with government mandates like Feed In Tariffs invariably impose a premium to recover losses from reduced fuel consumption. Monbiot's policy framework is limited to carrots and sticks - ultimately the feed-in tariff - a poverty that makes nuclear the only option.

The Enlightenment leader Voltaire said sometimes the most dangerous man in the room is the one who says everything is going to be alright. In a crisis, to be comforted by such a man, is folly. Monbiot, like British climate scientist and nuclear revivalist James Lovelock, is justified in being sufficiently alarmed by Climate policy collapse and epochal catastrophe that would follow that. I admire both men for their clear read of the Climate Change / Energy industry trainwreck over the past decade. The problem is, the time is up. The energy industry is the problem, not the solution; public works built bridges when banks would not – not to mention water and sewer systems – the public side of life. Why no consideration of public works to address this mounting crisis? 

Great crises and great events are not consensus-based; they are political, they involve decisions being made and actions being taken.  Our somnambulistic U.S. climate policy players (among which are counted some of its worst energy corporations, like self proclaimed “eco-warrior” Pacific Gas and Electric) where I live have obscured this fact with astro-leadership, which is to say, public relations - greenwashing. When a terrorist attacks New York and Washington with airplanes, our governments jump militarily to destroy entire nations; but when the energy industry threatens humanity on a far greater scale, the corporations causing it are consulted, asked for their ideas on how to handle the problem, and ultimately coddled with incentive packages and tax breaks, perhaps a new tariff or 30-year goal. This is a political problem - of corporatism, not an economic problem, as Monbiot and Lovelock naively assume.

History did not end. The surrealism of pay-to-play industrial democracy has brought a new kind of corporate hubris in a fiscal collapse following a global deregulation and liberalization; in my own struggle last year, Proposition 16 attacked the efforts of governments to implement green power public works in California last year by a corporate plebiscite. $46 Million was spent over six months to persuade voters to block City and County governments from implementing some of the world’s leading efforts to attack climate change. PG&E attacked local governments mind you just as they were being hit with sudden property tax collapse and 50% budget shortfalls to start the collapse ball rolling. Again, this is politics, not some iron law of green economics. PG&E is America's leading Nuclear Revivalist, Mr. Monbiot - while crushing green public works by municipalities. In this historical moment it is not green power itself that poses the main challenge, but effective democratic action – doing the Right Thing – not choosing the (cough) lesser of two evils. That is what we have been doing since Kyoto: our two nations have already suffered our Blairs and Clintons.

Over my career of 18 years in energy- , arithmetic has not ruled energy costs – but bailouts, state-authorized shock doctrine, and laundered structural failures. This failure of ideology is a uniquely American and UK prejudice for oligarchical, imperial-style control of energy as a strategic commodity. It is the detritus of the Cold War and the British Navy before that. But it has spread throughout the world under energy liberalization policies our governments have championed. Many are more comfortable blaming overpopulation for climate change rather than question Western hypergrowth, and feel more comfortable discussing depopulation (more imperialism) rather than questioning the prerogative of energy corporations in our political life - the very maw of hypergrowth. Our nations are intellectually encumbered by this Market Fundamentalism: we literally cannot see the solution to climate change, nuclear proliferation, oil war, sprawl transportation, species extinction, and the epi-crisis that is Energy itself. 
In energy, markets might control technology, but politics controls markets. The power of a local government to build infrastructure is not limited to markets.  In finance, the ability of a government to control power revenues or sell bonds is the basis of a non-linear investment opportunity – the opportunity of “public works.” My own work is reinventing energy public works to cause relocalization by local governments and cooperative ownership structures to create the space for real change. This is not a market structure, not a tariff as in the Feed-In Tariff and Net Metering arrangements between owners of renewables and monopoly utilities. Such schemes are constrained to build change within an industrial detritus of legacy investments in obsolete coal, methane, oil, and nuclear power plants and fuel supplies, high voltage power lines and substations, pipelines and related financial obligations. Monbiot limits his analytical universe to the sectoral green power industry growth curve assumptions, which determine his bandwith of greenhouse gas reduction potential in local distributed renewable technologies, efficiency conservation technologies, and so-called “smart grid” applications of a dozen or more competitive technologies.  It is a fatal flaw. Energy Localization – Community Choice, H Bonds, Community Solar Shares, and other related strategies change the foundation upon which pricepoints and growth curves are built. This non-linearity of public works, Monbiot and Lovelock fail to perceive.

Over the years I have admired Monbiot's work. His dressing down of the California solar cheerleader squad in his 2006 book Heat was totally on the mark. But Monbiot assumed that was all there was to solar. To assess wind economics, Monbiot like Lovelock always assumes British or U.S. industry markets and their trend curves are the final word on what is physically achievable - if the utility industry he so blindly parrots were to itself to take a hit.

The Market Fundamentalists all mistake the interests of a power plant owner with the interests of the energy user. The grotesque spectacle of ecologists nuclear revivalist Born-Agains is not unique to Monbiot, who follows in the steps of Gaia Theorist and technologist – actually a genius, but profoundly mistaken - James Lovelock, "Greenpeace Dropout" eco-contrarian Patrick Moore and Marin New Age “green capitalist” Stewart Brand. All share the demeanor of the recently converted, a sunny tabula rasa innocence, a jettisoned former conviction replaced by an imperfectly attained new wisdom - a hubristic resentment of abandoned loyalties, a trace of guilt, an ambiguity verging on paranoia - a skepticism posing as certainty. Like when left atheist Christopher Hitchens came out supporting Bush's Iraq invasion right when it made a political difference in Congress, cheerleading for Dr. Strangelove in the Fallout of Fukushima is high-stakes territory resembling intellectual folly.

The No-Man's land between knowledges is most terrifying to the philosopher, who would possess wisdom, an organic remembrance of pure unencumbered history, and thus producing reliable theory, even a tradition - appropriate attitude and the right questions, a steady practical management of the New. But the Nuclear Revivalists get it wrong - dyslexically wrong.  The 20th century eradicated what remained of the Enlightenment through a process of Specialization that has rendered coherent scientific knowledge very difficult to accomplish.

