| vagabondsurf.com it's about life - not "lifestyle |
| THE POWER CRISIS IS A LIE |
| Friends and family from outside California have been bombarding us with phone calls, e-mail, and letters asking just what the hell is going on out here with this power crisis thing. Some get info from power company websites, which is interesting and informative, but hardly unbiased. What kind of website would the Third Reich have these days, one might wonder? The "legitimate" news media seems reluctant to dig too deep into the story. Even several months into it the genesis of California's energy deregulation is not terribly clear. Yet one thing is: there is no huge energy crisis at time time this story started. It really doesn't exist as presented. All the calls to "cut back our wasteful use" and to "conserve" are a crock. Two months into it and the actual statistics show Californians are the second most conservative users of energy per capita in the nation! California energy use stayed virtually the same in 2000 as in 1999, yet the price for the same amount went up 1000%! What California is suffering from is not a crisis of energy; it's a crisis of money! The energy exists and is available for those who can pay unregulated rates. The amount needing to be purchased varies due to the various capacities the different California power companies have to generate their own power. After deregulation the two main investor-owned utilities, PG&E and Southern California Edison, began divesting power plants. It is still very unclear (via the media) how much of this divesture was forced upon them by actual deregulation and how much was for the money. And the reason 25% of California's power plants were offline at Christmas 2000 hasn't been explained to any consumer satisfaction yet either. No folks, it's all about money. Outsiders are gouging California utility companies, because they can. In the case of SCE right here in California there is a corporate parent company which has enjoyed roughly 4.5 billion dollars in California profit since deregulation but is not obligated to funnel money back into SCE in a time of need. They apparently don't feel any corporate resonsibility to their customers. vagabondsurf.com realizes that there is something going on, and that circumstances can and will make electricity occasionally a finite resource. The problem we are having right now is that figuring out "the truth" behind the current situation is bewildering enough to power another seven seasons of "The X Files". I was thinking about this on a rainy winter afternoon while stumbling around in the dim, waning light coming through the rain splattered windows. Conserve...it's The Right Thing To Do. Almost a mantra... Except it seems all we are doing is conserving corporate financial assets at our own increasing expense for absentee "landlords". I reached for the light switch and turned it on. Nels Norene vagabondsurf.com |
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| Copyright (C) 2001. All rights reserved. |
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| ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 2001 |