Gray Davis
THE PETER PRINCIPLE IN ACTION:
Splendid staffer, winning legislator, competent controller, presentable lieutenant governor and then
‘Caps’
WELL, AT LEAST WHEN THE FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION bent to political pressures last week, it only bent to the extent of imposing “soft” caps on energy prices, rather than imposing the “hard” caps sought by Gov. Gray Davis. So when problems, unforeseen but probably inevitable, arise as a result of the caps, their impact should be somewhat muted.
And there is a good aspect to these cautious caps,they should eliminate the onerous price spikes that have bedeviled the state for months. (Indeed, rather than being “too little, too late” as critics charge, the FERC’s actions might be “enough, in time” as prices soften on their own and some observers, as Rajiv Vyas reports on page 1, begin to reduce their forecasts of outages this summer.)
Of course, overlooked is the fact that Davis could have been setting ceilings of his own all along by simply telling power producers that the state would not pay more than X amount for power. The worst that would happen, assuming that X was not concocted in fairytale land, is that the state might be deprived of some power on the margin, resulting in a few more blackouts than would otherwise be the case. But if we’re going to suffer blackouts anyway, doesn’t it make sense to do so when the alternative is to pay a prohibitive price for a relatively small amount of electricity? When Davis fumes over the fact that a producer sold the state “last minute” power at 10 times the market rate, why doesn’t somebody ask the governor why he was so foolish as to pay it?
Indeed, much of what the FERC did last week was to impose some discipline on California’s skittish leadership. For example, the FERC called generators, utilities and the state of California to the table this week to try to settle their dispute over alleged overcharges.
We could be well on our way to getting out of this mess if Davis himself had the wherewithal and good sense to get everyone on the same page. But for Davis, the energy crisis is not a problem to be solved, but a predicament to be spun, which requires him to keep politics at the center of his energy “policy.”