Energy and the ecological and economic crisis the Energy Industry has caused, presents a particular challenge to philosophers because of the many-layered forms of knowledge required to comprehend Energy. Monbiot, and the Nuclear Revivalists are in a sense victims of this silo-ism (post-enlightened solipsism?) of knowledges in our time, rendering them over-dependent intellectually on specialists in fields of knowledge in which they have no direct competence.   While brilliant and honest, Monbiot and the genius Lovelock have fallen into an intellectual blind spot. Lovelock, as I have written in some detail, is politically illiterate, and economically naive to the point of possessing a fundamentalist naivety - a worshipper of economists as if they were naturalists rather than ideologues and minions of corporate power - and of imperialism, for example. Monbiot, less naive politically, is uneducated in energy economics, depending upon status quo industry statistics for his estimates of the cost of renewable energy relative to the cost of conventional power. This is a drab statement admittedly, to make it plainly – an understandable but damnable mistake.

We are talking, ultimately about the cost of change. Monbiot has said it is too expensive, so we must have nuclear power. Big Brother talking now, chiding us for our nuclear NIMBYism.  Naive, these philosophers have become pawns of the darkest forces of Status Quo, imperialism, divide and conquer, and are reduced to cheerleading for the least of two epic evils:  nuclear power yes, coal power no.

Monbiot and the Nuclear Revivalists would have us choose between catastrophes because they embrace its dark hopelessness as a new kind of adulthood, a new political maturity. They would father us with this condescending realism, repeating the old saw that what is must be - that the real is indistinguishable from the true.

But what is, must not be. Economics, in energy, is master of technology, but the servant of politics. The synthesis is science - is Enlightenment. Understanding what is possible, today - not just tomorrow - cannot be achieved without this synthesis. Like Lovelock, Monbiot worships at the idol Economics; he states, with little qualification that solar photovoltaic power costs 41 pence per kilowatt hour, pointing to Britain's Feed-In Tariff system of paying solar PV owners for their solar power. And he is right, the Feed In Tariff system of Europe is not the way forward, but nonetheless he uses this number to discredit solar power as a technology. Similar isolated technology economics analysis comprise Monbiot's critiques of renewables as a Carbon solution throughout HEAT and his other writings. This analysis is woefully limited and must be retracted. Monbiot fails to deconstruct the Tariff itself, merely footnoting it as a FACT.

Truth, is solar power has neither an objective price, energy cost, nor a priori carbon impact.   The impact of renewable distributed generation technologies may not be judged in isolation, one by one, but together, operating in parallel as a single integrated location-specific system. Tariffs are flawed, because they are designed as post facto modifications of the incumbent energy industry’s business. It is self evident they have prevented change in the U.S. for fifty years – nearly as long in U.S. and competitor’s imperial claim areas all over the world. Now that the technical feasibility of renewable energy localizations of 50% to 75% over five years cannot be disputed, the economic feasibility is solely in question in Nuclear Revivalists’ central precept that renewable energy cannot deliver a 50-75 physical system demand reduction cost-effectively in five years without increasing power and heat utility bills for any customers.  Technology strategy will differ by place but is achievable today by mature, innovating industries. I repeat, the challenge is political will for historic change, not any objective price of power that Monbiot or anyone else can tag on solar power. Power and heat can be built to carry transporation infrastructure, capturing the Lion’s Share of the extraordinary volume of carbon emissions that must be reduced over the next five years in any region of the world. A ten- to fifteen-year global transformation of energy is technically economically feasible through such localizations, offering a soft landing to 21^st Century mankind - without new nuclear plants threatening new catastrophes.

Like Lovelock, Monbiot approaches renewables within the paradigm of fuels. Fuel has a price. Natural gas, coal, oil produce the same power in the UK as in California or Siberia. But renewable technologies produce different volumes of power in different weather conditions, and more importantly, offset different volumes of grid power in different communities based on the regional weather and demand pattern (bedroom communities at night, cities in day). 

Every place has advantages and disadvantages based on not only local resources but local governance authority; if only a monopoly has role of implementing the change, it is germane to estimating feasibility. Where a local government like Sonoma County or Boulder Colorado says it wants to relocalize and physically build a public works rollout of a 50-75% regionalization/relocalization with not one technology but a dozen, not just minority facilities but mainstream distributed power and demand response, targeted capacity balancing with local storage, and smart grid. To speak of renewable energy in this two-dimensional way is a folly of climate change economics. Monbiot had a debate tour but I didn't hear about it in time. I would welcome a debate at any time, San Francisco or London some time in the affordable future. Renewable economics are not defined by commodity prices but by the manner in which they are integrated as intermittent resources to physically replace power plants.

Our time in History suffers not from stupidity but a demoralization, disengagement, and a sense of hopelessness - it is the rational modern attitude in the face of overpowering external forces - and liberalization, globalization, hypergrowth. But philosophers and leaders must not succumb to it; to the extent Monbiot and Lovelock would concede my economic argument, they must admit to some startling non-linear volumetric consequences, namely an accelerated scaled decentralization that could be implemented in short order. I know it is hard to imagine given how dystopian the idiocy of America, Britain and Europe in the Blair/Clinton Era of Bush Obama Non-Policy is - no economy, and no trade policy. It is hard to find a witness or coherent leader in the so-called developed world. That U.S. Trade policy is unmentioned during the world economic downturn shows the deck - the vacuity of policy depth, the unseriousness, the Fame-oriented trivialization of it. But this decadence does not define what is possible, nor what is to be done to stop Climate Change.

Why wouldn't it be that way in the U.S. twenty years after the global victory of Capitalism, Globalization, Liberalism, and Deregulation? In the tired detritus of U.K. and U.S. political discourse, physicists compare Tariff prices and cry Uncle - at the very moment when a real alternative to nuclear power and more militarism is made possible now and without increased utility bills - if the necessary changes are made by local governments, like San Francisco, Marin County, and the City of Boulder are trying to make.

Zeitgeist After Apocalpyse? Will the world end with a whimper or a yawn? The challenges of building major public works in a new category of cause (not plumbing nor bridges, nor hospitals nor trains) are significant, with complex urban environments to work through. These are the focus of my work, how I make a living - figuring out how far, how fast any county or municipal government could transform its community's energy supply, measured in carbon reductions, without increased rates. I can point to portfolios we have designed for several cities, and proposed them to cities in public documents over many years.

