PG&E's Bankruptcy and CCA

The bankruptcy of utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric should be understood in the context of decades of

More Zilla, less God

 regulatory bailouts and giveaways suffered by California ratepayers, which taken together already exceed the book value of the utility. Todays "emergency" is more of the same routine. Moreover, its cause, and its solution, should be viewed in context not of climate change (as Washington Post recently did), but of electricity industry restructuring, starting in the late 1990s.

The bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric was not caused by climate change. While this notion is catchy and trending, California has been in a drought for half a century: PG&E's power transmission and gas transportation systems have been causing explosions and fires in more recent years, because its corporate leadership has neglected what should be the core of its business (wires), failing to conduct standard simple activity of trimming trees around power lines, and maintaining their pipes. Why? Because it was distracted by an irresistible opportunity to take advantage of political conditions to capture regulators, and build a new and illegal retail electricity monopoly: a strategy that backfired with bankruptcy after successfully subverting competition in 2001, and today backfires with another bankruptcy after having failed to subvert Community Choice Aggregation (CCA).

PG&E's fox needs removing the CPUC's energy henhouse. Hopefully, California's new Governor will take the lesson from Gray Davis, who was recalled for mismanaging the state's energy crisis by giving in to, and simply bailing out, the utilities in 2003, and make a point of finding opportunity in this crisis. The opportunity would be to get rid of the cause of this bankruptcy and the 2001 bankruptcy, for which the California Public Utilities Commission approved a $9B ratepayer bailout at that time. 

The cause of PG&E's distraction was politicization of its corporate leadership, based on an opportunity to subvert the legislature and corrupt state regulators. Since California's bipartisan legislature deregulated its electricity industry in 1997 and opened the state to competition in 1998, PG&E's brass, having won an equally large bailout of "uncompetitive assets" for endorsing the end of its power monopoly, nevertheless became obsessed with blocking competition, first by new suppliers entering the market, which they successfully blocked, causing a diaspora of would-be suppliers out of competing for customers. Having driven the Enrons and Reliants of the world into selling their power into  spot markets servicing utility "default service" customers, i.e. customers still "owned" by PG&E, PG&E has had a consistent strategy of rebuilding an economic, if not legal, monopoly over retail service. 

Customer ownership has been the strategic football of deregulation from the start. Subverting retail competition also resulted in the manipulation of spot markets, causing the energy crisis and the bankruptcy. At the time, one Nation writer called in an "Energy War." And, once the legislature found a new path out of the energy crisis by creating Community Choice Aggregation (Assembly Bill 117) in 2002, PG&E regarded municipalities, again, as mere competitors to body-block.  Building up to 2010, PG&E spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying, lawsuits and astroturf campaigns to block early CCAs, starting in the Central Valley where it successfully killed the first CCA, and attempting to block Bay Area CCA startups, building up to Proposition 16 in 2010, which failed despite $46M in PG&E campaign spending.

Moreover, the attorneys and board of PG&E learned they could use the state regulators of a permanently weakened CPUC to subvert competition for electric supply, and made the CPUC its handmaiden. PG&E won approvals to resume monopoly-like activities as if CCA didn't exist, such as building new power plants that it would own, self-dealing and gas-for-power swaps with merchant generators, long-term power contract procurement undertaken with rubber stamp approval of contracts that are not even reviewed by commissioners, and multi-billion dollar regulatory reallocations of generation costs to transmission charges in the 2010 General Rate Case. In many of these decisions, CPUC regulators admitted that they were acting in violation of longstanding CPUC policy, and promised not to allow it again. This is widely known as bad parenting. The CPUC was training its corporate dog, Pavlovian style, that it could win by failing. Every high-cost contract would erect a new barrier to CCA. 

Today, PG&E plays victim, claiming that its renewable energy contracts have lowered the cost of renewables for CCAs, who have an unfair advantage now that renewables prices are lower. This is Mickey Mouse economics: PG&E didn't lower the price of renewables; China did. Moreover, CPUC regulators acknowledged that PG&E's contracts were extremely high at the time it approved them, and repeated this acknowledgement when it approved massive increases on the PCIA charge to CCA customers to pay the resulting premium. PG&E is no victim. It is a repeat offender. 

