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Sunday, August 17, 2003 |
We watched the '60 Minutes' report tonight on the risks to commerical airliners from the plethora of shoulder-fired ground-to-air missles throughout the world. [Summary: we're cruisin' for a bruisin'; Senator Charles Schumer wants to spend $10b to outfit the US commercial airlines with counter-measures; the process, if you can call it that, is moving very slowly.
It's almost as if they want occassional catastrophes, Jane mused, as an excuse for continuing to clamp down on civil liberties..
Could be, but there are simpler reasons. All you have to do is look at the way large institutions so often fail to act in their own interests -- due to inertia, distraction, turf issues, procedural obstacles, ego and so many more reasons. We've seen many clients walk away from large and certain financial returns -- for example from eco-efficiency initiatives -- due to one sort or another of an organizational inability to make the decision. The technical issues are simple, compared to the orneriness of minds ands organization.
This is where the art of change unfolds: finding the way for the right thing to happen anyway. Fortunately, it can be done.
(And lest we forget, this is not just a problem for corporations an dgovernments; we've all seen these same difficulties in families, relationships, and our own individual beings, too.)
8:41:16 PM 
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[Rocky Mountain Institute]: Eastern Power Outage Unfortunate but Entirely Predictable; Event Offers Wake-Up Call for U.S. Energy Policymakers
Calling the massive August 14 power outages in the Northeastern United States "a wake-up call to decision makers," officials at the twenty-year-old Rocky Mountain Institute said Americans should look to distributed, diverse, and resilient clean technologies to power their industries, homes, and communities. America's existing system--based on a hundred years' worth of heavily centralized generation and distribution policies--can trigger a cascading series of errors that leaves us vulnerable and should be corrected.
In fact RMI predicted this in their Brittle Power report to the Pentagon in...1982!
8:20:24 PM
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[Greg Palast]: And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by
candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by
the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens
of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over
America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of
dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the
regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to
ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."
I can't vouche for Palast's credentials, but what I read here has the ring of truth. I was involved in lobbying the California Legislature during the deregulation debates in the mid-90s, trying to steer the inevitable approval to consider the needs of small and mid sized businesses, and to preserve what we could of California's energy efficieny and renewables programs.
But the deregulation juggernaut was not to be stopped, and had the solid support of the now bankrupt and near-bankrupt utility companies and then [Republican] governor, Pete Wilson. Gray Davis inherited Wilson's deregulation, and while he didn't handle the crisis well enough, he certainly wasn't the one who caused it. Palast suggests who did.
Worth reading. (And I be interested in hearing from anyone who can vouch for or debunk his assertions.)
7:47:01 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Gil Friend.
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