Most are posted on my Local Power Inc. website. We are talking about political challenges, not challenges to technical potential or economic potential. Just as it was a political challenge for the U.S. Congress to turn its back on King Tobacco in order to truly oppose cigarette proliferation, so the green power localization / customer ownership / public movement can plan to down nuclear, gas and coal power plants to a grid backup function, dramatically reduce carbon (our last model is 67% reduction built over 5 years - no rate increase – for Sonoma County in California).  Again, I repeat, the Green Nuclear Revivalists undertake an economic rejection of renewables modeled upon the incumbent owner/controller of the utility system to implement. In countries where the government owned or controlled the systems left over from socialist origins, the Feed in Tariffs were easier to implement. In the U.S. a Cold War configuration of mega-utilities, holding companies and cartels control each state market differently - even each municipal franchise agreement.

The reality of Climate Change actions on a scale commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis is, as with telephone deregulation, a trade war. Enron and Pacific Gas & Electric have proven that democracies can be gamed, manipulated, led in a circle. The Keystone Cops aspect of regulation in U.S. or Europe during the Boom to Bust orgy must not suffer the silence of laughter. To suggest the Tobacco companies should have been given responsibility for reducing smoking in the U.S., this was thought irresponsible - but is precisely the primary framework of all U.S. energy policy that is deal-oriented and normative with stooges and dorks played by sharks and cynics. Let's not pretend that U.S. or European governments are limited market-based solutions, when after all the markets have self-combusted? Indeed, today the Local Power model is more possible because the growth maw of hyper-growth economics is so spasmodic, so obviously maladaptive. We do not need a power supply to feed the McWorldization of the world. We need ourselves to be retrofitted and modernized, our Old New Infrastructure now behind countries like Cuba. Liberalization and Globalization are not the way of the future. They are the mad dreams of an old-fashioned economic imperialism. 

The embrace of Nuclear is ultimately an embrace of militarism. It is nightmarish, this epiphany that one must embrace one devil to avoid another. This is the madness of Market Fundamentalism, and its jettison will free souls like Lovelock and Monbiot who cannot tolerate the salesmanship and lies of solar promoters in California a decade ago - who need to see a real path, not just the fog of hope. But in fact my associates and I at Local Power Inc. are at the precipice of implementing community renewable energy localizations and are confident of various strategies that are achievable in electricity service or gas or heat district service that can be engineered with storage, demand response, islanding (virtual power plant replaces dispatchable fossil or non-dispatchable nuclear plant) and other technologies to achieve exponentially accelerated growth curves for all categories of renewable onsite and demand technology.  It is often very challenging to design these systems but so far we are able to model 50-75% physical replacement of a county at price parity, exponentially higher greenhouse gas reductions at price parity,  and a grid-reliability power plant replacement at price parity. In no case does solar, or wind, or any single technology or application provide the key and the economic shape of the solution. With renewable energy, location matters – there are no cookie-cutter solutions.  Being committed to specificity and handling complexity is critical to the economics of energy localization. Again, this is a five-year solution anywere in the world.

I hope Monbiot and Lovelock will reconsider. We need to regroup around the concept of localization, rather than obsession with technology favoritism; Appropriate Technology means adapted to local conditions. This principle of approach should change the desperate terms of debate about Climate Change and Nuclear Proliferation after Fukushima. 

Nuclear Revivalism - Sleepwalking into Oblivion

This sent in from Charles Schultz - "In the golden age of science, at the time when society had its most optimistic view of science, it basically had a wrong headed view of science. It had the view that this form of the technology was the inevitable form it had to take; and if that was the form it took, it must be the right form.  Forty years later we have a similarly naive view, it is no longed tinged by hope and optimism it's tinged by pessism and fear, but we still have this view that society can't shape technology: that the form technology takes is the form we must accept.  Just as it wasn't true in 1950, it's not true today.  This is not a story of technology run amok, though that is how many people would understand it to be.  The history of nuclear power is a history of political and economic and social decisions being made about a technology.  And the key decisions weren't made by the technologists; they were done in the business realm. What science and technologies give you are a range of possibilities. And those possibilities can take you in any number of directions. It is potentially a liberating force, but to get there, society has to stop sleep walking, and start realizing that it's not a scientific choice, it's not an economic choice, it's a moral choice." - Joseph Morone, historian

Live Fallout Model - Japan to California

This is produced by the Incident and Emergency Centre of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Last Updated March 26. For the original click here.

Japan's Radiation Nightmare - Fallout for the Nuclear Industry Revival

The Nuclear Industry revival began in the late 1990's, when I wrote an article republished in The Workbook, poking fun at the absurd, even hysterical marketing efforts of the the nuclear industry as it began to exploit climate change as a new opportunity to promote nuclear power, then presumed by nearly all Americans to be politically DOA, as a new kind of "green" power. At the time I did not appreciate the power of money to engineer American opinion. I thought of nuclear revivalists as a kind of latter-day Orwellians who should be laughed off of the international stage.

Since then I have learned my lesson. Hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade later, the Nuclear Energy Institute's efforts to persuade the American voter and politician that nuclear power is the climate change panacea have proven shockingly successful, with public opinion polls on nuclear power turned on their heads in no time, and every Tom Dick and Harry proudly proclaiming unqualified confidence in the safety of nuclear power. The contrarian streak of Americans makes them susceptible to a crude manipulation. Nuclear industry strategists were  immeasurably augmented by the "thought leadership" of self-hating ecologists like New Ager Stewart Brand and climate scientist James Lovelock, whose desperation in the face of pathetic government inaction on climate change converted them to an eco-revisionism defining nuclear power as the "only solution" to a mounting global atmospheric crisis.

It is so effortless, when one is ensconced in a losing fight aginst one evil, to embrace another by persuading onself it is a lesser evil. It is indeed a classic case of the failure of wisdom under duress - the beginning of a deadly folly - the sentimental origin of panic, which I wrote about in my 2006 Lovelock refutation, "Climate Panic."  In this piece, I made, in full recognition of the seriousness of global climate policy collapse, the case against Lovelock's embrace of nuclear power - particularly his failure of perspective, "rushing into the arms of Dr. Strangelove." Throughout the industrialized world, the failure of governments to cope with the economic zero-sum game of Climate Change has led many to water down the policy discussion as if to trivialize it away, such as President Obama's latest "State of the Nation" speech in which he promised us all a "Clean Energy" future...which he then defined as including renewables, gas, coal...and nuclear power. Anything not included in the new definition of "clean?" Today the Obama administration reacted to worldwide reaction to the Japan disaster by re-proclaiming the President's commitment to nuclear power  -even in spite of the meltdowns underway and the death and suffering that will inevitably follow. When did the people decide it was worth dying - even threaten human health worldwide - just to have electricity? The President reaffirms his commitment to nuclear power. Eh? An amnesiac fanaticism yawns its platitudes - meaningless phrases that protect nothing but the profits of a few energy companies. In times like this it would appear that Orwell has won.

