Out of Curiosity How did this Administration Fix the Energy Crisis in CA

[Toots]

In 2000 California was experiencing Blackouts and rationing. What specifically did this Administration do to solve the "Crisis" as it has not resurfaced since then? The action was immediate and had an immediate effect but what were those actions? I know Jeffords switched parties but what did the Administration do?

[seabeyond]

1. they had an coup and put in arnie n/t

[kaygore]

7. Arnie did nothing to end the crisis

Arnie is an incompetenet governor as he is an incompetent actor. He is a good body (not brain) builder. He is also a true lying Republican. See how he has turned on the least able in California. What a loser!

[seabeyond]

13. are you kidding, they didnt have to rape calif

anymore. they had what they wanted with arnie there. there was a big ass law suit going thru that companies would have to pay on. have you heard anything about that of late. no need for the energy to do

[kaygore]

22. Good point

At least I not only didn't vote for Arnie, I actively worked against him. What has been interesting is how Arnie's election revived the Democratic Party in California, at least in San Diego where it seemed to have died.

I guess that is the silver lining.

[seabeyond]

24. yes it did, reminded dems who they were, but.....

i am afraid, and we will see, that arnie has thing set up to turn calif red in 2006 and beyond. i just so strongly feel it. i hope not. i hope the dems kick the ever lovin shit out of them ole boys. especially pig arnie. snort

[kaygore]

26. Arnie is the Republicans own worst enemy

My friends who actually voted for him (even the Republicans) hate him. He is such a liar. He has not come up with any positive solutions and is all for the big guys. What a loser. He has made even my Republican friends into Democrats! So it has been a gain. Now when they try to rig the voting tomorrow in Sacramento, the whole thing will blow up in their faces. Remeber hubris. It is about to claim them.

[Enraged_Ape]

2. Enron crashed

The boys in the Monkey House had absolutely nothing to do with it. If Kenny Boy Lay and his gang could have kept their massive ripoff going indefinitely, there would still be blackouts in California.

[ComerPerro]

25. Exactly

Not only do Bush's friends get to steal millions of dollars from Californians AND their shareholders without real consequence, but Bush and Arnold get to take credit for "fixing" the problem.

[kaygore]

3. Arnold did nothing

Grey Davis fixed it. Also, all the Enron memos about freezing grandmothers in California came to light and showed conclusively that the crisis had been manipulated, primarily by Enron.

Californians use less energy per capita than any other state than Rhode Island and they are on par with Europeans in the use of energy.

Much of Southern California has no central heat or air conditioning, rather we heat the room we are using and we use fans and open windows to cool off our houses and apartments.

Grey Davis took the fall for the energy crisis but he shouldn't have.

I hope that Californians have learned a lesson with Arnold: Republicans are liars. I am listening to them lie on CSPAN right now. They can not be trusted and the moderate Republican is going the way of the Dodo bird.

[Coastie for Truth]

4. Nothing

We were blackmailed, then we sued, then raised rates, and then prosecuted the out of state energy traitors/traders.. Then Ashcroft joined in on the side of the out of state energy traitors/traders.

Then Arnold said Davis didn't do enough. But the boobengrabber did less then Davis.

Came down to raising rates and paying blackmail to the of the out of state energy traitors/traders. (I am an energy engineer)

California politics is Marxist - GROUCHO, HARPO, AND CHICO - BUT NOT KARLO

[hunter]

21. This is the "boobengrabbers" job: to cover up the stink.

There are many people running around free who should be doing hard time in Federal prison for what went on here in California. On a firm Martha Stewart scale of justice many of the rat bastards who orchestrated this "energy crisis" should have been dragged out of their fancy homes and offices to be put before firing squads on prime time national television.

But Republican megacrooks are above the law.

[mike_c]

5. interestingly, very little-- if anything-- has actually changed...

...out here in CA, but the "crisis" magically disappeared. There was effective conservation, and there are likewise some real problems with the distribution system in California, but the real answer seems to be that the "crisis" was manipulated from the start.

[havocmom]

6. Nothing. The 'crisis" was manufactured by ENRON and the rest

so they could substitute expensive power from the spot market for the less expensive power utilities in the state had contracts for.

It was a robbery. There may have been deaths from the heat during times the power was off. People should be in prison, lots of them, for a very long time.

What did the malAdministration do? Nada. They stepped back and let the robbery go on as planned.

[EC]

8. Nothing, Enron went broke so were no longer

controling the electricity, and when left alone, no shortages....

[HR_Pufnstuf]

9. My theory on this.

The dotcommers stocks were too high for the old economy companies to be comfortable with, so they decided to price gouge silicon valley. Roaming grayouts and high electricity costs are a server's enemy. It worked, and it started the dotcom crash.

[Coastie for Truth]

14. That might tie in with failure to fund BART to Silicon Valley, too - NT

[da_chimperor]

10. Nothing at all. They didn't lift a fucking finger.

I really didn't like chimpy before the 2000 elections, but that's when I started hating him.

[Coastie for Truth]

11. Prosecuting--

Check out this post at DU Underground which contains a link to in today's San Diego Union Tribune.

