Just Drink The Kool-Aid

Shown in his earlier political career is California Governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown with political ally Rev. Jim Jones of the People's Temple. Brown has a lot less hair now, and Jones has gone off to his particular place in hell. Brown's obsessive need to get the people of the State of California to commit suicide has survived the years.

The heavily-Democratic state legislature has just passed Brown's plan to require California to get one-third of its power from "renewable sources" by the year 2020. The current goal was one-fifth. When the legislature first proposed this measure, it was too much even for muscle-head governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who vetoed it. The one-third figure must be reached by using solar panels, windmills, landfill gases, small hydroelectric and other "renewable" resources. Well, those are neither coal nor oil, but I'm not sure how they're any more "renewable."

I'm often amazed at the sheer chutzpah of politicians like Brown. Bought and paid for by California unions and the green weenie lobby, his faux Wall Street reasoning is that the economy will be improved by giving reassurance to the renewable energy investment sector. No mention at all of how it will affect the other 99% of investors and employers. But if Spain is any indication, for every four jobs created, nine will be lost, energy production will fall precipitously, the economy will continue to slide into the abyss, and energy prices will soar.

The bill was signed on Tuesday at SunPower-Flextronics located in Milpitas (southern tip of the San Francisco Bay Area). US Energy Secretary Steven Chu was in attendance, and a spokeswoman for Chu stated: "Instead of watching from the sidelines, America needs to get back in the clean energy race, and that's exactly what California is doing." Note the use of the word "clean" instead of "renewable." More about that later. SunPower-Flextronics is one of several companies that has benefited from government subsidies and Democratic special treatment. If you know you have the government and the taxpayers' money behind you, investment is indeed secure.

Now I know you will not be surprised to find out that General Electric stock will also be going up with the help of this happy-happy act. I have two hopes in regard to GE. First, that in its rush to hire foreign workers overseas, it will have a little room to hire out-of-work Californians at home. Second, I am hoping that SunPower-Flextronics will pay some taxes, unlike GE. Politics does make for strange bedfellows, with crypto-socialist politicians joining crypto-capitalist big corporation CEOs on the Posturepedic.

The green weenie corporations get rich, pay little in taxes, put more workers out of work than they hire, and set goals that no reasoning human being can believe can ever be accomplished without skulduggery, creative accounting, and serious damage to an already-fragile economy. California's unemployment rate is officially well over 12%, much of it attributable to other green and envirowacko initiatives. Just ask the farmers in the Central Valley.

Business groups have conservatively estimated that the cost to consumers will go up no less than seven percent almost immediately. That's bad enough, but electricity rates in California are already fifty percent higher than the national average. But the bill "guarantees" that no such increases will occur because the government will control costs. That theory is not merely both obnoxious and crazy, but California has already seen what government control of real costs can do. Anybody remember the rolling blackouts and brownouts that cost Jerry Brown's close political ally, Governor Grey Davis his job?

Democrats had promised that if Davis were elected, the government would reimpose cost regulations. Republican governors had de-regulated so the Democratic-Socialists re-regulated. Consumer energy costs had been rising at almost exactly the same rate as the overall cost of living, but the Democrats made it sound as if those costs had soared beyond the working man's ability to keep up. So Davis's Public Utilities Commission strictly capped retail prices. Like all good socialists and statists, the Democrats don't understand either the market or simple accounting. Costs to the utility companies kept climbing, but they couldn't raise the consumer price because of the rigid caps. Result: California went dark in large areas on a regular basis. In San Francisco, I was given the joy of complete power failures, scheduled by the State no less, on three separate occasions before the people recalled Davis and elected Schwarzenegger.

Try explaining to a Democrat that if your costs go up, your selling price has to go up. Not subtle enough, I guess. So here we are eight years later, and Brown has found another way to mess with the market, favor an unproven industry still in its infancy, and disallow the logical use of oil, coal and natural gas while the green industries develop. As for hydroelectric power, California has abundant water and places to put hydroelectric dams. But the same people who are behind this new act have used their eco-freak shock troops to stop development of any new dams and want to shut down the existing dams.

The act includes language that requires the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to set limits for what utilities should have to pay and allows the standards to be relaxed if not enough renewable power or transmission capacity is available to meet them. So the green weenies built their own escape route into the bill. It is a near-certainty that the goal will not be met (see the results in the nations which signed on to the Kyoto Accords). And exactly how do they plan to control how much utilities will themselves pay for their power? So the imaginary cost-controls will still end up costing the consumer more money. At the same time, the tried and true sources that they hate so much will have to provide the power that green technology isn't close to being able to provide.

Now, back to "clean energy." This has become the new slogan for green weenies and other envirofreaks. Somebody forgot to get the memo to Moonbeam. As I mentioned before, the inadequate sources of power that the act addresses are not really renewable, just depletion-neutral. Coal, oil and natural gas are finite sources. So it's depletion-neutral versus finite sources. Not very sexy, so a new pejorative had to be applied. Since nobody wants "dirty" energy, how about "clean" energy instead? It's hard to say that you support dirty energy, isn't it? It's a bit like turning baby-murder and abortion-on-demand into "choice." Now who's against choice? The same people who are against clean energy.

Before you laugh too hard at the misfortunes of the vast majority of Californians, just remember that as California goes, so goes the nation. Delta smelt sandwich, anyone?