Blogs Sport Wallpaper

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget!



On YouTube.com

Right on the heels of the passage of the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act, which establishes a kind of "cap-and-trade" system for greenhouse gas emissions, we have a project I'm excited about as it will be the first power plant in America designed with a federal greenhouse gas limit. It's called the Russell City Energy Center and will be constructed in Hayward, California.

The facility is slated to employ 650 people and generate a one time tax revenue of $30 million and an annual revenue of $6 million for the City of Hayward, according to the website for the proposed facility.

What's exciting about the development that we're finally seeing a project that languished in development hell since 2001 finally see the light of day under the Obama Administration and the new act. The act calls for modernization of the electric grid; this is a brand new power plant. It calls for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; this plant has a limit on such output.

For those seeking construction jobs, you're wondering when it will start construction? Well, it's got to go through a public comment and hearing period first, then The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) will issue an air permit for construction and operation. Having gotten approval from the California Energy Commission, the project is one permit away from breaking ground.

That permit's a big hurdle. It seems there are groups and people who, well, just don't believe the facility will do what it's designed to do, and that's a shame. So much of California's economic problem rests with NIMBY's who fear any type of real progress. The plant's developers have agreed to every alteration requested to date. What we need to have is a pro-development culture; right now, what we have is an anti-development culture where people struggling to pay the rent don't want anyone else to have a chance at earning a decent living making things; in this case, power.

To the opponents, I say, give this one a chance. The San Francisco Bay Area, crumbling under the weight of the shrinking economy, needs this power plant. We've got to get over this habit of people constantly offering pseudo-intellectual arguments crafted to kill almost any project that might be proposed. This constant habit is costing us much needed jobs and sorely needed revenue.

Leave it to long time San Francisco Bay Guardian scribe and now Executive Editor Tim Redmond to lay down the truth about Pacific Gas and Electric Company's campaign of lies and misrepresentation regarding Proposition H.  Read this by Redmond:

Way back in the 1980s, when Willie Brown was the untouchable speaker of the State Assembly and by all accounts the second most powerful politician in California, he came to an event at the San Francisco Press Club and gave a few dozen reporters a lesson in how to defeat a ballot measure. I'll never forget it.

A group of reformers — some Republicans, many unhappy with Brown's leadership — placed a measure before the voters that would have taken the power of drawing legislative districts away from the State Legislature and given it to a panel of retired judges. The Democratic leadership, which had used its redistricting power with shameless brilliance to create safe seats for Democrats, wanted to kill the proposition, but polls showed it passing by a good margin.

So Brown went to the notorious Los Angeles political consulting firm of Berman and D'Agostino (a.k.a. BAD Campaigns). "And they told me," Brown announced to the audience, "that any piece of legislation has something in it that can be used to upset and confuse the voters....MORE