With radioactive fallout now being released into the atmosphere in Japan, Tokyo taping its windows against dangerous ambient radiation levels - now meandering across the Pacific Ocean toward my home in Marin County, California not far from Stewart Brand's own home -  I wonder what is come of Mr. Brand's confident announcements regarding the safety of nuclear reactors?  It is so easy to deny the dangers of radiation until you are breathing and drinking it yourself. One would think that the founder of the Long Now Foundation would remember Chernobyl only 25 years ago. Would Mr. Lovelock reassure me that the radiation is harmless to drink? Were there no other way to stop Climate Change, perhaps an argument might be made for humans to be sacrificed to Gaia.  But there is another way, technically and economically feasible, that neither Lovelock nor Brand ever considered, as I seek to prove in my recent book, This is Not a Theory.  Our sacrifice is being made not to Gaia but to the profits of obsolete power and fuel corporations.

"What the hell is going on?" Japanese Prime Minister Kan asked a Tokyo Electric Power Company official by telephone today. We might ask in response, "What the hell is Japan or California doing leaving nuclear plants in the hands of private corporations?" The government's impotence in this crisis is chilling, underscoring the irrationality of corporatism. While my family and friends dread the impacts that the Tokyo Electric Power Company disaster will have for scores of Japanese and ourselves, there is perhaps one consolation. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the electricity company for Northern California, is yet another of the cadre of leading nuclear industry revivalists that have pumped millions of dollars into the Orwellian promotion of nuclear power as a new kind of green power. While spending equal sums to suppress real green power aka the "Community Choice" movement here in Northern California ($50M on Prop 16 last year), PG&E's deep pockets have exploited America's pay-to-play media culture to redefine the very meaning of green to include nuclear power, positioned the nuclear / fossil corporation as "the greenest utility in America," and brainwashed American politicians like the President to repeat the mantra that nuclear power is "clean". While thousands, or millions of Americans and Japanese suffer from the radioactive fallout that is now billowing into the air, perhaps the power of PG&E's cash to mesmerize the Sleeping American will be diminished, and some consciousness created. Perhaps this disaster could make real change possible in an industry that is causing both climate change and nuclear proliferation all over the world today.

It is worse than bittersweet - call it poisonsweet. Only when people realize that there are no cheating answers to the fundamental challenges of our time, will they perhaps finally turn away from the crafted idols of dissemblers and give consideration to the real solutions - like Community Choice Aggregation and energy localization - however unprofitable it may be for the PG&E's of the world.

Ground Dog Day, Again - And a Day Late

Nancy McFadden, author of PG&E's Proposition 16, is now going to become the Executive Secretary to the State's new Governor - for policy, appointments and scheduling. Having fought off Proposition 16 against the $50 Million that PG&E put down to block Community Choice (CCA) in California just six months ago, and having worked closely with Jerry when he ran for Mayor of Oakland and created a strong mayor system there, I could not help be feel a sense of paranoid alarm that Jerry had hired this PARTICULAR woman into his fold. This particular elf for past failed Democratic Presidential and Governorship candidates? What would make you want this? Friend of a friend? Is this another case of inviting the U.S. Military to practice invasions in East Oakland after being elected mayor - suiting the Governor's contrarian humor, a desire to outrage his old base for a good chuckle?

There is something postmodern, even decadent, about McFadden's move from PG&E Headquarters to the Governor's front office. It is like being in a vaguely bad dream. On the one hand, the Governor promised that base that he would revolutionize California with local power - the very kind of change we have always championed - with some 20 GigaWatts (GW) of renewable distributed generation throughout California. California is collapsing back to the counties, "devolving" power by default. On (or with) the other he hires a woman more responsible than any other person (alleges PG&E CEO Peter Darbee) for PG&E's most notorious strategem to block any such effort by San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma County, San Luis Obispo.

For the author of perhaps the most reviled attack on local government in California in recent memory to be hired by the same Governor who will devolve power to local government, how is this ostensibly praetorian secretary to be regarded by those who would approach the Governor concerning policy, appointments or the Governor's schedule? I know how powerful a "scheduler" can be for a politician - even for a gifted one like Jerry Brown. His decision to give McFadden the keys to his office is indeed troubling, even haunting.

So what is Governor Brown 3.0 thinking? I can only guess. Jerry has a scholarly mind that is not well adapted to the platitudes of State of the State speeches. He can make a campaign interesting, and managed to not kill a few good ideas in his first round as governor, but is not a natural executive in character, ability or disposition. So in other words, it matters who his head staffers are and what they are up to. Having McFadden in there is frightening.

Some people put hope in Brown's appointments of Mike Florio, formerly the head attorney at The Utility Reform Network, one of the major pro-consumer law firms at the CPUC.  I have known Mike for many years and think him a very smart, able attorney who is well-intentioned. But what is the program? Does anyone have any ideas what to do in California's energy market, other than blocking PG&E from destroying Community Choice, or otherwise mis-investing in the ongoing overbuilding of PG&E and the other utilities (e.g. PG&E's new Oakley Power Plant) or shift costs onto transmission ratemaking as in the current CPUC proceeding, so as to erect a wall of ratepayer debt, penalties, charges and other shenanigans, and thus kill all that local power stands for? Platitudes or lofty goals aside, where is there sign of a determination like Franklin Roosevelt's when he defied the utility industry players in the region like Duke Power and built the Tennessee Valley Authority? Clear lines must be drawn between aggressive incumbents that have prevented any real change for half a century, and those individuals who are determined that change must come in this administration. This is leadership in a crisis - not revolving-door opportunists.

The Collapse phenomenon is highlighted by the the decadent actions of powerful people, who display their contempt for the public. It is a kind of epiphany, the boredom of Caligula as he destroyed Rome. Sustaining this attack but damaged by Chevron's "Copycat" Prop 26 (which did pass) the local governments of California swoon before the spectre of Brown's devolution in unprecedented mega-deficits brought about by an economy that has substantially collapsed at the real level of small businesses, which employ most people - and President Obama announces in his State of the Union that the economy is coming back because of the Stock Market. Financialization has reduced national debate to cheerleading when a serious rethinking of the American economy is desperately needed. It is a time for clear leadership to force change on an industry that has not merely resisted but subverted California's mandates for years, reducing its global reputation from leader to loser. Can Brown do better?

