Since the fate of renewable energy itself hangs in the balance, and San Francisco is holding its collective breath in anticipation of learning my take on the question, I’ve decided to cut to the chase and issue my endorsement now.

I’m for Prop H, the San Francisco Clean Energy Act, and I hope everyone else is too.

San Francisco is but one city, in the US (at least) more often ridiculed than praised. And probably more often visited than either. We offer our example to the world and proudly accept the response, including the ridicule, which we consider the modern equivalent of being on Nixon’s enemies list.

In November we’ll have a new opportunity to make history. To set up a way of doing things that makes sense. To wrest some of the control of our lives and our environment away from predatory corporations — but I repeat myself — whose only standard is profit, most of whose executives pursue their own personal profit and consider shareholders only because not doing can cost them their jobs.

So can Prop H. That’s why opponents funded by PG&E have spent five and a half million bucks to defeat a city measure, and enlisted, co-opted, or conscripted much of the local political establishment to serve the sacred cause of private profit from public works.

They know that if everyone in San Francisco understands what this proposition is about, they’ll vote for it overwhelmingly, and PG&E execs will face a Morton’s Fork: either they operate as we want them to when they use our resources to generate our electricity, or we take over the company. We’ll no longer pay more than residents of Palo Alto for some of the worst service in the country. I’ve lived for at least a year and a half in six states in my adult life, and I’ve never seen a public utility as incompetent as PG&E.

The threat they now face is an evolution from earlier attempts that aimed directly at takeover, which were popular enough that each one garnered more votes than its predecessors. But they also attracted increasing amounts of resistance from corporate interests as the implications of public ownership percolated through the corporate mindset.

Prop H takes a more subtle tack by ordering the company to do what we want done. PG&E consistently paints itself as friendly and helpful, and as least as interested in the environment as, say, Chevron; but its own compliance reports, tendered to the state in March, indicate that the amount of energy coming from renewable sources has actually decreased by one percent over the past three years. If they’d directed all that advertising money into renewable energy research, they might have come up with something, or been revealed as grossly incompetent. Clearly the marketing strategy worked.

These people are borderline criminals. Of course they use our water, which we stole fair and square in the 1913 Raker Act, to generate power; they overcharge for it; and they fail basic reliability tests. Still, that’s normal for American corporations. Culpability arises from reckless and unnecessary destruction of non-renewable resources when they could be moving to better ones. But if you’re already on top, all change is bad.

San Francisco has a head start on proving that clean energy can produce a high quality of life. Consider the amazingly effective program that turned Samsø around. In the nineteen-nineties this Danish island of farmers imported its oil by tanker and its electricity by cable from the mainland. In about ten years its culture was changed until, as one local put it, saving energy became a kind of sport. Everyone was involved, looking for ways to save energy, and to invest in producing clean energy. The island now gets its electricity from wind turbines, turns biomass that would be burned anyway into heat for buildings, and over the course of a year produces more energy than it uses.

Or consider the experiment undertaken by the Makah tribe in coöperation with Finavera Renewables, a company based in British Columbia. The idea is to place power generators a few miles off shore in Makah-owned waters, and let the ocean operate the piston-driven turbines. Here’s a brief video about the plan.

We can join the parade away from the world of multinational corporations and toward the sustainable people-oriented world of the future. We can help lead it.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at October 26, 2008 12:11 PM

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