For years, Dr. Bill Wattenburg on KGO Radio AM810, has warned the west coast that the so-called energy deregulation plans are a massive fraud on the working families of California in particular and the nation in general. Scientists have predicted for the last ten years that we do not have enough power plants to supply the future needs of the growing population and economy. The press and politicians paid no attention. Almost every week he has warned the public that utility rates would double or triple within a few years. The deregulation proponents and most politicians, as usual, said that Bill Wattenburg didn’t know what he was talking about. He warned the public and press about the dangers and excessive costs of the additive MTBE that the same state bureaucrats put in the gasoline that is now poisoning the everyone.
Demand that your state legislators, the Governor, and Congress stop the utility companies (PG&E and Southern Cal Edison in California) from selling their power plants to private companies that will then turn around and charge two to ten times as much for the same energy that the public paid for long ago. This is the same as a community hospital selling itself to a private HMO that then charges three times the rates for health care. For instance, PG&E now wants to sell all of their hydroelectric power plants in the state to private companies (which are partially owned by PG&E!). These hydro plants are built on public lands, use public water, and paid for in the utility bills paid by the public over the last hundred years.
No existing power plants should be sold until enough new power plants are built to provide at least 15% additional energy generation capacity so that the public cannot be blackmailed as is happening now. The so-called environmentalists have stopped every project planned in the last twenty years. They typically filed lawsuits or complaints until they were paid off with big judgments for “attorney fees” for “protecting the public interest.” Most projects were simply abandoned. Now there will be a panic effort to build the same power plants that were proposed with good judgment ten and twenty years ago.
Many of these politicians and their staff aides are standing in line to get nice jobs and lucrative consulting contracts from the new energy companies for letting this happen. Because of term limits, most of them will be out of office in a few years. Many of them who pushed for and approved “deregulation” are already working for the utility and energy companies who are expecting billions of dollars in new profits—at the expense of working families and small businesses.
A massive public relations campaign was mounted to convince the unsuspecting public that “deregulation” would bring more competitive utility rates to working families. The press didn’t bother to investigate—or even ask the scientists who had predicted what would happen. For instance, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California has studied and reported on energy demands and energy capacity for twenty years.
For the last five years, big customers and the utility companies knew full well what was coming. The big boys knew how to safeguard themselves. The utility companies knew how to profit from the coming crisis in a big way:
Copyright © 1999 Dr. Bill Wattenburg
This page was last modified on .
Related Information |