I was called yesterday by a journalist who said there were rumors that Nancy McFadden is an "environmentalist." I said this was funny, or alarming, considering who she is - undeniably the "idea person" beyond Proposition 16. Peter Darbee hired her to do it just after failed Governor Gray Davis had hired her to handle his disaster of an administration during the energy crisis...that PG&E more than any other caused. To me this sounds like a classic power player, this circassian horsewoman jumping from Governor to energy megacorp to Governor. Were will she jump next? Moreover, what was the Governor thinking?

The reduction of Obama from leader to cheerleader has illustrated the importance of having actual ideas, not just brilliantly crafted slogans and winning smiles. You cannot stop the Great Recession by announcing that the economy is coming back. That was Herbert Hoover, not Roosevelt. You cannot bring the change that America needs by waxing poetic (however polished, thank you Geroge Lakoff) while ignoring basic matters of trade policy or actual infrastructure. The Shuck and Jive has got to stop, and Revolving Door Blues ain't the way to start either, Mr. Governor.

Citizen Darbee: The Pricelessness of Leaderspeak

PG&E Corp CEO and President Peter Darbee, who controls the holding company of Pacific Gas and Electric Company and funded Prop 16 with $70M to blanket California with propaganda in the few months prior to the June 8, 2010 ballot, sought to publish an Op Ed defending his failed constitutional amendment days after the state's voters rejected it by a 4 point spread. The utility executive - one of the highest paid in the world - called his essay “The Price of Leadership.”

I posted a statement on Local Power's victory against Prop 16 on the powergrab.info website but want to focus on the PG&E leader's letter because it indicates how PG&E will be treating San Francisco, Marin, and other communities that implement Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) in Northern California. Darbee started his letter by quoting (former UK Prime Minister) Tony Blair’s statement  “I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour, but sometimes it is the price of leadership. And the cost of conviction.”

One is tempted to observe that Mr. Blair was at the time of this quote defending his abortive Iraq policy - hardly an encouraging example of leadership. Would Darbee say that Bush paid the price? But it is perhaps wiser to observe the inappropriateness of the utility executive's reference, even as it is naively regurgitated - to simply state that Mr. Darbee is in fact no Prime Minister of England, but the president of an electric utility that is regulated by the state of California and operates upon public rights of way under municipal control, including franchise agreements without which PG&E could not exist.  Yet Mr. Darbee elected to attack the foundational authority of those same democratic governments through a corporate plebiscite - just to block Community Choice Aggregation in its service territory.

More recently, Darbee has come out in opposition to the Valero/Tesoro Initiative, Prop 23, a Prop 16 copycat plebiscite to pre-empt the legislature's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law, AB32. Some fear PG&E will use the campaign to re-green its now tarnished image, but in fact PG&E's carbon strategy is an even greater concern for alarm than its recent attack on local governments.

Again, the undiscussed emergency of not just US but world policy, because of the US, is that PG&E's proposed future, of a nuclear industry revival, is happening under PG&E's global leadership. It so happens that the Bay Area's utility is leading the global nuclear industry revival as part of its promoted carbon policies. As local citizens, the CCA movement and the spotlight of Prop 16 is a rare case where we can do something global by acting locally. The stakes are that high: we should not fear that America's political bottom will fall out (which Prop 16 and Prop 23 represent) but that an historic opportunity is before us; we as San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, the Greater East Bay, and potentially the rest of Northern California now face perhaps the quintessential practical opportunity to prove the nuclear carbon solution globally unnecessary.

Then there are PG&E's long-term allies, particularly the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). When Newsweek and Vanity Fair called PG&E America's greenest large utility after attending NRDC's celebrity party, the "carbon free" (scent of Coca-Cola, includes nuclear) brand is now being sold en masse to millions of Americans, and they are buying it. A lot of Americans now think we have to have nuclear power to solve climate change. But we know this is all about an industry, specifically the mining and fuels industry - and importers like PG&E. Too many Americans are being brainwashed into giving up on the obvious solution the climate crisis (local green power and ubiquitous customer-owned demand technology) just to protect incumbent monopolies and fuel cartels' "revenue requirements." It is a bad situation America is in now because of Obama's obvious waffling with nuclear as well as offshore oil (though I guess he has recanted since the BP catastrophe). It would appear that American big business has evolved into a decadent kind of post-competitive oligarchy.

Either way, such is the simple political crisis that we are solving in the Bay Area not merely as Silicon Valley hard/software geniuses but a coherent, scaled public works project. Hopefully the tens of thousands of citizens who learned about CCA because of Prop 16's propaganda machine will now remember what PG&E really is made of - and perhaps this will strengthen their resolve to try to implement CCA in their rural areas or municipalities - but everyone must recognize that CCA is urgently needed as an example of real change - throughout the world. Many societies fail, and America has so many reasons to fail if in fact the Climate collapses and America loses what power it still has to influence the course of events that will follow.

But the Corporation rises, like the Terminator, for its next new attack. Since losing Prop 16, PG&E's lawyers have gone back to state regulators to undo regulations that prohibit the corporation from lying. Under the recent CPUC decision, PG&E was directly warned not to make false and misleading statements to customers regarding municipal CCA options. PG&E petitioned to change that regulation in its fights against CCAs.

Section 2102 of California's Public Utility Code holds PG&E to the higher standard that “Whenever the commission [CPUC] is of the opinion that any public utility is failing or omitting or about to fail or omit... in violation of law or of any order, decision, rule, direction, or requirement of the commission, it shall direct the attorney of the commission to commence an action or proceeding in the superior court... for the purpose of having such violations or threatened violations stopped and prevented, either by mandamus or injunction.”

PG&E asked regulators to strike its decision prohibiting lying, arguing that it may be regulated only if false and misleading statements are proven in an unfair competition verdict against it after trial in a California Superior Court. In other words, commented the San Diego Reader, “absent a guilty verdict against it under Section 17200 of the Business & Professions Code, PG&E appears to assert that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution gives the corporation the right to say anything it wants.”

