Feel like Californians don’t pay enough in taxes and fees?
Feel like Californians don’t pay enough in taxes and fees?
Well, then, you will be glad to learn that the California Public Utilities Commission will be collecting $600 million from utility ratepayers over the next 10 years to fund a global warming think tank.
There are so many astonishing aspects to this bizarre departure from the PUC’s mission that it is hard to know where to start.
First of all, what makes the unelected commissioners, who are charged with ensuring a reliable and reasonably priced power supply, believe they have the right to impose a new fee on California ratepayers for a pet project, however worthy?
Then there is the price tag. … For that kind of dough the California Institute for Climate Solutions, as the commission has dubbed its modest enterprise, should take a shot at delivering world peace in addition to solving global warming.
And there is the matter of oversight. The PUC, a government agency, is directing utility companies to collect money from ratepayers to be handed over to a quasi-private institute with its own board of directors.
Then there is the fact that the institute would be redundant in the extreme. Climate change research in general _ and the search for clean, renewable energy in particular _ are boom industries. …
Various arms of the federal government are looking at solutions to global warming. The California Air Resources Board has a climate change program. Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Closer to home, a number of researchers at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography are at the forefront of worldwide research on the topic.
But that’s not all.
Because the PUC regulates the state’s three large investor-owned utilities, including SDG&E, but not municipal power companies such as those in Los Angeles and Sacramento, only about two-thirds of the state’s ratepayers will be on the hook for this new fee. That hardly seems equitable.
The good news, and we use the term loosely, is that the new fee will amount to only about 12 to 30 cents a month on residential bills. But don’t forget that comes on top of other PUC-mandated fees we already pay for things such as smart meters, the California Solar Initiative, the Solar Water Heating and Efficiency Act and more. (At least those fees have a more obvious connection to the commission’s constitutional charge.)
Fortunately, consumer groups are certain to file legal challenges to this folly, which was driven by commission President Michael Peavey, whose term ends in December. A court ruling that the PUC’s plan is illegal would, among other things, spare us the concern that there already is a leading candidate for the plum position of executive director of the new institute _ say, perhaps, an outgoing commission president.
This editorial first appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune on Tuesday.