The pattern is clear, from 2004-5 during the CCA proceeding, which focused on the conflicts of interest of PG&E and the utilities in "cooperating" with CCA as required by the CCA law, while also having to maximize returns to Wall Street investors. All in all, CPUC dropped the ball. All of these monopolistic activities increased PG&E's desire to control retail energy, and made it neglect its core business of maintaining the wires and pipelines. Northern California has paid the price. 

It is indeed Groundhog day, 18 years later, and nothing has changed. So if Gavin Newsom is smart and wants to be re-elected, he will make it a point to avoid repeating Gray Davis' mistakes, by using this opportunity get PG&E out of the power business entirely, and to refocus it on its core mission: the grid. Moreover, he will move to strengthen the role of CCAs as the dominant retail power providers that they already are in California. Bailout or no bailout, this should be the "win" for California. Otherwise bailing out PG&E yet again will be merely another repeat-rinse, and California is likely to have another Republican governor in a few years.

For CCAs, CCA activists, and CCA suppliers, however, the question is, what will happen to the economics of CCA if yet another ratepayer bailout is approved by the CPUC? CCA has already been hit hard by CPUC approvals of extremely high cost PG&E power contracts (admitting at the time that they were too high, but approving them anyway), then increasing surcharges on CCAs to pay for them: the dreaded PCIA charge. We just got done paying for the last bankruptcy. All of these shrink the power portion of the bill and thus depress the competitiveness of retail supply.    

One question is how they are bailed out. This will have different impacts, obviously, but either way the overall trend is the same: competition shifting from energy rates to net utility bills: from energy to capacity. The worst case question is, assuming they are bailed out at customer expense, what is the net impact on markets and CCA. Or Assuming they are rescued, is there a different future?

Questions about impacts of the bankruptcy tend to focus on the bailout outcome, but in some ways the competitive landscape outcome is the same either way, based on the fact that bailouts have formed so much of the PG&E bill for the past two decades. One key question is will PG&E's insanely expensive power purchase agreements with renewable generators be invalidated by the bankruptcy, decreasing the extant and oppressive PCIA charge that Jerry Brown's CPUC imposed on CCAs? This is a big one, and would be appropriate, because it is the only upside we see other than getting PG&E out of the power business. However, it is not controlled by state regulators. This is a question of FERC jurisdiction vs. the bankruptcy court: and FERC recently said it can protect the holders of PG&E's high cost contracts: so don't count on it. 

All in all, the question is, if there is a bailout and a new bailout surcharge, will CCAs fold, or will they adapt? On that question, rest assured: CCAs are proven resilient public agencies, so they will adapt. There are over 1500 CCAs out there across the nation with a 20 year history, with few terminations in constantly fluctuating market conditions. CCAs in California have an unusually high level of control and resources that they have only begun to use. 

In some ways, the question is not whether CCAs will go away, but how this second crisis will influence CCA procurement activities and how it will impact California's energy markets. PG&E will either collect bailout costs from customers for the next decade or longer, or will not. Either way there will be strong pressure to get them out of the generation business entirely, and PG&E itself has made statements about some sort of "restructuring." Based on the last bankruptcy, a large surcharge will be added to already oppressive PCIA charge increases of recent years. But considering the likelihood of PG&E's days as a energy generating and procuring company will mean a drop in natural gas sales and a shift of wholesale energy markets to CCAs. Moreover, CCAs should use this opportunity to win more support from the state in their new role, such as backstopping Solar Bonds to invest in California renewables and energy efficiency.

When considering impacts of another bailout, it is important to remember that surcharges are volumetric charges on delivered grid power. Therefore, there are nonlinear benefits from PG&E's ever increasing "surchargization" of the power bill (in which paying a bill will be primarily to pay for surcharges, not energy). The more of the bill is a volumetric surcharge and not cost of energy, the better will look the economics of distributed energy resources that reduce the customer's use of grid power.  Increasing T&D charges will encourage CCAs to undertake a stronger adoption of a customer-ownership-of-energy model, promising an increasing turn to Community Solar, Cooperatives, Community Microgrids, and financed efficiency projects. A "CCA 2.0" focus on consumer electronics such as home area networks and IP thermostats, targeted V2B electric vehicle sharing, and generally the integration of residential and small and medium sized business customer investment in storage, onsite PV, boiler heat capture and other kilowatt-scale distributed power with onsite IP and system level networks, will prove more cost effective, being exempt (as non-consumed grid power) from volumetric surcharges, than surcharge-encumbered conventional supply with Renewable Energy Certificates, which otherwise (stupidly) remains the dominant CCA model.  