In his "price of leadership" letter, Darbee mentions PG&E’s support of “California’s aggressive vehicle emissions standards, opposing efforts by a national business organization to overturn them. He fails to mention that electric cars would have dramatically expanded electricity sales by PG&E, and thus were in self interest (if corporations have selves), not “leadership.”

Darbee rests his case on PG&E’s support of greenhouse gas emissions legislation in California (AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 - now under a copycat attack by Valero and Tesoro on the November ballot) -- as well as PG&E’s role as a “major contributor” to the US Climate Action Partnership. He fails to mention that PG&E will profit from the “Cap and Trade” approach that the Partnership promoted. He fails to mention that Cap and Trade used to be a Republican policy – and is widely criticized for benefiting big utilities but not producing results. Darbee fails to mention that PG&E already has a low carbon profile compared to most coal-dependent US utilities, and would bring profit to PG&E if coal utilities had to pay PG&E to clean themselves up – profit, not leadership - while doing little to actually contribute to the solution and much to prevent the solution (Prop 16).  Finally, Darbee fails to mention that PG&E has the advantage of being lower carbon because of its nuclear power plants. Mr Darbee fails to mention that PG&E is among the nation’s most prominent nuclear revival promoters.

Darbee mentions that Newsweek magazine recently called PG&E “the country’s greenest utility.” No mention of the fact that Newsweek (1) sucks and (2) is bankrupt. Kind of like PG&E and fellow traveler? One obsolete monopoly sympathizes with another?”

Darbee mentions “(S)ome of our longtime supporters, who decried Proposition 16, believe the PG&E they once admired lost its way somewhere along the line. I would tell them that their disagreement with us-which we respect-is the price of our leadership on important issues of the day.” Leadership is attacking governments by corporate plebiscite? Leadership and profit interweave in Darbee’s astro-patriotism. “By staking out bold positions, we of course invite controversy.”  But the position was that you unilaterally wrote a constitutional amendment to crush the democratic powers of local governments – and further weaken the legislature and California Public Utilities Commission. This was not an expression of opinion, but a calculated assault upon the Republic of California. Darbee’s final meditation is to muse that “the alternative is to be cowed by fear of criticism into ducking our leadership opportunities and responsibilities. Surely our society needs more leadership, not less.”  The image is classic Napoleon, the tyrant who fears impotence. Once can barely hear the barely audible voice amplified into deafening roar on California’s airwaves, and in the minds of California’s voters.

A vote that Darbee’s “expression of opinion” failed to win. “After a lively debate, the voters have now spoken on Proposition 16 and we respect the outcome.”  Well la-di-da. “We hope our critics will equally respect our willingness to participate in the system and engage on the important issues of the day.” The Supreme Court’s recent decision to officially sanction corporate personhood for full financing of congressional elections, Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission, could not find a better refutation than the blank platitude that Prop 16 was PG&E's way of “participating in the issues of the day.” Prop 16 was an industrially manufactured assault on democracy: a globalized, bailed out holding company unleashing its market power against the traditional constitutional authority of local governments in California. “Through mutual engagement and mutual dialog, we can improve our company, our communities, and our country.” The global corporation's patriotic phrases transmute into traitorous threats. With friends like you, mister, who needs enemies?

Corporate Psychopath: PG&E’s RoboCorp Attack on California

Teabaggers and the Angry American are the targets of a calculated propaganda effort of one of the world’s largest energy companies to grab a power monopoly in California’s constitution – all by re-directing voter anger from anger against the Wall Street collapse to anger against local governments. PG&E says Prop 16 is about voter rights, when its CEO admitted Prop 16 is really intended to reduce public votes that might interfere in its business. With a shamelessness that brings the film The Corporation to mind, PG&E has spent over $50M in ratepayer funds to pay for its faux-patriot advertisements during the same month that its attorney's are asking California regulators for the largest rate increase in its history: 30% or $6 Billion.

http://www.kget.com/news/local/story/CPUC-hearing-on-PG-Es-4-2-billion-revenue/Y6fUZk_8aketUKK044K95w.cspx

A $50M “saturation bomb” television advertising campaign by Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation (PG&E) attempts to persuade millions of Californians that it is local and county governments, not Wall Street CEOs, that should have their hands tied in 2010. PG&E led (arguably invented) the nation’s “Too-Big-to-Fail” bailout trend, collecting over $20B in ratepayer bailouts over the past dozen years, including the largest bankruptcy in history and a “ringfencing” scandal for siphoning $5B of bailout funds through the holding company. But its ad says only that governments should not be allowed to participate in the energy business – even if a majority of voters approve it.

PG&E’s bailouts were never voted on at all, including $ Billions in non-bypassable surcharges the utility has imposed on its customers’ monthly electric bill to pay PG&E these bailouts -- and as  these surcharges somehow escaped being called “taxes,” no vote at all was required. Same goes for PG&E's 30% rate increase. But PG&E’s campaign says now it is a champion of the right to vote -- and furthermore that majority rule is not good enough for local governments. California begins to feel like a Third World country in which corporations are puppet-masters of failed states, and in which local governments are stripped of basic, centuries-old local control authority. The Proposition 16 vote next week on June 8 signals a new kind of globalization in America – in which formerly domestic corporations begin to behave like multinationals that have little real regard for local or even state governments. Never mind that PG&E has no business without state and local consent: attack now, "mend fences" (as CEO Darbee said) later.

http://localpowerrevolution.blogspot.com/2010/05/climate-war-california-regulators-warn.html

PG&E’s hubristic attitude has transformed its image among Californians into a machine-like, even Orwellian dissembler: enter “RoboCorp,” the corporate psychopath, at stage right. Energy Giant PG&E started the Robocorp trend following the US Supreme Court’s recent decision (Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission) to give corporations the same rights as individuals, by allowing corporations to fund candidates in federal elections. The justices struck down a provision of the McCain–Feingold Act that prohibited all corporations, either for-profit and not-for-profit, as well as unions, from broadcasting “electioneering communications” in federal elections. Now the world’s wealthiest corporations may play the game at will. Justice Stevens’s dissenting opinion was joined by Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, and Justice Sotomayor, holding that the Court's ruling "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution," concluding:

“At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y

California now faces the threat of a new brand of “robo-corporatism,” with a statewide vote next week on a proposal written and financed by the holding company of a regulated energy company to amend the state’s constitution. It is a preemption of both traditional local control and coup d’etat against the authority of the state, and local governments, to regulate its subsidiary company, Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

