California's Negawatt Revolution
Environmentalist lobby group the Club of Rome's report Factor Four announced that business could double wealth and half resource use back in 1997. Their example of how to make money by saving the environment was the California electricity business. Instead of profiting by making megawatts, the California electricity companies were rewarded for making savings, or 'negawatts':
'Around 1980, Pacific Gas and Electricity Company was planning to build some 10-20 power stations' read the Factor Four report. 'But by 1992, P&GE was planning to build no more power stations, and in 1993, it permanently dissolved its engineering and construction division. Instead as its 1992 Annual Report pronounced, it planned to get at least three quarters of its new power needs in the 1990s from more efficient use by its customers' (Earthscan, p160)
In practice, though, the reduction in electricity generation simply increased the price - by as much as 900 per cent in December 2000. With electricity prices to customers capped, utility companies could not afford to buy electricity elsewhere and P&GE ran up losses of $12 billion before introducing the inevitable blackouts. Blame for the electricity crisis is bandied around. New Economy enthusiasts are surprised to learn that 'post-material' IT consumes electricity as voraciously as do old economy industries. Despite being the tenth largest economy in the world, California has learnt that you cannot run a state on 'negawatts'.
Such a shame about Laurent Kabila
The assassination of Congo president Laurent Kabila was greeted with ill-disguised glee amongst Western commentators. It was not always thus. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described Kabila as a 'beacon of hope' and a 'strong new leader' when he took power from the ageing dictator Mobutu in 1997. Then Kabila was supported by the State Department's favorite regional dictators Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda - the three lionised as a new generation of African leaders. But since then Kabila, Museveni and Kagame fell out, and the Rwandan army that had taken him to power, took arms against him, plunging the country into war.
Most surreal of all the comments on Kabila is the bandying about of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's assessment of Kabila's role in the Congo wars of the 1960s. Very few present-day politicians would have met the Cuban guerilla leader's exacting standards, but Guevara's critical comments on Kabila are regularly quoted by newspapers that have no sympathy with Guevara's goal of ridding the Congo of imperialism. Indeed, Richard Gott, who republished Guevara's Congo diaries as a blast against Kabila at the same time charges him with having 'alienated foreign investors by refusing to make payments on the gigantic foreign debt of $14bn incurred by his profligate predecessor' (Guardian January 19, 2001).
The truth is that the future of the Congo continues to be decided by forces outside its borders. On independence, the United Nations' own envoy Conor Cruise O'Brien charged the UN with complicity in the murder of radical prime minister Patrice Lumumba. The United States backed dictator Mobutu's regime as a base for attacks on the radical nationalist movement in Angola. Kabila's own rise to power was not popular, but simply better supported. His subsequent fall was decided not in the Congo, but Washington.
-- James Heartfield