Our Electric System: For Profits or for People?

Jim Feeney

1996

Published in:

Technocracy Digest, 2nd quarter 1997, No. 324

Excerpts from a talk, by Jim Feeney, Technocracy member of Section 12237, San Francisco, sponsored by Technocracy Inc., and given at San Francisco State University, November 12, 1996.

The recent electrical power collapse in the Western States in the United States prompts us to ask: what is this massive system supposed to do? Is its main purpose to supply electric power to consumers and industry? If that is the reason, then certain requirements would be incorporated into its design. These design criteria would include such things as reliability. The designers would be instructed that interruptions of the flow should be reduced to virtually zero. One such interruption could be an attack by terrorists from without or within the United States. A mere handful of people with readily obtainable explosives strategically placed in unprotected and unprotectable spots, could bring our whole society to a halt in minutes. Unlike Vietnam, which received more bombs than all those dropped in World War II, and survived, we could not. The system design we have today has totally neglected this potentially fatal possibility.

On the other hand, here in California, the challenge of earthquake damage has largely been met, so we know that when a challenge is identified it can be successfully handled. However, even though everyone today knows that we have a serious problem with finding a source of energy to supply this electric system in the very near future, we do next to nothing about it. This is in spite of the fact that almost all of our literate population has at least heard the word, ``ecology,'' and millions of them have a working knowledge of how ecosystems work. Have we, as a society, injected the requirement that this electric system be, not only reliable, but sustainable into the future? To be more direct, don't these millions who know about ecosystems plan to have any children or grandchildren?

For many years, decades in fact, a system for the transmission of electrical power over great distances has been available. The surplus power available in the Northwest could be shipped via one- to two-million volt underground cables to all points in California with very little loss. The recent power outage, allegedly caused by trees shorting out an inter-tie, would be a thing of the past. It would be virtually immune to terrorist or nut-case sabotage.

The source of power, hydro, is actually free and is sustainable forever. The ugly ``wirescape'' we have created in wilderness areas would be gone. This technology has already been developed and is already in use in Sweden and other countries. With all these advantages, just what is holding this development back? The answer is that: it is not considered an engineering challenge but a PRICE SYSTEM challenge. Consider, if this line were to run the length of California through the Central Valley, it would disrupt the private power companies' stranglehold on what we reverently call, ``the market''!

When this system was first proposed many years ago, the reaction of these companies was as expected. They are, after all, not in the business of distributing power. Any distribution of energy that occurs is beside the point. Their main interest is the flow of money, not power, so these companies successfully interfered with the design. They managed to reduce the capacity of this new extra high voltage direct current line to less than half, placed it above ground, and routed it east of the Sierra Mountains, well out of the way, eliminating any competition for their turf.

We know that we have the engineering knowledge and all the available materials to do these jobs, or, for that matter, any job. So what is the matter? The answer lies in the fact that these are not engineering problems. These problems are system-design failures, not engineering failures. Our technological society is controlled today by an ancient system that evolved over several millennia to the present. In this last century of human society on earth, we have seen the introduction of a technological revolution, a revolution so great that it is affecting every aspect of our lives more than all previous generations put together. What we are seeing today is a gigantic collision between the old way of doing things and its requirements to perpetuate itself, and the brand new requirements of today's technological society.

In this old way of thinking, certain requirements pertaining to money, more properly called ``Debt Tokens,'' such as profits, interest, bonds, property rights, dividends etc., are given absolute and complete priority. Technological, engineering, and ecological considerations are always given short shrift. Why is this so? The answer is that the people we have put in charge of our society are steeped in the goals and needs of what we call the PRICE SYSTEM. This system is defined as, ``...any social system that effects its distribution of goods and services by means of a system of trade or commerce based on commodity valuation and employing any form of debt tokens (money,) constitutes a Price System.'' It is obvious why we have, today, what some describe as: people putting the needs of the present antiquated system first and dedicating themselves to preserving the system and themselves.

As an example: the director of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power resigned the other day because he was refused a salary raise of $190,000. Previously, he was a legislative (not engineering) analyst for the Mayor! Would anyone question where his priorities lie? One can search far and wide to find a trained technologist in charge of anything in our society. The federal Communication has never had an electronic engineer in charge. They have all been lawyers! The businessmen, and the politicians who work for them, know nothing about the vast technology they are supposed to control. It should be obvious why we have today, what some describe as, a run-away technology. As the late President Nixon is said to have joked, ``Ladies and gentlemen this is your pilot. We have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we are making record-breaking progress. The bad news is that we don't know where we are going!''

The massive power outages that have occurred over the past years were not technological failures. They were PRICE SYSTEM failures. Let us examine, for instance, a simplified example of a failure mode. If you start to consume power when you turn on your toaster or whatever, the generator at a distant power plant must be able to supply at least this amount of power. A second appliance turned on would slow down, and overload the generator, causing safety devices to cut the line, leaving your toast undone. If you should decide to turn on all your loads at once, the power generators better be ready with sufficient reserves of steam and capacity to handle all foreseeable circumstances.

