Survival: Imperative or Lifestyle Choice?

If you live in the Greater Boston Area you can now ask your electricity company, NSTAR, to provide you with exclusively wind-generated electricity.

In one sense, NSTAR's decision to offer its customers 50-100% wind power is welcome news. Several organizations that are engaged in valuable environmental work in Massachusetts cooperated with the company in developing the option, namely the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Conservation Law Foundation, and Environment Massachusetts (a project of Mass PIRG).

Massachusetts law requires companies like NSTAR to get 4% of their energy from renewable sources by 2009 and the new wind-power option will, says the press release, "make it less expensive" for NSTAR to meet this standard. How? It's simple: Choosing wind power will cost you more money.

The company says that customers opting for wind power will "pay premiums above the basic plan to reduce global warming." The average increase will be about $4 to $7, according to NSTAR. To reduce global warming, you see.

At this point, it is worth noting two facts; first, NSTAR has a captive market and, secondly, its shareholders are smiling. NSTAR's 2008 annual report filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) explains:

As a rate regulated distribution and transmission utility company, NSTAR is not subject to a significantly competitive business environment. Through its franchise charters, NSTAR Electric and NSTAR Gas have the exclusive right and privilege to engage in the business of delivering energy services within their granted territory. Under Massachusetts law, no other entity may provide electric or natural gas delivery service to retail customers within NSTAR’s service territory without the written consent of NSTAR Electric and/or NSTAR Gas.

The report adds that in 2007 NSTAR's common share dividend increased "by 7.7%, outperforming the industry average of 5.4%." Among the three reason for this boon to shareholders were "increased sales of 1.8% ($30.5 million)." The company's website boasts that "NSTAR is the largest Massachusetts-based, investor-owned electric and gas utility, with revenues of approximately $3.3 billion and assets totaling approximately $7.8 billion."

It is just conceivable, then, that NSTAR could absorb the cost itself without its investors going shoeless and hungry. So why is NSTAR shifting the cost of clean energy onto Massachusetts citizens, penalizing the people who are helping the company meet its legal duty by choosing wind power over fossil-fuel power? Because NSTAR is a private enterprise, albeit a regulated one, with a duty to its shareholders. In short, because it can.

Massachusetts deregulated electricity in 1998. Or, to be precise, the Democratic-controlled Legislature deregulated it, much to the detriment of the public. Since deregulation, prices have risen by approximately 50%. States that did not give in to the lobbyists and kept the provision of electricity under public control have not had to endure comparable rate hikes.

On the bright side, there is a law that allows Massachusetts communities to take back the ability to provide their own electricity (municipalization). But NSTAR's annual report notes that municipalization "is not a trend." Any community brave enough to try would face "numerous legal and regulatory consents and approvals" and would have to pay the company compensation.

So for NSTAR's customers, fossil-fuel power is cheaper and wind power is more costly. Why would any cash-strapped family choose the more expensive option? Ordinary families are already having a hard time making ends meet, so an additional $84-a-year for electricity means cutbacks somewhere else in the household budget. This sends an unequivocal and damaging message: If you want to reduce global warming, you (not the NSTAR shareholders) are going to have to pay. You can either go out for dinner one night, or you can help ensure that the planet your kids inherit is fit for human habitation. You can't do both.

Mike Tidwell, in the current edition of the magazine Orion, urges a wartime level of mobilization for clean-energy solutions:

"[T]o achieve these changes fast enough, the American people need a grassroots political movement that goes from zero to sixty in a matter of months, a movement that demands the sort of clean-energy policies and government mandates needed to transform our economy and our lives."
("Snap! The terrifying new speed of global warming and our last chance to stop it," Orion, May/June 2008, www.orionmagazine.org)

We have a choice. We can, as Mike Tidwell suggests, mobilize politically to bring about the transformation that the crisis requires. Or we can engage in the equivalent of the Phony War -- telling the for-profit energy companies to provide a mere 4% of their electricity from renewable sources and letting them meet that legal obligation by offering us wind-power as an optional extra while charging us a few dollars extra for the privilege.

Reducing the survival of the species to a luxury commodity, a matter of lifestyle choice, may strike you as outlandish, and hardly the we're-all-in-this-together attitude that is essential in a crisis of this magnitude. But it is the logical consequence of the Massachusetts Democrats' deregulation policies of the 1990s, and it makes complete sense from the consumerist perspective.

The choice we confront comes down to how we see ourselves. Companies like NSTAR depend on us perceiving ourselves first and foremost as consumers. Democracy, on the other hand, requires that we see ourselves as citizens. And democracy, unlike NSTAR's wind-power, it is not an optional extra.