NIMBYs blamed for California Energy Woes

California faces many difficult choices in energy planning, as it balances environmental concerns with its need for natural gas and petroleum. But the two are now in conflict, according to energy experts Wayne Lusvardi and Charles Warren:

As “black gold” was exchanged for the brown gold of real estate development the NIMBY problem emerged – oil fields may be necessary but “not-in-my-backyard.” The emergence of NIMBY-ism and the growth of the tourist industry formed a political base for creating coastal “marine reserves” in Monterey Bay and elsewhere. It also gave cause for filing environmental lawsuits with the “discovery” of oil sludge along beaches in scenic coastline areas. Environmentalists have been successful in attributing such natural deposits of oil as caused by industry instead of nature, exacting hundreds of millions of dollars from oil companies in mitigations for redevelopment projects at Avila Beach and Guadalupe Dunes. This NIMBY-style environmentalism has historically bought Democratic votes from the blue-colored wealthy coastline counties.

Enter the Energy Crisis. From 2000 to 2002, California experienced a series of rolling electrical system blackouts and skyrocketing electricity bills. This “electricity crisis” was blamed on faulty governmental deregulation of the electricity industry together with the “gaming” of the deregulated energy markets by Enron and other energy companies. To technical experts the crisis was caused many to what was called a “perfect storm” of unusually cold winter weather, the lack of backup hydropower availability from the Pacific Northwest due to a drought, and unusually high regional natural gas prices due to a lack of competing cheap hydropower all converging just at the same time as old polluting power plants were taken off line under energy deregulation.

This “crisis” was artificially created when in 1996 the Clinton-run Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) threatened to cut off all Federal aid to California by the year 2000 unless it met its clean air mandates. The only way to meet these standards was to mothball the polluting monopoly-owned energy plants along the coast. The problem was that the old mortgages, or bonds, on the power plants weren’t paid off yet leaving unanswered the question of who was going to pay for billions of dollars of these “stranded assets.” The crisis was resolved by a recall of the governor and folding the stranded debt into a government bond to be repaid by the taxpayers. The media mostly blamed the crisis on greedy corporations such as Enron rather than the actions of government environmental and energy agencies which left the public in the dark as to what was really going on. The so-called “energy crisis” wasn’t really about energy at all, but about cleaning the air by shutting down old polluting power plants with unpaid mortgages on them.

Enter FERC. In a backdoor maneuver to overcome the obstruction of the Democratic-controlled CPUC and State legislature, language authorizing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) absolute power over California to issue permits for off-shore LNG terminals was recently slipped into the back pages of a recent massive Congressional spending bill, which Senator Barbara Boxer voted against.

Anticipating this change of events, two foreign companies, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi and BHP Billiton LNG International, have proposed to build California’s first LNG terminals in the ocean 15-miles off of Long Beach and Oxnard to import liquefied natural gas from overseas. Nimble politicians and commercial enterprises have finally found a safe, environmentally unobtrusive, and politically acceptable way around California’s entrenched environmental interests. The environmental community is apoplectic at this “leap frog” maneuver over entrenched state environmental interests.

The mainstream newspapers around the state have portrayed this change of events as “big business” trumping “environmentalism” and “local control.” But the ugly fact is that we are fighting resource wars abroad to preserve ocean views in Malibu and tourism in Monterey Bay rather than exploiting our own natural resources.