"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without" or trouble at the OCPA delays efforts to reduce GHG output.

The Mission Viejo city council invited Brian Probolsky, the problematic CEO of the Orange County Power Authority (OCPA) to make a presentation on June 28.  This was what I had asked for months ago, and I am grateful to councilwoman Trish Kelley for puttinh him on the agenda.  Since the subject of Community Choice Energy had been discussed in 2021 and subsequently put aside for future discussion, this would have been a fine opportunity for the city council to vote for the adoption of CCE for Mission Viejo.

Alas, this wasn’t to be so because long simmering doubts about Probolsky’s leadership as well as OCPA’s transparency and rates have come to a boil during the last few weeks, throwing a monkey wrench into our efforts to convince the first south county city to vote for greener electricity.  For me, this is a classic instance of the perfect becoming the enemy of the good and of process becoming more important than results.

I’d like to know why is it necessary to examine the OCPA’s dirty linen in public?  Why is this not done behind closed doors?  And who hired Probolsky in the first place since he is such a bad egg?

Climate change appears to be accelerating, and delaying GHG output reductions will have disastrous consequences for us and future generations.  We need to act fast across the board, and if we cannot even pick the low hanging fruit because it’s not quite to our taste, such as the currently constituted OCPA, we're doomed.  Besides, the usual suspects that want the CCE movement to fail are having a field day over this brouhaha, and it keeps me, for the time being, from advocating effectively for OCPA before the MV and any other city council.

Instead, the MV city council will postpone any action on CCE/OCPA, and I’ll ask Climate Change and Global Warming to kindly take a time-out until the OCPA board figures out how to improve its act.  This unfortunately, is not a surprising outcome as discussing and postponing Climate Change actions have been the MO of governments and businesses around the world for half a century.  If future generations can look back at our behavior, they’ll probably call us the worst generation.

("Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without" is attributed to Confucius.)