How Green is PG&E?

The video reveals how PG&E, despite all of its greenwashing public relations misinformation, is hardly green at all. In spring 2011 property owners along the Helms-Gregg 230 kilovolt transmission line were informed by PG&E of an abrupt change in the utility's vegetation management policy. Contractors working for the utility would now remove thousands of trees--mostly blue oaks--from the 120 foot right of way of the Helms-Gregg. Why the sudden change? In another part of California, hundreds of miles away, a century plant had bolted a flower stalk into a PG&E line, causing an outage and fire, for which the utility was heavily fined. But there are no century plants growing along the Helms-Gregg and hardly any other fast-growing trees. In any case, trimming has worked fine for the thirty year history of the Helms-Gregg on the few relatively fast growing species in the area, such as the bull pine, and there have been no outages caused by vegetation either falling into or growing into this line So, again, why the change?

Edward Abbey--Glen Canyon Damn

The Electric Black Widow

In 1901 Frank Norris published The Octopus: A Story of California, about the struggle between farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and the Central Pacific Railroad. The octopus with its tentacles symbolized the railroads holding the land and economy in its iron tentacles--its rail tracks. Through government subsidies, which gave the railroads every other section of land through which they laid track, these powerful entities eventually acquired approximately 200 million acres of land in the U.S. Together with the fact that the railroads held a monopoly on the overland transport of goods, these vast land holdings gave the railroads immense political power--so much power that they became the de facto government, placing representatives in local, state, and national government offices, including the House and Senate, and even the president. Yes, even Abraham Lincoln had been a railroad lawyer, and he of course promoted and signed the legislation for the transcontinental railroad which empowered the railroads to acquire so much land and power.

Today the Electric Black Widow is wrapping California and the West in the web of its powerful grid, destroying the environment, and sucking the blood of ratepayers. For many years this poisonous spider, with a metal web of high voltage transmission lines, substations, and distribution lines, holds all of us tightly in the shocking grip of its monopoly.

I will be adding to this post in days to come ...