MARINA DEL REY, CALIF.--Today, the Ayn Rand Institute issued the following statement: The blame for California's energy crisis has been placed on deregulation. But this is not the whole story. The unmentioned culprit is the environmental movement.
Environmentalists have worked for decades to stop the construction of major power plants in California--and have succeeded. As a result, California generates less power per resident than any other state, and imports up to one quarter of the energy it consumes.
An illustration of the scope of the environmentalist impact on power generation is the Honey Lake plant, in the Sierras, which used timber chips and forest leftovers as fuel to make electricity. The plant was forced to close down because of a mandated moratorium on forest logging, prompted by a lawsuit from Earth Island Institute, a San Francisco-based environmental group. Another dozen similar plants scattered around the Sierras will probably share the same fate, and the 300,000 homes they serve will become the next victims of environmentalist litigation.
Environmentalists have done everything to stop the construction of new power plants, from nuclear plants to "environmentally friendly" timber chip plants. The consequences of California's environmentalist activism are now glaringly obvious.
Their leaders tell us that their purpose is to "protect" man. But man needs energy and technology to sustain modern industrial civilization, and progress cannot happen without increasing energy supply. The blackouts are an early warning sign of the dangers to human life coming from environmentalist activism. Now Californians are paying dearly for the environmentalists' determination to slow down the engines of the world and halt human progress.
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Ayn Rand Institute resident fellow Onkar Ghate is available for interviews.
The Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization established in 1985, seeks to advance novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and its principal tenets: reason, rational egoism and laissez-faire capitalism. For further information, contact ARI Media Relations. Phone: (949) 222-6550 ext. 213; fax (949) 222-6558; e-mail: interview@aynrand.org or visit ARI's Website at: http://www.aynrand.org.