Your own cite is a discussion of the **theory ** of natural rights. I am well aware of that theory. Just because some people hold a political philosophy that encompasses natural rights does not prove that inalienable rights exist. It is a theory not proof. Now who didn’t take the civics class?
But isn’t California in the process of phasing out incandescent bulbs? Your options would quickly become limited as they ban all of the quick-fixes!
Wiki on Police Power:
In other words, states have inherent “police power” to enact laws to promote the general health, safety, and welfare of the public, unless the state and/or federal constitutions provide otherwise or otherwise restrict that police power.
I don’t see anything in the state or federal constitutions restricting the power of a state to regulate private thermostats.
I remember a few years ago our area was in a days-long cold spell, and there were rolling blackouts. My widdle 1000 Sq ft house at the time was in one of those rolling blackouts. Then I went to work in an office building with a 5 story atrium with nothing but glass on one side, with the heat blasting away to keep that entire space warm. :mad:
I think they ought to go after the five story atriums before they go after regular folk, but I’m sure I’m gonna get called a Communist for that.
I should add, please cite legal authority showing which individual right trumps the police power here.
HINT: See US Constitution, 14th Amendment, Liberty, Due Process, Substantive Due Process
Now that we have located a potential “right” to hang our hats on, please cite legal authority reconciling the apparent conflict between the individual right of liberty and the state’s police power.
HINT: See such things as - Rational Basis, Rational Relation, Judicial Scrutiny
To save you time and effort, the short answer is that the state can regulate damn near anything it wants any way it wants.
For those who are unfamiliar with the conditions in California, a bit of detail might be helpful here. I grew up in Sacramento, the state capitol, which is smack in the middle of the Central Valley. If you live in the major valleys, most of Southern California, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area the reality of summer is excruciating heat. In Sacto, it’s quite common for 100+ degree F temperatures to begin as early as late April or early May and go on through September or October. Most of California gets less than 30 inches of rain a year, some areas considerably less than that. It’s not uncommon to go from May to September without a single drop of rain falling. Humidity is mostly nonexistent.
It’s very unusual to find houses built in the last 30-40 years that don’t have central air conditioning systems. Blackout and brownouts are not uncommon during summer heat waves, where temperatures can be over 100 for days or sometimes weeks at a time, with nighttime temperatures maybe as low as the mid to high '80s–and unless you live in just the right place to catch a Delta breeze there is no wind activity to speak of. To give some real perspective, I personally have experienced temperatures as high as 125 F (in Redding, late '70s) and the day I left California for good the temperature was 113 F with a pollution standard index of 175, which in real world terms means the air smelled horrifyingly foul, it was incredibly hard to breathe and people with compromised lung function are advised to stay the hell indoors. With the A/C on, because the filtering action helps cut down on particulates that affect breathing.
California has been one long series of fights caused by too many people fighting over too limited resources. The Central Valley is incredibly rich farmland–but you need water to make it bloom. LA is a gigantic city which drains water from the Colorado River at a rate that would make you cry to see it. Northern California farmers fight with Southern California over water rights–but SoCal has the majority of voters.
California has battled unbelievably bad pollution conditions and has had to implement draconian legislation to keep the air breathable. For instance, rice is a major crop in the Central Valley–the easiest way to prepare the huge fields for the next crop is to burn the stubble and this used to be common up to when I was a young adult. It was not uncommon for inversion layers to trap the smoke and reduce visibility to less than 500 feet–for days at a time. Rice stubble is very high in silica and the pollution caused major breathing disorders and asthma in a large percentage of the population, but the agricultural lobby is very strong and managed to fend off legislation preventing rice stubble burning for years after the health risks were made public. In SoCal, I can remember similar conditions caused by car smog and inversion layers that were actually painful to the eyes and lungs after mere minutes of exposure coming down the Grapevine into the San Fernando Valley–horrible stench, too.
California is a “paradise on earth” that everybody wants to move to and is horribly overpopulated considering it’s just one big desert. All the “wacky environmental laws” people marvel at who don’t live there are actually damned necessary to keep people from dying in various nasty ways–because most of the citizens flatly refuse to voluntarily subject themselves to any deprivation for the common good. When Northern California was having such a horrible drought that we couldn’t flush the toilets unless we took at at least one shit in there we got to see Angelenos on the news watering their lawns and playing in their swimming pools–water diverted from NoCal via the California Aqueduct (with about 1/3 of the diverted water lost to evaporation on the way.)
As someone who managed to live for five years in a single wide mobile home that had NO A/C of any kind after the swamp cooler broke I find it reprehensible to see people seriously intending to circumvent thermostats that will cause higher than desired temperatures for everyone so’s not to cause random people to have not only NO A/C, but NO power AT ALL in order to stretch available reserves. Not to mention that intentionally overheating the thermostat causes a higher load on the A/C unit and uses even MORE energy–nice going! Also, 80 degrees is unbearable? Good grief, do you people listen to yourselves? I don’t have any A/C at all because I consider it environmentally dodgy at best and when it gets hot here in Oregon (not nearly as often as in Cali, thank goodness!) my house can get up to 93 F inside–so I go out on the back porch with a fan and a spray bottle. After sundown, when the demand for energy is less, I set up breezeboxes to exhaust the interior warm air and cool the house down for the night. It ain’t rocket science. Besides, the main reason why A/C feels good is that it lowers humidity–in arid climes evaporative coolers work beautifully and are great for the skin but Californians tend to refuse to use them because they’re noisy and “low class.” Yes, I’ve actually hears Angelenos express that exact point of view in those exact words. The entitlement is palpable at times.
