Power Play: The Fight to Control the World s Electricity - Hardcover

Beder, Sharon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 156584808X ISBN 13: 9781565848085

Publisher: The New Press, 2003

Synopsis

As electrification spread across America in the early twentieth century, private corporations moved quickly to reap unprecedented profits from millions of new paying customers. Blocking their path was the widespread view that electricity was a basic need and that its production should be regulated―if not owned outright―by the public. The electricity companies fought back, buying up newspapers, radio stations, and politicians, and flooding the schools with free, pro-industry schoolbooks. Their actions heralded the advent of corporate public relations, and form a major chapter in the history of the industry.

In an eye-opening investigation, Sharon Beder's Power Play reveals the decades-long struggle to wrest control of electricity from public hands. Her analysis ranges from the machinations of American political power to grassroots struggles in South Asia aimed at stemming the environmental degradation caused by multinational energy providers. In so doing, she sets the stage for understanding the damage done by deregulation, the roots of the Enron scandal, and the contemporary debacle of electricity supply.

About this title

About the Author

Sharon Beder is the author of numerous books, including Global Spin, Selling the Work Ethic, and The Nature of Sustainable Development. She is currently associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Reviews

Australian scholar Beder has heard free market advocates argue that government control works against economic efficiency. She's also seen them campaign to deregulate the electrical power industry, promising lower costs, better management and harder-working employees. Still, after assembling evidence of the outcome of deregulating electricity markets in different settings, she's skeptical. For instance, California, which began deregulating its electricity market after a 1996 liberalization of its energy law, saw its politicians, industrialists, environmentalists and consumers united to support a program they believed would lower the price of power and bring the state publicity as a pioneer. The program did receive news coverage, but it was for blackouts, skyrocketing energy prices and possible fraud. The state paid dearly; one study estimated the 1996 deregulation law will cost Californians approximately $71 billion. Going beyond tales of duped industries and Enron's profiteering schemes in California, Beder meticulously documents the worldwide push by energy companies, developers and international bankers to proclaim the benefits of deregulated electricity markets, whereas, she indicates forcefully, disastrous effects in Brazil should be enough to challenge their credibility. As Beder catalogues lost jobs, rising prices and declining service, yet finds large profits going to private developers and power companies, she becomes convinced recent experiments in deregulation of electricity have been nothing more than a confidence trick. Beder's blistering indictment of the wealth transfer from the public to private industry (under the guise of achieving economic efficiency) powerfully urges readers to prevent such abuse of public trust in the future.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156584808X
• ISBN 13: 9781565848085
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416