Since the Copenhagen Summit was fundamentally undermined by the U.S. Senate (under vigorous U.S. energy industry lobbying - as was the Kyoto Treaty),  several major crises have underscored the impression that the United States, California high among them, appear to be suffering from a “policy collapse” syndrome in which concentrated corporate power systematically disables governments from implementing the public mandate for action on energy independence and meaningful climate protection measures. High among them is the BP oil platform spill, which has brought to light the longstanding compromised, even co-dependent relationship between energy corporations and the government agencies that are supposed to regulate them. In BP’s case, the Interior Department had recently exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling operation (the one that exploded) from a detailed environmental impact analysis just last year in 2009, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely. The cost BP avoided by not installing measures that would have prevented the spill: $500,000. The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009, as well as BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions illustrate the dangerously perfunctory function of regulators over one of the largest oil importers into the United States. Even worse, President Obama’s failure to admit his mistake in supporting an end to the ban on offshore oil drilling just a week prior to the oil platform explosion highlight’s the consequences of collapsed government: that even its best leaders are rendered unable to learn from their mistakes. Today, with unthinkable long-term impacts facing the U.S. and the entire Atlantic Ocean, we face the possibility of the Gulf being permanently damaged just so Mr. BP could save half a million in equipment upgrade costs – but all President Obama can say is that BP will have to pay the damages!  This is offensive to the informed, who know as Obama does that the current federally established cap on damages for a single oil platform spill is $75 million - a tiny fraction of the $ billions in damages now occurring – if damages of this scope can even be assigned a value.  If this is what the President means by “the buck stops here,” then there would appear to be no There, There, so to speak.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050404118.html

Many Californians remember the film Who Killed the Electric Car? And know that General Motors and other U.S. automakers conspired to undermine California’s landmark Zero Emissions Vehicle standard which caused electric cars to appear on California’s streets in the late 1990’s. Within a few years heavy lobbying led Governor Gray Davis to buckle and suspend the Zero Emission rule requiring automakers to sell a minimum number of electric cars each year. Just a week after GM recalled the last cars its entire California fleet of 1000 Zero Emission electric vehicles to be destroyed (citing a "lack of demand"), and during the same year by which California air regulators had since 1990 required that 10% of all new cars be pollution free had not Governor Davis lifted the requirement upon taking office -  state air regulators came out with a new standard for rating new cars that instead re-classified gasoline-burning engines as "clean."  Keeping on their smiley faces, state air board regulators proudly announced the "Partial Zero Emission Vehicle," ("P-ZEV") a characteristically Moderate Democratic nomenclature to which the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and Detroit automakers have agreed - a watered down version of the "Zero Emmission Vehicles" classification following Governor Davis' decision to eliminate the 1990 landmark state regulation providing that 10% of all cars sold in California should have been Zero Emission Vehicles ("ZEV") starting in 2003.

The irony is that the global energy and automobile corporations have only succeeded in shooting themselves in the foot. GM went bankrupt because its products were non-innovative, gas guzzling lemons. By protecting their market share against competition, corporations enable themselves to grow into stupid, dysfunctional fiefdoms. In recent years, because GM’s lobbying prowess had enabled it to kill its own electric car the EV-1, one of the most admired GM cars in decades (and undermine fuel standards since the early 1980’s), GM has gone bankrupt. Indeed, many of America’s industries, such as telecommunications, have substantially harmed their own competitiveness in global markets by dominating U.S. and state regulators and legislatures– winning rules and laws that appear to meet their short-term interests while actually undermining their competitiveness with mediocrity and corruption. The negative feedback loop is indeed reminiscent of the fall of empires: as if some invisible force were drawing the lemmings over a cliff.

http://freepress.org/departments/display/20/2003/343

Energy corporations that prove unable, like BP or GM, to dominate the governments that are supposed to regulate them, are simply attacking them – with Napoleon-style plebiscites. In the case of PG&E and Valero/Tesoro, laws of California’s legislature that have taken a decade or longer to implement, and indeed the constitution itself, which is extremely rare for the legislature itself to amend, are now known to be for sale to anyone with $50M. PG&E’s Prop 16 coup attempt on the June 8 ballot has awakened two other energy giants, two oil corporations from Texas - Tesoro and Valero - to come gun-slinging to California, already ponying up $800K to write and pay sidewalk signature gatherers to qualify a subsequent November ballot initiative that would un-do California’s adopted landmark Greenhouse Gas Reduction law, AB32.  But PG&E will be the proving ground of this new robocorp trend. On June 8, PG&E would block a movement of San Francisco, Marin County and other municipalities to provide cheaper, greener power to willing residents and businesses – through the Community Choice law, AB117. Already, Marin is providing cheaper power to residents and businesses even though it is twice as renewable as PG&E’s power and 78% carbon-free without nuclear compared to PG&E’s 50% including nuclear. PG&E does not want this competition. Prop 16 would even block communities from acting to reduce greenhouse gas reductions while PG&E and others continue to fail to comply with state green power minimum laws. These days, California looks like another potential failed state, ruled by bloated monopolies and cartels. While municipal governments are prohibited by law from donating a penny to the No on Prop 16 campaign, PG&E is free to dip into bottomless wells of near-captive ratepayer revenues. Under globalization, corporations may indeed become traitors to the state. Indeed, the PG&E/Valero strategy may usher in a new era in which formerly rooted local utilities begin to act like they are operating in a foreign country. The days of bowing to state and local officials appear to be over. This is war.

California is the fifth largest economy in the world, but if PG&E’s cluster-bomb marketing campaign succeeds in persuading an angry electorate that Prop 16 is good for them, the state will have sold its constitution for $50M in corporate plebiscite advertising. The move would not only block some of the nation’s most ambitious and successful energy programs, but also disable local governments from planning economic development – a move that has led real estate and business leaders to oppose Prop 16. The Prop 16 story is a tale of revisionism – erasure even, and has evoked the word “Orwellian” to reflect the shameless deceptiveness of PG&E’s consultants’ advertisements. Prop 16 rests on a crass manipulation of the angry victims of the Wall Street downturn. The Company’s Astroturf campaign “Californians for the Right to Vote” is the ultimate poker face – a $50M trick to win back a multi-billion dollar power monopoly. Deflecting anger against abuse by large corporations that collapsed the value of Americans’ homes in the past two years and has thrown the nation into an economic depression, the nation’s Too-Big-To-Fail Trendsetter (PG&E) crafts the ultimate Orwellian twist: it is the government’s fault.

