George Rebane
Congressman Tom McClintock has delivered some eloquent and incisive critiques in opposition to the intent of California environmental fanatics’ plan to demolish dams on northern California rivers. These dams provide critical watershed control, agricultural water supply, recreation, and electrical power generation. The congressman’s article ‘Klamath Claptrap’ is required reading in order to understand the nature of the debate over this issue. But destroying functional dams as a part of California’s ongoing social(ist) engineering programs highlights the malady that has stricken our state, and is therefore worth study to appreciate our current road to ruin.
Also informative is how the left promotes such destructive policies in the larger and specific sense. Instructive in this regard are the comments of Mr Steven Frisch appended to the congressman’s article. (Mr Frisch is president of the non-profit Sierra Business Council, a northern California NGO promoting various environmental and leftwing regulatory causes.)
Discounting Mr Frisch’s regular lapses into blanket vilification and excoriation of other RR readers, his thread of argument and, more strongly, his cited references provide prima facie evidence that corroborate the internationally diagnosed and universally recognized California disease. For reference, I list and link them here.
1. ‘Implementing California’s Loading Order for Electricity Resources’, California Energy Commission, July 2005.
2. ‘Deconstructing the Rosenfeld Curve’, Sudarshan & Sweeney, Stanford University, 1 July 2008.
Reference 1 is actually a 240-page book of the most insidious gobbledygook imaginable put out by the staff of one California’s public agencies that ranks right up there with CARB (California Air Resources Board) in driving the state’s economy into the mud. The CEC would be a prime candidate for disbanding under a sane state legislature. The report lays out a roadmap for “demand side management” of electric power in California, spelling out various stratagems for increasing the cost of electricity, making its rationing more facile for the government, and increasing the regulatory burden for everything that uses electricity in the state.
Its implementation will by and of itself explain away the exodus of businesses and investment from the state. The means and methods it recommends for “distributed generation” of power is a thinly veiled approach to promoting uneconomical and infeasible green energy programs and projects by simply making the more conventional and economical sources (e.g. natural gas) more expensive through new regulatory hurdles, legislative prohibitions, expensive delays, and targeted fee hikes.
The approach to green power is as clear as ever – since green can’t compete on a utilitarian basis, regulate market-driven suppliers into submission to such an extent that the government’s green alternatives remain as the only alternative sources of very expensive energy. The breezy justifications given for such implementations are based on nothing but progressive diktats for the proper organization of society. I strongly recommend the more stalwart RR readers to plow through this tome, and challenge anyone to find in it any reasonable basis for tearing down northern California dams.
Reference 2 labors mightily to explain why California’s per capita annual electricity use has been more or less constant over the last forty years at about 7,000 KWh while the rest of the US has risen to 12,000 KWh. The authors immediately launch into a painfully dissected factor analysis, based on a growing kitbag of assumptions, at the end of which they emerge with the conclusion that about a quarter of the difference is due to California’s history of enlightened regulatory policies (given the authors' institutional home, we are surprised at such a modest fraction). The remainder being laid to “various structural factors” such as climate and concentration of industry.
The analysis quickly and necessarily becomes opaque in the limited 30-page disclosure. But what struck me from the gitgo is that they never took a first look at the more simple, robust, fewer, and obvious factors that could well explain away the entire 5,000 KWh difference. In these we could number the steady exodus of large energy consuming manufacturing businesses, the steady inflow of compactly housed and poor illegal aliens, among the highest electricity costs in the country, and the aggregate gain in energy efficient electronics for California’s large information industry sector (the latter helped by locating its huge energy-hungry server farms in states with much lower electricity costs thereby adding to their per capita consumptions).
Once more, there is nothing in Reference 2 that recommends California’s energy future should now continue with the destruction of California’s dams and water conservation reservoirs. But the report is again worth at least a perusal, since it forms the ‘rigorous basis’ for the progressives' plan forward for California. Almost no one reads these sleepers. Of the remaining, few understand their methods and intentions, and yet all of the leftwing chorus wave them at us in defense of their next encroachments into our lives and businesses. Dangerous stuff indeed.
[26sep2011 update] RR has reviewed the recent Spanish experience in its embrace of renewable green energy sources. It was an unmitigated economic disaster, counting among its effects the loss of 2.5 jobs for every job it claimed to have created. A reader forwarded me a pdf of the definitive study of this public policy debacle from which Spain has yet to recover. It is the March 2009 report – ‘Study of the effects of public aid to renewable energy sources’ – by Dr Gabriel Calzeda Alvarez et al of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. The reading of its 'Executive Summary: Lessons from the Spanish Renewable Bubble' should be enough to convince the reader why Agenda 21 proponents have quietly suppressed this experience in the United States, and why EU countries have implemented a pause in their recent rush to green. There is a lot to digest here.
rebanesruminations.com 
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