Routing power to out-of-state entities and then selling it back to California allowed PowerEx, a wholly owned subsidiary of BC Hydro of Vancouver, B.C., to set prices far above a price cap on more than 800,000 megawatt hours and drove up the cost of power, Lockyer said.

Such transactions were also called "ricochet" trades and were one of several strategies described in the infamous Enron memos.

"Our evidence shows that PowerEx was the most prolific practitioner of ricochet," Lockyer said. "This lawsuit seeks to hold them accountable for their rampant antitrust violations and recognizes a fundamental reality – they couldn't have done it without co-conspirators."

BC Hydro spokeswoman Elisha Moreno said the lawsuit was "just another move in California's desperate attempt to blame everyone else for their poor electricity planning and market design."

"We actually helped California keep the lights on during the energy crisis," she said.
<snip><<

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has found California is owed about $3 billion, but the state claims that number should be closer to $9 billion.

Lockyer previously sued PowerEx for allegedly helping manipulate California's electricity market to create phony supply shortages and drive up prices, costing California consumers as much as $850 million. That lawsuit asked the court to rescind thousands of contracts the state made with PowerEx under duress.

Footnote --

The story says

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has found California is owed about $3 billion, but the state claims that number should be closer to $9 billion.

The chairman of FERC at the time had just come to FERC from Enron's Houston law firm, Bakker and Botts - that's James A. Baker III's law firm. Baker is the Bush family consigliere and Bush I Chief of Staff and Secretary of State, also House of Saud consigliere. Talk about "the fix is in" incestuous cronyism.

[hecate77]

12. There never was a crisis. It was all on paper. When Enron crashed

the problem went away, since the manipulators were no longer playing.

Again, there was no crisis. They pretended to sell our power out of state, then forced us to buy it back at inflated prices. It never left the state, there never was a shortage, just gouging, to the tune of 11 billion dollars. This loss of 11 billion to the California economy lead directly to the collapse of the US economy.

[Coastie for Truth]

19. FERC Chairman Pat Wood, III, a Baker-Botts Partner

let them get away with it - and took acts not inconsistent with a cover up.

FERC Chairman Wood Wood is the longest-serving appointee of George W. Bush, having been named by him to the Public Utility Commission of Texas in February 1995 to regulate the state's telecommunications and power industries. Wood served as Chairman of that Commission until joining the FERC in June 2001.

<>

A native of Port Arthur, Texas, Wood received a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Texas A&M University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has worked as an engineer with Arco Indonesia and as an attorney with the Baker & Botts law firm in Washington, DC. Wood also served as legal advisor to Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Jerry Langdon and as legal counsel to Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Williamson.

(Look at the Texas Mafia smirk - like Bush and DeLay)

[catzies]

15. Nuttin'. White House said it wouldn't interfere.

They sat back & let us get screwed.

Then they put Schwarzenegger in to make sure we'd never get the $9 billion back.

Another Mission Accomplished.

[seabeyond]

16. the summer of the fuckin of calif

by the energy dudes, arnold was in those meetings.

[judy]

17. Everything you wanted to know about the energy crisis and were

not afraid to ask...

Can be found in the excellent documentary : "Enron, the smartest guys in the room". I highly recommend it, but it is really excruciating to watch if you are a Californian.
The explosion of the Enron scandal fixed the energy crisis in California as if by magic.

Oh, and on edit: remember the "pretzel" incident? That happened just before the Enron scandal hit MSM like a ton of bricks. Poor Georgie must have been so scared, he had to ask his friend Jack (Daniels) for help with that one...

[Toots]

18. I recall Cheney saying we had to build hundreds of utilities or something

like that. He said new ,they weren't utilities but another word, energy producers, can't think of the correct term but anyway Cheney said the only way we could solve the immediate Crisis was to do certain things. Open ANWR was one of the things but building new production sites was key. Something like one a week for ten years or some such thing. Don't know how that went but no one is writing about them so i guess there haven't been any. My memory sure isn't what it used to be...

[Stinky The Clown]

20. Enron's balls being removed did the trick

no company to manipulate the market ..... no more crisis. It is THAT simple.

[applegrove]

23. Yup - Enron went bankrupt. Seems many crisies can be ended

when rules of laws are applied. A pattern.

[leftofthedial]

27. the coup of 2000

made it no longer necessary for Enron to perpetuate the "crisis"

[PurityOfEssence]

28. The recall election was essentially a thug's referendum

Deregulation happened when the Republicans held the legislature. Lest we forget, deregulation ALWAYS favors the rich. Deregulation is getting rid of laws; laws are there for the weak. Deregulation is the mugging of the poor by the rich.

Arnie's basic argument was one of a child molesting daddy sueing his wife for custody of the child in question: you should have defended that poor thing from me better than you did. Davis bit on a bad deal to stop the flow of blood, but the wound was deliberately inflicted by the Republicans, and Arnie can tell you all about it.

Arnold never could have won if it had been a regular election; by entering late, the news stories couldn't be sourced in time. Republicans--and sadly, too many Americans--see a maneuver like this to be admirable. Truly, we are a nation of get-rich-quick schemers who LOVE people who fuck the system for personal gain. They want the loopholes to continue to exist so they can use them in some mythical Horatio Alger day. It's ridiculous.