"I Don't Feel It's Valid"

watching government think

My city council in the Los Angeles suburbs voted this week to lease a fleet of Teslas to make our police department an all-EV agency. As soon as they can get it done — which won’t be soon soon, but ASAP in government time — the South Pasadena Police Department will only have electric vehicles for patrol officers, administrators, and detectives.

Now, watch a minute and a half of the council debate, because it’s amazing. In this exchange, a member of the council who recently stepped down from a position as the chair of a local electric power utility warns that the power grid isn’t enormously reliable, which makes it risky to put an entire police department into nothing but electric cars. Just watch the response, which neatly illustrates the entire reality of Blue Zone governance in a matter of seconds. A personal aside before you hit the “play” button: I couldn’t get the “record from screen” function to work this morning, so I resorted to the high-amateur technique of holding my cellphone up to the screen, which gets you a priceless cameo at the end:

Now, the California Independent System Operator, the entity that runs the power grid in the state, just spent a long week — earlier this month, not in some distant and forgotten past — declaring a series of grid emergencies:

None of this was obscure:

So.

September 7, the people who run California’s power grid say GRID EMERGENCY SHUT EVERYTHING DOWN, after a full week of warning people against dangerous behavior like doing laundry or turning on their lights.

September 21, an elected official in a local government says that wait, what are you talking about? The grid is unreliable? Why would you even say that? “I don’t feel it’s valid,” he says.

And he asks if there are any “academic studies” to prove that wild claim.

And then they voted to make the entire police department entirely dependent on the electric grid.

So.

Government officials sit at tables and trade symbols with each other. They don’t notice anything, any mere reality, that might underlie those symbols.

If they had met during an actual blackout, debating the reliability of the electric power grid in the darkness inside a ring of candles, do you think the vote would have gone differently?

Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom

CALIFORNIA: We’re now in a Flex Alert. What does that mean? We all need to conserve as much energy as possible during this record breaking heatwave. Here’s what to do until 9pm tonight: - Set thermostats to 78 - Turn off unnecessary lights - Avoid using large appliances