How will the utilities focus their strategy? 

PG&E is a very poorly trained dog that is fond of dragging its bottom on the Persian carpet. They have learned that they can win through over-procurement and above-cost procurement, ratepayer bailouts, and surcharge increases on departing customers. They appear to be considering an exit from the power business, speaking of "restructuring." The state and CCAs should support this move. Either way, they will seek to increase transmission and distribution charges. PG&E will continue to consolidate its position as a wires company, and a big part of this will be to get the CPUC to authorize a huge new investment and thus rate increases. One way or another it will seek increases, whether to repay a bailout or to make new customer rate-basing of  their transmission infrastructure, or both. 

How the CCAs will focus

--Turn away from increasingly expensive business model of conventional power with Renewable Energy Certificates, and toward resources that reduce consumption

--Move from in the current approach of in-state RECs and long-term PPAS with regional renewable developers to customer-owned, behind-meter, integrated Distributed Energy Resources

--Take an increasingly flexible approach to grid power procurement, shifting program emphasis towards a long-term focus on integrated DER and onsite integrated renewables development: Solar plus storage, EVs, in-city PV, and other technologies
--Deliver demand response and dispatch, load reform and peak shaving, avoided capacity charges, and lower non-supply savings to the cost of power.  

--Move into non-rate customer savings through focus on load management, and marginalization of procurement as the competitive part of the business model.

Market advice

From an investment point of view, PG&E's bankruptcy underscores the need for CCAs to get operational control over their power. Unconsumed energy cannot be surcharged. Whether a bailout follows or not, this is yet another hint for Community-scaled integrated DER to CCAs in California. Smart investors and CCA suppliers should focus on iDERs integration rather than traditional renewable PPAs, specifically automation, microgrids and flexible storage integrated with onsite renewable power generation and conservation technologies. Expansion of CCA service to heating systems and dynamic EV chargers are also highly recommended. Moreover, more innovative CCA service entities are needed that are responsible for both power and development of iDERs.

PG&E's New Strategy to Stop CCA - Goldfinger Comes to Cali

Call it PG&E's "Goldfinger" strategy. Last week, Pacific Gas & Electric's manager of local government partnerships was sworn in as chairwoman of San Francisco's Democratic Party Central Committee (SFDCCC). Her name is Mary Jung. Read that again.

Indeed, PG&E's person in charge of dealing with the City of San Francisco on its energy partnership is now officially in charge of the SFDCCC. Thus, understand that as San Francisco approaches its final action to bypass PG&E under the City's longstanding Community Choice energy program known as CleanPowerSF, Ms. Jung is now in charge of the single committee that endorses San Francisco Democrats' local and state candidates for political office, and allocates SF Democratic Party campaign funds to those candidates.

The Community Choice (CCA) movement in Northern California appears to have caused energy giant PG&E to form an unprecedented new kind of political machine. Failing in its 2010 campaign for a corporate plebiscite to pre-empt the legislature's CCA law allowing California communities (half in PG&E service territory) to choose their energy supplies, the energy corporation is now systematically infiltrating key local and state political positions - positions that give it a disturbing new level of control in state and city politics. Caught ordering highest level staff to spy on energy activists, PG&E has recently asked a California Public Utilities Commission Administrative Law Judge for a protective order attempting to seal details of how the top management of PG&E infiltrated and spied on activists in the months following its failed 2010 proposition to block Community Choice in California.

Mary Jung's appointment signals more than just a new, more virulent PG&E machine, but also appears to outline a more insidious corporate strategy. The story of Jung's election reeks of political manipulation. Replacing the progressive former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, a leader for city progressives, who had retired from the post and did not seek re-election, a mysterious thing happened at the DCCC election meeting last week - a classic kind "accident by design": while many members of DCCC claim to be progressive Democrats, somehow nobody ran against Ms. Jung. An expected progressive challenger to the PG&E government partnership manager's campaign to chair the central committee somehow failed to formally announce candidacy at this meeting - and so, as if by mistake or some hard to imagine consensus, PG&E's government relations person has been unanimously voted chairwoman of San Francisco's Democratic Party Central Committee.