The best solution for California would probably be kicking out about 35% or more of the people who live there. Since that isn’t feasible, people are going to have to realize that the more people you jam into a finite ecosystem the less comfortable each individual person is likely to be. It’s just logic and simple fairness that insisting that YOU be perfectly comfortable at all times because YOU can afford it is not equitable considering the people who could die because YOUR excess caused their lack.
My credentials here, aside from 35 years spent living in Cali, are that both my father and my ex husband worked for the Department of Water Resources (one of them in a department which built power plants of various types) and I also did multiple research papers in college on the California Aqueduct and various alternative energy sources, including geothermal power plants and wind generators–many of which were blocked by NIMBYism back in the day when they would have been much cheaper to build and would have forestalled some of the current problems. Getting California voters to agree to do anything which might threaten their entitlements or impede their view has historically been an uphill battle. This is why I live in Oregon now.
What in the heck does any of this have to do with anything? We need to build a few power plants. Problem solved. It can be done. Burbank Water and Power just brought a new state of the art natural gas unit online. They got it permitted and built in just a couple of years.
The problem here is that the moron known as Gray Davis got snookered and hooked the state into long term contracts at outrageous prices. The power brokers (Enron anyone?) created the shortage out of whole cloth. There IS NOT AND NEVER HAS BEEN a real power shortage in California. It is all nothing but manipulation of the market so the ratepayer gets stuck. All this was exposed and meticulously documented on the Mr. KABC (Marc Germain) hour of power feature on KABC Talkradio, and on his website.
This thermostat nonsense is draconian, morally wrong, and stupid. I don’t give a damn if it is constitutional or not, and I damn well will circumvent mine if the time comes.
And it may all be a tempest in a teapot. As I understand the thing, the thermostat must merely be installed. There is no provision that it be activated except on a voluntary basis at this stage of the game. It is just to make sure that every home gives the option of using the feature, not that using it is mandatory. But talk radio has seized on it, so rational discussion flies out the window in most cases.
I did not read the legislation.
Arkansas Power and Light had an optional switch installed on A?C compressors so that they could turn them off as you described in th 1980’s. You got a discount on your bill. I should think a voluntary program like that would be the way to go.
Would window units be outlawed? 
That’s simply not true. In Davis’s own words: **I think the people that insisted that we get into deregulation in 1996 made a huge miscalculation," California Gov. Gray Davis told CNN. “They did not anticipate the huge [economic] recovery California experienced and the needs of the tech companies here in California. Secondly, there was no effort to build new plants to meet the demand.” **
The legislators didn’t truly deregulate in 1996, they only deregulated in one direction (lower prices) in an effort to spur competition. Without the ability to raise prices in a market that required more electricity there was no incentive to build power plants. You can’t force a business to lose money.
from the same article: **California was the first state to deregulate its electricity market in 1996. The move was supposed to lower the bills of consumers by preventing most utilities from passing rising costs on to their customers until at least March 2002.
Under deregulation, the state’s investor-owned utilities sold most of their power generating plants. Now they must buy back that power at market prices.
Meanwhile, the neighboring states where California has been buying surplus electricity grew rapidly, boosting the price of wholesale energy.**
The purpose of a PUCO is to manage the utility requirements. This was clearly not done in California. In Ohio the PUCO reviews requests from power companies for rate hikes based on proposed capital investiments. It’s not rocket science and if politics is left out of the process it works well. If a rate hike goes into effect and the utility makes a higher than anticipated profit then the state goes back and makes adjustments.
The fact that power companies in other states weren’t beholding to California’s PUCO is the reality of bad legislation. California had to sue them for the price gouging they exposed themselves to. If I lived in Arizona I would want to protect my power grid against another state’s stupidity.
I find it reprehensible that California legislators didn’t react to a known problem in time to fix it. I remember very distinctly when they predicted brownouts a year in advance. We had torn down our aging city power plant and replaced it with a series of peak use generators. Actually, replaced is not the correct term since the power load was switched to other larger plants that were built to replace a number of smaller ones. The peak-use generators were for summer heat waves. They only take 6 months to build (read that in the local newspaper).
If we could build peak-use generators in 6 months than what the hell were the CA legislators doing? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. When the brownout’s hit the next year they suddenly decided there was a problem and in the following year I saw a politician standing in front of a peak-use generator proclaiming that California was building power plants. I watched this in stunned disbelief. I actually yelled at the TV. Those were not 24/7 power generators.
Wake up Californians. Find a plot of land that isn’t going to slide into the ocean at the first sign of an earthquake and build some real power plants. Make them out of recycled condoms that run off the hot air of politicians, but build them.
Yes, let’s take the word of a highly corrupt politician. I won’t even get into the sweetheart deal he struck with the prison guards that even now is bankrupting the state. Did Davis oppose deregulation? Yes. Fine. Whoop-de-doo. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t snookered later or possibly even bent over for them. If Germain’s site was still up I would link it. Maybe on the wayback machine. I have to go and take care of biz but will return later today or tomorrow with some stuff that will hopefully make you as angry as I am over this nonsense.
I’m not flinging blame on Davis, rather on the entire political structure. The purpose of a public utility commission is to ensure utilities are available and at a reasonable price. The final price is set by the market, not politicians and is based on the idea of of a reasonable profit in return for the rights to operate in a relatively closed environment. The ability of a state to regulate a utility is a golden opportunity to keep costs to a minimum for the consumer.
Where this went horribly wrong was the idea that the final cost could be regulated. What a state should be negotiating is a nominal profit, not the end cost to the consumer. The utility commission’s job is to review requests for rate hikes and determine if they are justified. The end cost is what it is. If it’s higher in California because they don’t have sufficient infrastructure then that is the problem which to be addressed. Asking people to be collectively miserable is just retarded.