Bill Bradley

You can hear the waterfall in the Capitol. The raft of state is drifting closer and closer to the edge. The rushing sound grows along with the numbers that define our power crisis, some of which have been kept very quiet. Here are some of the bigger numbers: In 1999,......

The pigeons of California’s power crisis returned home to roost this week with the state‘s first rolling blackouts in two months, including the first in the Los Angeles area since World War II. It is fair to blame the outages on last month’s accident at San Onofre nuclear power plant,......

They said it was a small fire. The reactor automatically shut down as a precaution. Minor damage would be repaired in just a few weeks. The reality, however, is quite different, with enormous consequences. A turbine at Southern California Edison‘s San Onofre nuclear power plant, situated right on the coast......

Events in California‘s power crisis are happening too swiftly and too slowly. Too swiftly for informed, democratic decision making. Too slowly for the pace of events. As is his custom, Governor Gray Davis called this week’s announcement of some long-term power contracts ”a major breakthrough.“ But the situation is still......

SACRAMENTO -- Gray Davis had a different sort of governorship in mind. He figured he’d raise tremendous amounts of campaign cash, stay out of the way of business, and preside over budget surpluses fattened by the flush new economy. Then he‘d raise tremendous amounts of campaign cash, go to the......

However vexing California’s current energy crisis may seem, it would be immeasurably worse but for the governorship of Jerry Brown. During his two terms as governor (1975--83), Brown initiated what were then viewed as radical innovations in energy policy, shifting state priorities away from nuclear energy toward environment-friendly sources and......

SAN FRANCISCO -- It‘s quiet at the roosting place of the architect of California’s failed experiment in electric-power deregulation. Here in San Francisco‘s spiffy Embarcadero Center are the elegant, hushed offices of the globe-spanning, carnivorous-sounding mega--law firm LeBoeuf Lamb Greene & MacRae. Daniel W.L. Fessler, 59 years old, Western-born and......

SACRAMENTO -- Not so fast. Back on January 27, after a Gray Davis press conference, the Los Angeles Times reported on a supposed bipartisan consensus in which the state would bail out California’s big private utilities in exchange for warrants, a form of stock options. That, however, was wrong. There......

SACRAMENTO -- The state Capitol is a fairly surreal place today. Outside, its Renaissance-revival exterior remains scarred by the explosive impact of a 40-ton rig driven by a maddened truck driver. Inside, the venerable building plays host to a frantic scramble to keep the juice on. Schemes to fix the......