The San Francisco Examiner spinned the story of a takeover of the notoriously progressive committee by a "Moderate," and said nothing about the spectacle of badboy energy corporation PG&E's coup over San Francisco politics. The election of Mary Jung as SF Democratic Party chair would be merely disturbing were it not for the fact that California Jerry Brown's number two and shadow, Nancy McFadden, was hired away from PG&E as Senior Vice President of PG&E, and a woman personally in charge of blocking a major movement by its customers to win energy independence from PG&E under Community Choice Aggregation. Today both Sacramento and San Francisco appear to be under this corporation's political control.

The move signals what the new PG&E CEO calls "finding our way" again after the energy corporation's failed $60M 2010 campaign to block the Bay Area Community Choice movement's efforts (Proposition 16). Community Choice (CCA) is now active in cities and counties throughout PG&E's service territory - to depart from PG&E power to competitive suppliers, and to localize communities' power supplies through renewable energy and customer-owned efficiency measures. Assembly Member Jerry Hill wrote recently in the San Jose Mercury News that Californians should not be fooled by incoming CEO Anthony Earley's brand-new $10 M public relations campaign to make Californians think well again of PG&E, whose political attacks on CCA led to the early retirement of former CEO Peter Darbee after voters rejected Prop 16 by 300,000 votes.  PG&E had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against and litigating against Community Choice Aggregations in San Francisco and Marin, not to mention Sonoma County and San Joaquin County, since the CCA law was adopted in 2002. Prop 16 masterminds Darbee and McFadden decided to roll the campaign donation dice and spent $60M to fool California voters into blocking CCAs with a two-thirds supermajority requirement before municipalities could implement - all across the state. It would have turned a decade-long state process to make CCA possible, and impose a Prop-13 style handcuffs on municipal energy in the state. After losing PG&E's record spending initiative against a hardly funded grassroots campaign of CCA activists at powergrab.info, CEO Peter Darbee wrote a concession letter to the public comparing himself to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, claimed to be working on high principles, and said PG&E would "respect the wishes of  voters." Is this what the new PG&E CEO meant in his new PR campaign claiming PG&E hat "lost its way"?

Because PG&E's "local government partnerships" provide its bastion against CCA programs (PG&E has made partnership funding dependent on not implementing CCA), Mary Jung's role in fighting CCA cannot be overstated, and her election to this post is deeply disturbing. As many other California counties (ironically awakened to CCA by Prop 16) are now moving to implement energy localizations (such as the counties of Alameda, Humboldt, Yolo, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Cruz), PG&E's strategy has in fact shifted to poisoning the regulatory environment for retail competition through state-sanctioned cost-shifting between generation costs and distribution costs to make CCA customers pay for generation costs even if they find new power suppliers.

That is not all. PG&E quietly won major reversals of state policy in the first months of the Brown administration. The company has persuaded Jerry Brown's CPUC Commissioners to undermine longstanding basic principles against cost shifting between customers, and California's only great achievement in conservation policy in the past quarter century - "smashing" the state's landmark conservation incentive system of block tier pricing early last year in the PG&E General Rate Case.  After orchestrating the 1996 deregulation bailout, 2000 energy crisis and subsequent bankruptcy bailout, bullying the CCA movement like a monolythic industrial nightmare, and leading the global nuclear industry revival, this energy corporation has infiltrated the highest levels of political power in Sacramento and San Francisco, even beyond the wildest dreams of Willie Brown. Meanwhile, the CCA Crimes Act, AB976, introduced by a PG&E affinity union, just passed the Senate Appropriations Committee, would create a special new crime in state law that only applies to CCA consultants (like Local Power Inc., my company, which created CCA), who work for a CCA in preparation for implementation of a local energy service, would be classified as criminal if it helped the same government implement that CCA program.

In short, PG&E's "new way" is to take it underground - not to play politics publicly, but secretively, as if to imitate not Tony Blair, but James Bond, or Goldfinger. Given PG&E's claims to have taken a new turn and reformed itself, following the assault it has already conducted against local and state government in recent years to block Community Choice, clearly there is a strong case here for illegal anti-competitive behavior under federal anti-trust laws, as well as evidence of the need to prevent this kind of political corruption from continuing to threaten the sovereignty of California's state and municipal democratic institutions.

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.  

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.

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.