If successful, PG&E will in effect win back a monopoly it has forfeited to the state over ten years ago – in a famously prosecuted case by then Attorney General Bill Lockyer. PG&E sold its monopoly to ratepayers in return for a multibillion dollar ratepayer “stranded costs” bailout in the late nineties.  Now CEO Peter Darbee wants it back by any means necessary, and has chosen to try and buy it for $50M – the figure already donated by PG&E to its “Astroturf” campaign – calling itself “Californians for the Right to Vote.”

http://www.pacificsun.com/story.php?story_id=3959

All along PG&E has dressed itself in patriotic garb, creating and funding “Common Sense” coalitions in San Francisco (commonsensesf.com) and Marin (commonsensemarin.com), abducted from the dead cold hand of American Revolutionary Thomas Paine. Seeking to seduce angry Teabaggers into its ideological striptease tent, PG&E has had to speak with forked tongue in order to appear coherent, creating the distinct odor of a dissembler, leading Los Angeles Republicans and many traditionally conservative business groups to vocally oppose Prop 16.

http://pgandeballotinitiativefactsheet.blogspot.com/2010/05/la-county-republicans-aint-buying-it.html

In a recent defense of Prop 16, PG&E has said that Community Choice programs should be subject to the same voter approval requirements as government takeovers. “The vote for approval of a utility should require the same two-thirds super-majority that cities need to sell an existing municipal power system,” Pruett told the Los Angeles Times. "We really feel it's important to have a level playing field so everybody is treated fairly," he said. "If people in an area want to have a different provider, they ought to have the right to vote."

But the legislature and California Public Utilities Commission had already authorized $ Billions in ratepayer bailouts to PG&E based on giving Northern Californians the right to choose their power provider – and AB117, the Community Choice law, was carefully written to avoid harming PG&E and the other utilities financially, while also requiring the utilities to “cooperate fully” with Communities seeking to negotiate with other competitive power suppliers. The Marin and San Francisco programs that PG&E is trying to block are a form of choice, taking over no PG&E infrastructure. They simply offer local residents and businesses an alternative, a choice, other than PG&E. During the state’s two-year regulatory process to set up Community Choice, PG&E was asked whether it would oppose San Francisco, Marin and the other cities – and they said “No.” Today, a different story appears in millions of living rooms across California. Prop 16 would submit these communities and dozens of others to the same supermajority voter requirements as would be required a full eminent domain takeover of their poles and wires. San Francisco’s own local charter required it to win voter approval of revenue bonds to finance green power before the CCA program could issue bonds. Fifty-five percent (55%) of San Francisco voters approved the Proposition H Bond authority in November, 2001 to finance renewable energy to serve them: Prop 16 would say this majority vote is not good enough.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-prop16-20100601,0,5414997.story

The RoboCorp trend has injected a siege mentality into governments already harmed by the fiscal impact of Proposition 13, which imposed a two-thirds approval requirement on the legislature for new taxes. Prop 16 threatens the ability of state and local governments to govern. Passage and implementation of AB117 (the Community Choice law) and AB32 (the state’s landmark Carbon law targeted by Valero/Tesoro) involved massive multi-year negotiations and involved long-term planning processes to complete the statutes and regulations so that adopted policy could be implemented. Now any Corporate Psychopath with $50M can destroy such complex deliberations in six months. PG&E/Valero would simply dissolve the foundational efforts of government by corporate plebiscite – directly threatening the ability of California’s government to function at all – another disturbing sign of the Thirdworld-ization of America. Both Valero and Tesoro operate two petroleum refineries in California, each causing some of the heaviest annual carbon emissions in the state. Valero owns refineries in Benicia and Wilmington, while Tesoro runs plants in Martinez and Los Angeles. Valero’s spokesman referred the New York  Times to a public relations firm in Sacramento hired to run the kill AB32 campaign. A spokeswoman for the PR firm, Goddard Claussen confirmed that the firm was retained to handle media and gather signatures to place the Valero/Tesoro measure on the ballot.

The proposed initiative formally moved into the signature-gathering phase on March 2. The measure requires 435,000 signatures to qualify for the general election ballot. It would repeal A.B. 32 until the state's unemployment rate dips to 5.5 percent. Goddard Claussen has taken over running the campaign and gathering signatures under a group called the California Jobs Initiative. The spokeswoman at the firm, Jenny Dudikoff, said she expects the signatures to be ready by the first week of June.

Environmentalists observe that refiners based in San Antonio, Texas, which is nearly 1,500 miles from Sacramento, appear to be the only companies willing to get behind the push. "Now voters can see this initiative for what it is: oil companies trying to buy their way out of their clean-up obligations," said Bill Magavern, director of Sierra Club California told the LA Times. Steven Maviglio, who handles communications for the pro-A.B. 32 effort, said Logue has slow-walked the process when the law requires his group to form a committee with the secretary of state and report contributions. "They haven't done that, as far as we can tell. They have no record of any contributions," he said. "It appears to me they are trying to do this in a stealth, and possibly illegal, way to hide the oil company backing,” he told the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/03/03/03climatewire-texas-refiners-mum-about-funding-push-to-hal-73127.html

In fact America has a longstanding tradition of corporate dominance and subversion of democracy, from the origins in the Virginia Corporation, the Maryland and Massachusetts Corporations that formed the first US states to the postwar imposition of a new, more fundamentalist corporatism bolstered by Cold War anti-communism and globalization or imperialism that willingly sacrificed local democracy to global economic hegemony. The U.S. Government accused GM of conspiring to destroy the nation's urban rail systems in the 1940's. Ironically, in today’s globalized environment, the effect of America's corporatist business culture has been to destroy America’s once dynamic, innovative industries, engendering a co-dependent relationship between abuser (corporation) and abused (democracy). The consequences threaten not only prosperity in America but also our democracy itself. Considering that Prop 16 is happening not before but after a major energy crisis that already cost California $100B or more, and in the middle of a federal policy collapse on Carbon policy, a full-fledged revival of the nuclear industry and the failure of nonproliferation in the Middle East, the stakes on June 8 could hardly be higher when Californians go to vote on PG&E's corporate plebiscite, Proposition 16.