Marylee Shrider: Say yes to Prop 8 — and no to PG&E
| Friday, Oct 03 2008 05:21 PM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 01:01 PM
It's good to be the king. Or PG&E.
When you're king, or a fat-cat near-monopoly like PG&E, it's OK to goose your subjects, then pooh-pooh the protests.
Or so PG&E apparently thought in July, when it donated $250,000 to the campaign to crush Proposition 8, the November ballot initiative that protects traditional marriage.
Secure in the knowledge it's got its customers right where it wants them, PG&E paid out the big bucks to advance its pet political cause, then barely acknowledged the outcry that followed.
It was an arrogant move and, like the California Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage, a breach of trust.
The thing is, PG&E customers aren't quite as stuck as they might think.
While it's true that PG&E's 200,000 or so Kern County customers have little choice in regard to the electricity they use, they do have some say about natural gas. Though most of the state's “core customers” — small commercial and residential customers like you and me — buy their gas from regulated utilities like PG&E and Southern California Gas, they do “have the option to purchase natural gas from independent, unregulated natural gas marketers,” according to the California Public Utilities Commission.
Which means, if PG&E's natural gas users want to goose the king a bit, they can.
Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, and a tireless defender of traditional marriage, was in Bakersfield this week spreading the word and encouraging PG&E natural gas users to shop around.
Dacus was even able to offer a solid alternative for PG&E customers, one he says met stringent criteria before meriting the institute's recommendation. The end result is a “no-brainer for people who believe in traditional marriage.”
“We did our research,” Dacus says. “We wanted to find a natural gas provider that did both commercial and residential, one that wouldn't suddenly support a cause divergent from what mainstream Californians would support and one that is, year-to-year, lower in cost than PG&E.”
After an exhaustive search, the institute found what they were looking for in Tiger Natural Gas, an independent company that services 20 different states and customers like IBM and the U.S. Postal Services.
Johnathan Burris, manager of business development for Tiger, says the company takes no public stand on Proposition 8 or any other political issue, but only offers itself as an alternative supplier.
“The majority of people in California have no idea they have options about who they can buy their natural gas from,” Burris says. Now they do.
PG&E customers who feel they've been forced to support an unsupportable cause, may visit www.NOtoPGE.comfor more information on how to switch to Tiger. Contact information for independent natural gas marketers can also be found on the utilities' Web sites, according to the CPUC.
Switching natural gas providers isn't going to break a giant like PG&E, but it will send the message that the peasants will no longer roll over and take it when the king stomps on their deeply held convictions.
“PG&E thinks they've got everyone,” Dacus says. “We want this effort to be the Waterloo for PG&E and other companies who denigrate the consumer by compelling them to indirectly support causes they totally disagree with.”
These are Marylee Shrider's opinions, not necessarily The Californian's. Her column appears on Saturday. Call her at 395-7474 or write mshrider@bakersfield.com .
