FPL, GE and the meaning of green ... by gimleteye

Yes! It is the top story in today's Miami Herald: "MIami Mayor Manny Diaz and the chief executives of four major national companies announced a sweeping move Monday to make Miami-Dade County the national leader in the green movement." That would be the new green movement, because we were already the leader in the "old" green movement: the color of greed that crippled the US economy. (see our archive, 'housing crash' and click 'read more')

Yes! It is important to look forward. But all the 'glimmers of hope' and promises of a new energy economy--which I strongly support-- don't add up to leaving history behind. After the misery of the last decade-- and the destruction of trillions of personal wealth-- an accounting is past due and the interest is running.

The political aspirations of Mayor Diaz will never outrun the zoning and permitting of overdevelopment he championed, now in ruins. When the boom was on, he viewed all development as fantastic; joined by the majority of city commissioners. Today, Miami's downtown is littered with foreclosures, skyrocketing costs to be born by taxpayers, and the remnant lost fortunes of developer titans. And Mayor Diaz is another shade of green. Fair enough? Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, is another shade of green, too; presiding over the nation's top industrial conglomerate whose real businesses have been dragged down by financial derivatives GE's divisions built too, spun out of ether that turned common shareholders into paupers and made GE executives and board directors rich. Lewis Hayes, CEO of Florida Power and Light, was one of the state's top cheerleaders through the decade of unsustainable growth. He is another industrialist who mastered head fakes when it comes to assurances that utilities care about protecting the environment, like the Glades coal-fired power plant he tried to build and new nuclear in South Dade where Hayes is responsible for hiding facts on rock mining in wetlands and where the new coolant water will come from.

This history is part of the continuum in which the new green shades the old green. What is also history is that more than 30 years were wasted while corporate America and politics suppressed science of global warming. We are done with that now. Now that the glaciers are melted and the ice caps turned to ice cubes.

In sum, we can all support smart energy meters-- the occasion of yesterday's news conference in Miami-- but don't forget that tax dollars are being spent on green initiatives that industry should have been compelled to do all along.

The bottom line is clear: demand reduction of electricity through conservation should be Florida state policy as it is in California. Part of the meaning of yesterday's press conference and announcement is Corporate America's attempt to assure the public it doesn't need government to tell it what to do-- even though vast swaths of American industry can no longer stand on their own two feet except for the contribution of taxpayers. So is the new green any different from the old green? Neither politics nor the law have provided answers, so far.