Sorry, City Light, That Money's For Destroying The Earth

God dammit! We're in no way convinced carbon offsets are any kind of a solution to global warming, but the news that a King County court has decided that Seattle City Light can't use ratepayer's money to buy them pisses us off nonetheless. Their argument is that it should be general taxpayer money that saves the Earth, and that ratepayer money is for the operation of the utility.

From the Seattle Times:

The decision followed in the steps of recent rulings that ratepayer money couldn't be used to pay for Seattle street lights or for public art in places like the Ballard Bridge.

While using money from ratepayers to fight global warming might be a good thing, Chief Justice Gerry Alexander wrote, such actions provide a general public benefit, not one closely tied to the utility's main job.

State law requires that utilities expenditures have a connection to their operations.

Most of City Light's power is hydroelectric which doesn't have immediate pollution concerns that would need to be offset, but the utility does buy additional power from nearby natural gas plants and the idea that cleaning up after those plants doesn't represent a "connection to their operations" is so ass-backwards it's hard to imagine a court would rule that way in 2007. Screw the court, actually. What about the four concerned citizens who brought this case against City Light in the first place?

Again from the Times:

For Rud Okeson, a former City Light manager, it's a third victory in his campaign to keep City Light from spending customers' money on things he believes are unrelated to the utility's work.

The Seattle resident and three others are behind the suits challenging City Light payments for streetlights and public art.

Thank you, Rud, for shitting on our children's planet. Carbon offsets aren't going to get us out of the global warming hole we're in, but granting a utility the capacity to deal with the emissions it creates is kind of a step in the right direction. Kind of central to the business they're in, in our book.

We read a great Elizabeth Kolbert article in the current New Yorker about a guy who would probably scoff at carbon offsets and, somewhat rightly, claims that gains should be made on the consumption end instead. That is, there are efficiency gains out there for the taking. So last night we were walking around the house screwing in our new compact fluorescents and turning down the thermostat on the fishtank (because, yeah, we're going to save the planet with cold fish) and dreaming of the big pile of money it was going to save us on our power bill. We went online to get a baseline (because you can't know what you're saving if you don't know what you were consuming to begin with) and found City Light's reporting on our usage to be somewhat lacking. Maybe asking how much energy we used last week is asking a lot (and real time is ridiculous), but are we really expected to track something like unplugging a 100 wattt light bulb four months ago? It's cool that they offer the analysis at all, but we'd be in favor of spending a little more to keep it a lot more current. Unfortunately they're going to be busy paying off legal challenges from Rud for the time being, so it'll have to wait.