Global Citizens' Call to Arms

In the article "It may be lights out," Warren Causey suggests agreement with Marty Rosenberg’s article Energy and Presidential Debates by writing that “There are massive problems to be solved in the electric industry, costing massive amounts of money, and with very little time to do it.” Mr. Causey adds that “NERC Chair and CEO said essentially the same thing.”

In a comment to Mr. Causey’s article, Mark Kaminski doesn’t “see any alternative call to arms.” The alternative has been available in Electricity Without Price Controls (EWPC).

EWPC is not just “A faith-in-the-market alternative,” as it has two interacting and balancing markets: a controlled transportation (a compact of the integrated transmission and distribution - the new utility - with a responsibility to transport electricity) market and an open retail and wholesale market. The first is still under price control regulation of tolls, while the second is under prudential regulations.

To get introduced into the alternative anyone should look at the EWPC article Shrinking the Regulator’s Jobs, written under a systemic perspective. To get people to “step up” as Mr. Rosemberg suggest, in my response to Bob Amorosi’s comment to this article, I wrote the following call to arms:

I believe that the media we are sharing [on the energy Central Network] is giving us an emergent unconventional alternative that we need to approach on how to make it happen by telling elective officials what to do, just as other grassroots movement did it in the past in different circumstances. This is also an era of transformation, where leadership is of the utmost importance to resolve the anomaly of the obsolete business model of utilities winning rate cases to regulators, when customers can do it better for themselves if given choice under market competition.

The alternative is a network of engaged global citizens. Eamonn Kelly in his book "Powerful Times: rising to the challenges of our uncertain world," suggests that "Participating together, passionate people will continue to discover and fulfill their potential and exercise their individual and collective power in pursuit of a shared moral purpose."

Kelly adds "we can and must become a 'bigger we.' We have globalized the economy and culture, but we have not yet globalized our sense of ourselves; that lies in our better future... This will not be driven by national governments; it is not how they perceive their role. Neither will it be a priority of businesses small or large, even as they embrace the concept of moral wisdom; it is not their business. In fact, there is only one actor we can expect to promote the growing consciousness of a global self, and that is us: individuals, people, citizens. We have voice, we have passion, we have information, we have unprecedented power, and we have an incredible common stake - only the future of our emergent yet fragile civilization... In the elegant words of the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan, ‘If not us, who? If not now, when?’"