MARINA DEL REY, CA--Power producers and utilities are being denounced across California as "profiteers" on the power crisis. But the real profiteers are the environmentalists, said a senior fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute.

"The key to understanding the power disaster in California is to realize that it is not a disaster--not for everyone. The state's environmentalists like it just fine," said syndicated columnist Robert Tracinski.

"For the greens, power outages represent a great victory in their 30-year war against power plants. But cutting off the power supply is just a means to their ultimate goal: shutting down industrial production, forcing us back to a pre-industrial way of life.

"For those who want to return us to this primitive existence, California's blackouts are a great leap forward. Except that 'forward,' in this case, really means backward.

"There is one way, however, in which the power crisis could become a disaster for the greens. Americans could get a taste of what pre-industrial poverty feels like--and decide that they do not want to sacrifice themselves on a green altar."

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Robert W. Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute between 1997 and 2004.

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.