In California, which excluded coal from its electricity mix thus leading to its embarrassing, expensive, and dangerous summer of 2001, corporate interests are seeking to exploit green values to set a heightened, specific requirement for a particular gasoline additive, notwithstanding its well-documented environmental (and economic) downsides.

The assumptions that California was behind it's own Energy Crisis (by refusing to build plants) has frankly failed in the last 6 months. With price caps in place, there's (last I checked) no shortages of electricity to be found. (And frankly, the few plants that California could get run and running in 1 year's worth of time don't equal to the lapses of energy it was running into, imho.)

In fact, it can (and has) been argued that California single-handedly put Enron out of business. Enron was the lead distributor of electricity to California (in terms of mega-watts rather than number of contracts) and when the prices went sky-high, not a single long term contract went to Enron.


(Now, what really scares me...those out there chuckling at Califoria's expense... is how close it came to Florida. Enron was moving into the potable water market and moving hard to get Florida to deregulate it's water treatment facilities.)