San Francisco Examiner, January 14, 2001

Contrary to current belief, creating an energy crisis in California is not a simple matter. To achieve skyrocketing utility bills and brownouts at current levels, with the threat of worse to come, requires a complicated series of steps and considerable determination.

Start with the premise that the government simply must control the process from start to finish. Maintain this premise even though you know full well that the government has virtually no role in vital areas such as the delivery of food. Base all action on the belief that if the government is not involved, people will suffer. Since your believe that the motive for your action is noble, do not consider it a requirement that you always tell the truth.

It is very important that you distrust the market, the process of free and voluntary exchange on which the American economy is based. Express this distrust through price controls and regulations, the more complicated the better. This will enable you to ignore the law of supply and demand, which you can also accomplish in other creative ways.

You understand that the generation and delivery of electricity does not occur naturally, that despite what affluent private groups like the Sierra Club say, windmills and solar power cannot possibly meet the needs of a modern society. Familiarize yourself with the realities of generation, the relative merits of power plants fired by coal, oil, and nuclear power.

Then, when militants protest the creation of these plants, accept all of their propaganda and scare stories at face value and do not conduct any research on your own. Ignore, for example, the successful nuclear generating systems of France and Japan. Ignore also the largely market-based systems for electrical generation in states such as Pennsylvania.

Familiarize yourself with the growing demand for power caused by immigration, a booming economy, and widespread use of computers and peripherals. Then prevent this demand from being met in a rational way by refusing to site new power plants fired by coal, oil, and nuclear energy.

You can easily take this a step further, feeling more noble and progressive in the process, by shutting down existing plants that use coal, oil and nuclear power. Ignore the reality that the delivery of energy requires trade-offs. In the rare event that you do opt to cite a new power plant, make sure that it is fired only by natural gas.

Natural gas plants are more expensive than others to operate, and this will go a long way toward creating a crisis. By using the government to create more dependency on natural gas, you insure that its price will rise. This move is very important in California, where the natural gas pipeline system leaves much to be desired.

When the results of your system begin to become apparent, launch a new system of interference in the market, but call it “deregulation.” Don’t really deregulate, however, on any meaningful scale, as took place in the transportation industry. Rather, treat utilities as phone companies that now get special treatment by opening their transmission and distribution for competitors. For the most part, keep existing rules, regulations and price controls in place statewide but select one remote area, San Diego, for competition.

This will open the field, in that one area, to competition from other companies. The genius of this move is that those companies and utilities are themselves are in need of additional power to avoid the very shortages which find their source in government regulations. When prices rise sharply in San Diego, rush in with yet more regulations for relief, posing as a rescuer of innocent victims. When the inevitable hue and cry against your fake deregulation begins to mount, go along with the big-lie technique of left-wing pundits and blame the crisis on “blind faith in the market.” Stick to that party line through brownouts and rising prices alike.

You have now created an energy crisis. To create a supply of abundant power, with no brownouts and competitive prices, reverse the above steps.

Sally Pipes is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.