Electric Rate Hikes Unfair to Consumers

Re “Rate Hikes Up to 60% Proposed by PUC Chief,” May 10: I fail to see how rate increases for consumers are justified. Consumers are being punished for a deregulated energy system they did not want. Meanwhile, power generators and suppliers reap enormous profits in a continuing effort to gouge consumers. What is being done about this obvious extortion of California and its residents?

If the administration and the PUC had any teeth, there would have been a refusal to capitulate, fervent demands for wholesale caps and a full investigation months ago. Instead, the PUC and Gov. Gray Davis are bowing to corporate interests like serfs to a king. They should be demanding retribution from generators and suppliers, not a bailout from consumers who not only have no control over the situation but do not want it either.

Shawn Dwyer

Santa Monica

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Logic is in even shorter supply than the elusive kilowatt. We are in a sinking boat and the experts and advocates seem more concerned with forcing someone else to bail water rather than working together to fix the leak.

We are all, in some part, to blame: consumers, businesses, politicians, suppliers. All of us must share the pain of rate increases, rich and poor alike. The 20 or so schemes being considered by the PUC seem at their very core unfair, if not totally unworkable. Equal, across-the-board rate increases are the only fair and equitable way to proceed. It is not fair for any group or individual to pay more, or less, for a kilowatt of electricity at any given hour than any other.

Roger Medanich

Studio City

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An interesting fact about the energy problem is that the residential user will pay twice for his/her increased bills. First at home and second in the marketplace, when all the producers will pass on their increases. Residential users do not have that option.

Elsa Shafer

Arcadia

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Amazing Gov. Davis: In all the time he has been governor he hasn’t solved the California energy crisis, education or environmental problems, so with a true Democratic Party mentality, he blames President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the right-wing conspiracy and everybody and anybody but himself. Governor, if it’s too hot in the kitchen you need to get out.

Don Schendel

Mission Hills

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Our country doesn’t have an energy production problem, it has an energy productivity problem. But rather than seek ways of creating more bang for our energy buck--which is what conservation, alternative sources, improved efficiency and other technological innovation accomplish--the policies proposed by Bush and Cheney will ensure the same bang for more bucks now and for years to come. Why tout strategies that one can be certain Bush, an MBA, and Cheney, a former CEO, would never countenance if the question were worker productivity? Follow the bucks.

Daryl G. Nickens

Los Angeles

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Re “Nonprofit Shrugs at Pleas to Conserve,” May 11: Yaron Brook laughingly decries energy conservation as “un-American” and “immoral” and feels no need to conserve energy whatsoever (unless, of course, he is paying the bill).

But I wonder if this same, ridiculous logic would apply in a situation where the commodity was food or water rather than electricity. And isn’t it a bit ironic that one who purports to embrace a doctrine of capitalistic individualism would shun some of the basic, underlying economic principles of such beliefs? All under the guise of a nonprofit organization, no less.

Craig Morrow

Costa Mesa

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Noting the current gasoline crisis and our continuing misguided refusal to address the need for better public transit makes me wonder if we will soon face the loathsome prospect of European gas prices combined with a Southern California-style transit system.

Jim van Scoyoc

Los Angeles