I got a mailer this weekend from the Close It Coalition, “with the proud sponsorship of PG&E”. The Close It Coalition is PG&E’s front group arguing against putting new peaker plants in San Francisco.
The mailer’s pretty disingenuous: it implies that the peakers would be built in place of the Hunters Point plant, which has been shut down for more that a year, and is being dismantled as I write this. Its image still graces the Left in SF masthead, though.
In fact, the peakers would replace the still-running Potrero power plant, which is old, and possibly more dirty than new plants would be. The mailer doesn’t mention the Potrero plant at all. Neither does the Coalition’s web site.
What I found even more interesting about the mailer, though, is that it repeatedly calls out the Board of Supervisors as the movers behind the peakers. The Board is actually pretty split on the issue (Michaela Alioto-Pier and Chris Daly on the same side! Who would have predicted it?). It seems that the actual driving force behind the peakers is, in fact, Mayor Newsom.
So why is PG&E blaming the Board for something the Mayor’s doing? I can see three (not mutually exclusive) possible reasons: 1) their polling data suggests the Board is a better target, 2) in the upcoming fight around CCA (Community Choice Aggregation), the majority of the Board is likely to favor San Franciscans having control over our own energy, something PG&E’s obviously against, 3) They are returning Newsom’s past favors for opposing public power and future support against CCA.
Whatever their reasons, though, the PG&E-sponsored Close It Coalition’s propaganda on this issue is disingenuous and misleading, whether you agree with them or not.
May 5th, 2008 at 8:54 am
And there’s something else involved for PG&E to attack the Board of Supervisors: Proposition E, which reforms the SF PUC. The more voters get confused and blame the Board, the less likely they will vote to pass Prop E.