Dear Mayor Newsom: pertinent questions on Clean Energy

Pub date October 17, 2008
SectionBruce Blog

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I am doing a special set of Pertinent Questions on the Clean Energy Initiative (Prop H) for all the persons and organizations that PG&E enlisted to front for its multi-million dollar campaign of Big Lies to defeat H. My first pertinent questions go to Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is in the unenviable position trying to be Gavin the Green while standing with PG&E and against the residents and businesses and environmentalists and neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Dear Mayor Newsom, (via press secretary Nathan Ballard):

I see that PG&E is using you as its major poster boy for its multi-million dollar campaign against the Clean Energy Initiative on the November ballot (Prop H).

I would like to ask you the following questions for my Bruce Blog on the Guardian website at SFBG.com. I am doing a series of questions for persons and organizations that PG&E is using to front its campaign against H, the most expensve initiative campaign in city history.

+How can you represent yourself as the “green mayor” and be a “green talk show” host on green 960 radio when you are standing with PG&E and against the residents, businesses, the environmental community, the Democratic party, the City and County of San Francisco, and the federal Raker Act of l9l3 (which mandates San Francisco become a real public power city?)

+How can you, as mayor, representing thousands of city employees, allow PG&E as a private power company to in effect say that city workers and managers are too dumb, too incompetent, too reckless, and too lazy to run an electric system?

+How can you, as mayor, allow PG&E to in effect control the city’s Hetch Hetchy public power system and the city’s energy policy and thus jeopardize our entire Hetch Hetchy water and power system because the city is in violation of the public power mandates of the Raker Act?

+How can you, as mayor, allow the dirty Potrero Hill power plant to keep pumping away because PG&E controls the city’s energy policy? (I see the fumes every day from my office window on Mississippi Street.)

I would appreciate answers or comments by 5 p.m. today that you could either put on my my blog yourself or give to me to put up on my blog. Thanks very much.

Sincerely yours,

Bruce B. Brugmann, editor and publisher

P.S. No answer as of blogtime on Friday. I’ll keep you posted.