Groups Look for Silver Lining in Energy Crisis
While legislators and lobbyists groan that the energy crisis is monopolizing the spotlight this year, some enterprising folks have seized on events to advance their agendas.
Exhibit A is an effort by auto makers to dodge a state mandate requiring them to offer thousands of electric cars, beginning with the model year 2003.
Manufacturers call the cars impractical and unmarketable, and have resisted the mandate for a decade. So when the state Air Resources Board began considering a proposal to weaken its demand for smog-free cars recently, auto makers sensed an opening.
Reminding the board of California’s energy crunch, industry representatives said recharging thousands of electric cars would only exacerbate the problem.
But the California Energy Commission disputed that notion, saying the cars would have a trivial effect on power supplies. The cars are typically recharged at night, when demand for power is low, the commission notes. And most of them won’t be on the road until after 2003, when several new power plants should be on line.
S. David Freeman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, accused the auto makers of “playing off public uncertainties and blackout threats.”
As it turned out, the air board reaffirmed its mandate by a unanimous vote.
“It is really time to get on with the business of progress,” board member William Friedman told a General Motors official before the vote. “And progress will be made when we stick it to you to make you do what you need to do.”
Another group looking for an angle in the energy crisis is the California Manufacturers & Technology Assn., which has asked Gov. Gray Davis to reconsider the state’s overtime rule.
The rule requires many employers to pay higher wages for workdays exceeding eight hours. But, citing the energy crisis, the manufacturers want Davis to reconsider it.
“We hope that some flexibility . . . will be addressed as a means to offset aggressive conservation programs,” said Gino DiCaro, the group’s spokesman. “If we have companies that . . . shut down for half the day, they may want to make up production later.”
A coalition of labor, consumer and environmental groups have fired back, opposing any efforts by “corporate interests to capitalize on the crisis mentality to weaken labor and environmental protections.”
No word from the Davis administration so far.
In the San Joaquin Valley, the giant Westlands Water District cites power woes in its lawsuit to block former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s decision to bolster flows to Northern California’s Trinity River.
The suit cites diminished supplies for power users and farmers as reasons the decision should be blocked. Sacramento Municipal Utility District officials contend the amount of water at stake generates enough energy to supply 31,000 Sacramento-area homes when it flows through hydroelectric plants in the Sacramento River Basin.
Westlands’ actions have angered Trinity County officials and Indian tribes that fish for salmon.
“It’s hypocritical for Westlands and others to claim harm to California’s power resources from increased Trinity River fishery flows when the state and federal water project pumps into the Delta enough power to keep a city the size of San Francisco lit up,” said Tom Stokely, Trinity County’s senior planner.
Bush administration officials say they are prepared to defend Babbitt’s decision. A hearing on Westland’s lawsuit is scheduled Monday.
“It is appropriate that the Department of Interior maintain the position it had and allow the court to now make its decision,” said Sue Ellen Wooldridge, deputy chief of staff for Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton.