The huge power outage in the Northeast, a few years ago, was because too many operators forgot about daylight-saving time, and the load-surge arrived one hour earlier than they anticipated, shutting down system after system until the capacity of the whole Northeast grid was exceeded.

Surprisingly, few deaths occurred, and no one burned their toast for a while, but nine months later the birth-rate took a large jump! The really funny part of it was the President declaring that a little black box in Canada caused the whole thing. Nonsense! The cause of that, and the recent West Coast failure, was the Price System operators' control over the technologists. They demanded that the extra capacity to be kept on hand for emergencies should be kept to an absolute minimum so as not to interfere with profit. What happens to reliability? In our present society, operating under rules that date from ancient times, we know what has priority!

The electrical system is but one of the technological systems that we must rely on to enjoy life in North America. We have a food chain, housing, transportation, communication, water, education, and many other functions that must be maintained for us. We can look at any of them and find near catastrophies in all.

Take a look at how we grow our food. Our agribusiness people have decided, with their focus on profits and the ubiquitous bottom line, that we must mine our food, not grow it. We pump oil out of the ground, convert it into fertilizer, and grow huge crops. This is not sustainable. Fifteen years ago we reached the peak of the total world supply of oil and the end of this abundance of food produced by mining is in sight. We also have immediate problems with herbicides, millions of tons of which are obtained from mined oil. Formerly, a few noxious weeds invading the fields were a small nuisance. But now, the same type of resistance that Rachael Carson warned about decades ago has happened, and they have become major threats, and call for more and more herbicides to control.

Like heroin, these dealers rejoice at this addiction because, under our present PRICE SYSTEM rules, this behavior is their only option. These dealers are not bad people; they are simply doing the only thing they are allowed to do. There are many alternative farming methods available today, but they are not used because the Price System rules will not allow them into the market.

What can we say that is correct about our transportation system? There has recently been a dim recognition that there is something wrong with forcing people to drive a two-ton vehicle twenty to forty miles a day from their house to a job. We have made ourselves slaves to the automobile. Since the control of housing is in the hands of the real estate interests, there is no chance of rationalizing our transportation planning. In addition, the automobile industry accounts for one out of six jobs, so any shift to light rail would be a catastrophe. May we build a high-speed rail system to replace the energy-guzzling jet planes? Not a chance!

Communications are being played around with so much, lately, by huge financial interests that it is almost a joke, except when you try to figure out how to dial a long-distance call, or tune in a decent TV show.

Education today is for the main purpose of training people for a job. Every day, as everyone should know, more jobs disappear forever. This obsolete goal must be changed. We should, and can, train our children and adults how to live, not how to make a living. The required courses should be: music, arts, crafts, and other vocations, to prepare our citizens for the work-free world that science and technology have made for us. Unfortunately, our minds have been so filled up with the obsolete garbage, from the past, that we cannot, or will not, see that the future is here today.

There are many more areas of our society that we could examine, and we will find that all areas of our society are afflicted with debilitating effects by obsolete Price System control. The hard-working, dedicated, hand-wringing liberals of all types, from the tree-huggers to the homeless advocates, have completely missed the problem. The items that they are targeting for reforms are not problems. They are merely symptoms of a much larger social malaise. Chasing after, and even curing, these symptoms will not remove the hold that the Price System way of management has on our society. The tree-huggers' and environmentalists' clash with the Forest Service and owners will be for naught until they examine the Price System's men on Wall Street who are the real determiners of how fast the trees will fall.

What they should be tracing doesn't stop there. The Price System,...that system of trade based on commodity valuation is the real boss in this tragic drama. If the reformers got as far as examining the Price System, they might be getting somewhere. If they asked what kind of morals or human values it had to allow and even encourage ecoside, they would find none. Socialism (or capitalism) with a human face? That is absurd. They should be asking the questions and doing the analyses that we are doing here. What would they find if they did these analyses? They would find that there are no problems in North America that do not have readily available, practical and easily implemented physical solutions. Instead of putting on ``band-aids,'' they could be part of the solution to North America's problem by identifying the culprit: the Price System.

Technocracy Inc. has made this analysis -- starting in the 1920s. Howard Scott started this educational organization in 1933 to try to teach North Americans about the failure of the Price System and how the scientific method, applied to the social system, uncovered the failure mode. Many books and papers have been published by Technocracy explaining how anyone can do these analyses themselves.

Technocracy did not quit with this successful analysis. By using the same method, namely the Scientific Method, Technocracy has come up with a synthesis for a new society which is described in the book, Technocracy's Technological Social Design. It is beyond the scope of this piece to review here, but it is essential that all North Americans avail themselves of this information.