People wondered when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced legislation last year to forbid development in a million-acre swath of the Mohave Desert, curbing 13 proposed solar plants and wind farms. But it raises a lot more questions when you see the Center for Biological Diversity team up with California Unions for Reliable Energy to intervene, obstruct, delay, strangle and wreck — no, not another oil rig — a whole string of large solar energy projects.
The Center for Biological Diversity couldn’t care less about workers or their unions. They’re just glad to have somebody else yelling about endangered species.
But what’s in it for job-seeking blue collar unionists to team up with job-killing greenies?
The 250-megawatt, 1,800-acre Genesis Solar Energy Project got its California Energy Commission license a little over a month ago. CURE fought it alongside the CBD, alarmed about the endangered desert tortoise and American Indian cultural sites.
Who is this CURE? It’s a project of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, a coalition of 14 affiliated unions.
CURE has a long track record of playing environmentalist — the energy commission told me CURE has intervened to stop eight of the nine solar energy developments on this year’s docket, and old newspaper clips show CURE doing the same for many years.
Why? To choke developers with impossible demands until they accept a project labor agreement, or PLA, a controversial package deal that gives a ruling union council great power — to allow only its selected unions to work on projects, to make nonunion workers join a local union, and charge 25 cents per hour for each employee for its war chest, in exchange for a guarantee that workers won’t strike.
Just sign on the dotted line and suddenly your foe becomes your friend. All those endangered tortoises and disturbed burial sites are forgotten.
But wait, isn’t that blackmail? Developers have called it “greenmail” and “environmental extortion.”
Not every union approves of CURE’s tactics. When Genesis Energy went through its decisive hearing in August, Danny Curtin, director of the California Conference of Carpenters, listened to hours of CURE’s complaints, then got up and said to the commissioners:
“Let the project stand or fall on what it needs to deliver. Move off of all of the things you’ve heard from the CURE group about this environmental issue or that environmental issue. The motivation behind that is really inappropriate.”
Just to make sure the commission got the message, Douglas J. McCarron, general president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, sent the commissioners a letter:
“I urge you to be especially cautious of any labor organizations that express opposition to these urgently needed renewable energy projects on environmental grounds. While it is their right, their motives may be to pressure developers and their chosen contractors to sign outdated labor agreements that do not fit the needs of this newly emerging and evolving industry. It will not only add extra, unnecessary, uncompetitive costs, it will hamper and obstruct the process of innovation essential to this vital industry. The clean energy revolution is too important to allow these tactics especially under the guise of environmental concern.”
The California Energy Commission took McCarron’s advice and ignored CURE and CBD this time, ending the process in time to make Genesis eligible for federal stimulus cash grants.
Genesis got its license and negotiated a satisfactory union-backed labor agreement. It doesn’t always end this way, but Commissioner Robert B. Weisenmiller said the state’s need for renewable energy and the 650 jobs Genesis would create outweigh the downside.
Examiner contributor Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
