02-03-09 by dugan
One of the most valuable endorsements an energy project can get is the
Sierra Club. Usually the venerable environmental group does its
homework, at least at the state and national level. But a couple of recent endorsements make me wonder who’s watching
the watchers. One involves a plan to resume coastal drilling off the
Santa Barbara Coast, a deal that state regulators halted in the nick of time. The other is a Los Angeles ballot measure that,
while billed as a saintly solar initiative, is a political deal done mostly under the table and put on the ballot under
questionable circumstances.
In Santa Barbara, the Texas-based drilling company Plains Exploration and Production offered a deal
to California environmental groups: Let us drill from an existing oil platform in
federal water into oil reserves that are inside the state’s 3-mile
control offshore. In exchange, the state will get up to $5 billion,
we’ll donate thousands of acres of potential parkland, and in 2022
we’ll shut down all of our coastal drilling. It was good enough for a
few local environmental groups, a regional section of the Sierra Club, the Surfrider
Foundation and up to 20 others to (a) promise not to sue and (b) implicitly
endorse the plan. For months, the deal chugged along with almost no
scrutiny or news coverage.
This was supporters’ reasoning:
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said
attorney Linda Krop, who negotiated on behalf of three lead
environmental groups. "If people really want to protect the coast from
offshore oil and gas development, this is the best opportunity to do
that."
But the environmental groups and the drilling company refused to make the details of the agreement public, which
should
have raised loud alarms. When details finally leaked out, there
were more holes than in a corroded pipeline. First, the 2022
platform shutdowns probably couldn’t be enforced, because the Plains
Exploration rigs are in federal waters, and the federal government, not
Plains or the state, controls whether they get shut down or not. Second,
some or much the land that was going to be donated had title problems,
meaning Plains couldn’t promise the transfer. Any agreement to open new
drilling would likely be seen as validation of more drilling, even
inside the state’s 3-mile limit. So, were the company’s promises a
sham to begin with?
And what were the environmental groups thinking, when making
private deals with oil drillers? As a Los Angeles Times editorial
said,
It is not unheard of for environmentalists to sell out the public
interest for political or financial reasons, and no elected official
should ever approve a secret deal that affects public resources. The
company finally announced that it would disclose the full agreement
during Thursday’s Lands Commission hearing, but that was months too
late.
I
don’t accuse the Sierra Club or other endorsers of deliberately selling
out the public interest. But who did
they think they were bargaining with? The groups were at best out-lawyered, and
should certainly have known better than to agree to secrecy. Thank
goodness for the state Lands Commission, which rejected the agreement
last week.
In Los Angeles, it’s a tale of even better intentions gone awry.
Supporters of the so-called
GreenEnergy/GreenJobs initiative on the city’s March 3 primary ballot
are whooping with joy that the Lung Association and the local branch of
the Sierra Club have endorsed the proposal, also known as Measure B. In
this
case, the consequences are not as potentially disastrous as with oil
drilling, and it would indeed result in more solar power in Los
Angeles, though the final amount is in dispute. What stinks is the way
the half-baked deal was done, and its unknown, open-ended cost to the
city’s utility customers.
The measure would allow the city
Department of Water and Power to install giant solar panel arrays,
mostly on commercial buildings. The DWP, not the building owner, would
retain ownership of the panels, and only the DWP’s own employees, all
of them members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical workers,
could so much as touch a wrench on the installations. The IBEW controls
most of what goes on at the DWP, and its political power is such that local politicians dare not cross it. The Green Energy plan was put together by a bunch of political deal-makers, not by city planners, engineers and independent solar power experts.
The
City Council, without asking any pertinent questions and without
knowing what the project would cost, rushed the measure onto a city
primary election ballot for which the voter turnout will be, at best,
the very low double digits. Low turnout gives an initiative backer like
a major union a big edge, because it can get members to the polls while
the rest of the city yawns. I’ve been a union member and elected union
official myself (though just in a wimpy white-collar union), and favor
well-paid green jobs with union participation. But if deals get put
together so cynically that they tarnish the promise of green energy,
those jobs will quickly lose their halo.
The local Sierra
Club, the American Lung Association and the League of Conservation
Voters endorsed Measure B on its greenness before anyone had a clue to
its cost or strength of
oversight. A supposedly independent analysis of the measure’s cost,
promised by its
backers before the end of January, is about to be released. But it’s
far from independent because the DWP itself controls the analysts’ contracts (see below).
If
the solar deal’s ultimate cost turns electric customers
against solar power, or if they see it as a dealmakers’ porky boondoggle,
both the political atmosphere and the city’s air will end up dirtier.
The word "green" shouldn’t be license to put a siphon into customers’
pockets. As City Controller Laura Chick said said of the way Measure B
was concocted, "When you’re cutting deals and you don’t want to
discuss details in public. that’s not in the best interest of the
public."
A leaked draft of one earlier outside audit estimated that the
actual cost could be more than double the $1.5 billion "estimate"
handed to the City Council, and worried that the DWP doesn’t have the management strength to oversee it. (The company, PA Consulting, then groveled and apologized to the DWP,
the Los Angeles Times reported today, promising to change its tune in a final report while all but begging
that it be allowed to keep another city contract. It lost the contract
anyway, a monument to the agency’s intimidation and control.)
The Sierra Club is the marquee
environmental endorser: trusted, old, well-known and admired. While the
endorsements above were issued by independent local or regional arms of
the club, such endorsements are always shorthanded by proponents to
just "Sierra Club." Trust comes with extra responsibility, which I
don’t think was
exercised in either Santa Barbara or Los Angeles.