full article at:
<http://www.independent.co.uk/argument/Leading_articles/2001-01/leaderb19010
1.shtml>
Power cuts in California hold a green message
19 January 2001
It has come to something when the lights go out in California, the richest
and most populous state of the richest nation in the world. It is, at least,
a useful corrective to the idea that the American economy is a model of
free-market capitalism.
As ever, though, California leads the way for the rest of the world. It is
not so much that what happens there will inevitably occur over here in a few
years' time, like flower power, Apple Macs and tax cuts. Indeed, one of the
causes of the blackouts in San Francisco was a botched attempt to introduce
competition into a monopolistic energy market – something that we managed
rather better here.
California's power cuts hold a lesson for all of us, however, in that they
are a monument to misguided environmentalism. The mistake the state made was
to discourage investment in new power stations on environmental grounds,
while preventing energy companies putting up the price of electricity. As a
result, demand for electricity has continued to grow, driven by the state's
rising population, its rising prosperity – which increases the demand for
air-conditioning among other things – and the fact that the hardware of the
internet revolution, much of it based in Silicon Valley, is unexpectedly
power-hungry. Another "green" measure gives tax incentives to
electric-powered cars. This reduces local pollution, but, given the
wastefulness of electricity generation, transmission and battery-charging,
uses a lot of electricity and burns up more fossil fuel than the internal
combustion engine.
The state of emergency in California is a striking illustration of the
dangers of perverse incentives, and the difficulty in prosperous democracies
of using taxes to raise the price of energy. But these are issues that we –
and the rest of the world – need to tackle before we arrive at Californian
levels of prosperity and Californian levels of the use of electric gadgets.
If the power cuts force Californians to realise that using less electricity
is the best way to preserve their environment, and that using less energy
altogether is essential to mitigate global climate change, some good may
come of them. Unfortunately, it seems more likely they will opt for a
technological fix, and raise electricity prices just enough to finance the
building of more power stations.
Even in California, home of the Sierra Club, it seems that environmentalism
is only skin deep.
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