Energy Crisis Puts UCI Expert on Circuit

UC Irvine economics professor Peter Navarro was in the makeup room at KOCE-TV on Friday, preparing for his close-up. He and fellow academics specializing in energy regulation seldom find themselves being powdered up for the spotlight.

But Navarro, 51, has emerged as one of the clearest expert voices speaking not only to politicians but straight to the consumer during the power crisis that has gripped the state. It’s a far cry from his last turn in the public eye, in the 1990s, as a four-time candidate for office in San Diego who rattled the establishment.

Why?

Well, after a generation of research and writing on the rather arid topic of utility regulation, Navarro can conversationally convey the complexities of California’s power crisis in sound bites, which he does on programs such as Public Radio International’s highly regarded “Marketplace” and KOCE-TV’s “Real Orange.”

His experience in the limelight is something akin to the actor becoming an instant film star after a long career in legitimate theater.

“I feel I have spent 20 years of my life reading, researching and writing on the topic,” Navarro said Friday, in between interviews. Referring to the country’s last major energy crisis, the 1970s oil embargo, he added, “You write about something in 1978, and then it doesn’t show up again until 2001. I like to joke that every 10 or 20 years, my skills are needed.”

Blond, brash and charismatic, scholarly, a slow-growth and free-market advocate, the Ivy League-educated Navarro eludes easy typecasting.

“Peter falls into the category of Renaissance man,” said Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers Action Network, a San Diego activist organization with 21,000 members that has often sided against Navarro. “He is clearly an intellectual, but also a good communicator. And he’s been active politically in San Diego. He’s got a lot of skills; he’s definitely not a one-trick pony.”

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This is the man who burst on the San Diego political scene and came close to beating Mayor Susan Golding as a relative political novice. He was a slow-growth Democrat in decidedly Republican territory. And during a fateful televised debate shortly before the 1992 mayoral election, a bad makeup job and his tear-provoking attack on an opponent--even if accurate--doomed his chances, political observers said.

“San Diego can be divided into the establishment and everyone else,” said Michael Aguirre, a former federal prosecutor turned private attorney who grew up in the city.

“There’s sort of an irony there. Peter has an establishment education, having gone to Harvard. But in San Diego it’s better that you are someone who will sing the song of the establishment than to be bright enough to lead it. He has his quirks, but he also has his positive side. And on a statewide level he might be more understood.”

Because he ran for several offices unsuccessfully, from mayor to supervisorial and congressional seats, Navarro was viewed as overplaying his hand or coming on too strong, too fast. After bowing out of elective politics, he wrote a revenge book titled “San Diego Confidential,” which exposed the players behind and in front of the local political stage. It was serialized in the city’s anti-establishment weekly newspaper, the Reader, and each chapter was eagerly awaited.

His other books were decidedly hard-core economic works that reflected his academic expertise.

Born in Cambridge, Mass., Navarro spent his early school years in Florida, then graduated from high school in Washington, D.C. His contact with the media began early: One of his first jobs was as a Washington Post paperboy.

He was a scholarship student at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., graduating with a bachelor’s in English. He spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, teaching English, showing how to build large ponds where fish could be raised and harvested--aquaculture--and helping with hospital equipment.

In 1976, he returned to the nation’s capital, where he worked for the Department of Energy, which is when his work on utilities began.

“The imperative at the time was to reduce our oil consumption because of the oil embargo,” he recalled. “I was in the policy shop at [the Energy Department]. My assignment was to help figure out why utilities were not building new power plants.”

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In 1979, he earned a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Papers published in prestigious journals such as the Harvard Business Review and the Yale Journal of Regulation followed.

In 1984, he wrote the first of his books, “The Dimming of America: The Real Costs of Electric Utility Regulatory Failure,” which he said “described the reason utility executives around the country stopped building power plants: failure of the regulatory process. I used to say then, ‘How do you make a small fortune investing in public utilities stocks? You start with a large fortune.’ ” That same year, he wrote “The Policy Game,” which examines how special interests and ideological motives shape public policy. Two years later, he finished his PhD in economics at Harvard.

He has continued writing for respected academic journals on subjects such as the relationship between utility regulation and international trade. He has taught at UC Irvine since 1989.

While Navarro has weighed in with opinion pieces in The Times ranging from energy to land use, his profile has increased considerably since the state’s energy mess hit the headlines last year.

His populist-toned commentary this week in The Times, which was read on public radio, offered a theory that the energy market has been manipulated by utilities and power suppliers that he referred to as “the Texas cartel.” It apparently struck a nerve.

“I’ve been swamped with e-mails about it,” he said Friday. “Here we have a situation where the utilities and the independent generators have precipitated these prices. I don’t think there’s a question. The only question is, did they intentionally do it.”