ARE YOU AS CONFUSED AS I AM OVER PROPOSITION 16?

Actually, the more I research and learn about this proposition the more it starts becoming clear ‘somebody’ is trying to ‘pull the wool over our eyes’! The barrage of TV ads would have us believe that we just ‘have to’ pass Prop.16 to protect our right to OK the plans by local governments to enter into power generating programs before they actually do so. On the surface this seems like a very reasonable and proper ‘right’ that we should protect. But, when you start drilling down into who is pushing this proposition and who is paying for all of this expensive advertising, you suddenly find there is only one entity really involved….P. G. & E. (Pacific Gas & Electric, the mammoth utility). Why would P. G. & E. be spending buckets of money unless they as an investor owned corporate utility have a lot to gain by doing so to convince us of something?

After receiving my Primary Election Voter Information Guide, I immediately went to the Prop. 16 section and read the ‘pro and con’ arguments. It seemed to me that Prop. 16 is all about P. G. & E. and little to do with you and I. What I was reading in other articles also backed up that supposition. Apparently there are already ‘fail safes’ in place to protect us from poorly contrived energy schemes that local governments might try to institute. Energy is what makes our life ‘run’. We use energy in almost everything we do during our day. When energy gets expensive or the supply is interrupted, it greatly affects our lives in a detrimental way. In my humble opinion, we need to be looking into every possible source of electrical power that is not generated by fossil fuels, not just for environmental reasons, but also for safety (i.e. coal mine disaster, Gulf of Mexico oil platform fire and oil spill, etc.). Keeping power affordable is an important reason too.

It’s getting harder and harder to extract fossil fuels from the Earth, which makes the process way more complicated, dangerous and expensive. We need to be looking at safe, clean forms of energy production. P. G. & E. should be whole-heartedly embracing this rather than just giving ‘lip service’, dragging their feet and making it more difficult for other forms of energy production to come on board. At the beginning of this year the State of California passed a law that requires the utility companies in the State to pay people for the electricity they produce that is over their usage amount. Up to this point, P. G. & E. just ‘took’ the excess – no thank you, no nothing! Yet, as is the case with my solar array system, P. G. & E. receives the electricity right when they need it the most, the middle of the day when demand on the electrical grid is the highest. The utilities should be encouraging this kind of activity, but they aren’t. I’m certainly not planning on receiving a check from P. G. & E. for all the excess power my system is producing any time soon as I understand that they doing everything possible to get the reimbursement law dismantled. So, I guess I understand Prop. 16 better than I originally thought. Which way are you going to vote on it?