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?

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.

Stop the PG&E Power Grab - PAC Formed

Local Power has joined The Utility Reform Network (TURN) and Capitol Consulting to form a Political Action Committee in opposition to PG&E's desperate move to halt the Community Choice movement in California - the so-called "taxpayers right to vote act." As dozens of communities in PG&E's service territory mobilize to win energy independence and implement Climate Action Plans, PG&E's claims that it will spend $50-$100M on its campaign to impose monopoly on Northern California portends a major political fight. We say bring it on - there is no better publicity than negative ads paid by an unpopular power monopoly - the great shot in the foot heard round the world. Visit our new organization, Stop the PG&E Power Grab to learn more.