As you may or may not know, the World Health Organization, after consideration of the large body of scientific evidence that now exists on Smart Meters, determined that wireless devices like Smart Meters pose a health hazard and risk of cancer, categorizing the radiation from such wireless devices as a Class 2B carcinogen. Some nuclear experts have said the radiation from Smart Meters is equivalent to 100 times the exposure of that emitted from a cell phone.
We should be grateful to the Lake County Board of Supervisors and to Lake County Counsel Anita Grant for maintaining a vigil on this matter and keeping public health and our county’s economy in the forefront of their decisions when weighing in on how to defend against PG&E’s position that if we want to opt out, we’ll have to pay for it and we give up our right to retain our perfectly fine working analog meters.
Thousands of reports have poured in statewide from people and their doctors after the installation of Smart Meters that are now linked to such deadly disorders as brain tumors, tinnitus, acoustic neuromas, childhood leukemia, neurodegenerative diseases, DNA damage and cognitive impairment. Smart Meter radiation also has been blamed for slowing motor skills, reducing learning ability, heating body tissue, lowering the immune system and damaging the blood-brain barrier that prevents toxins from entering the brain.
For PG&E, Smart Meters represent a gold mine in new fees and creative ways to charge for your current energy consumption in what they call time-of use-rates. Eventually, they’d like everyone connected to a grid that they could monitor and control from a central source which means that in our future, our appliances would be under the central control of the utility company. For understandable reasons, a lot of people take issue with this.
Then there’s the issue of vulnerability to hacking. This type of wireless system is susceptible to the most vicious of hacking crimes with the most devastating of consequences. A single hacker could bring down a large region of the country and that’s a terrorist nightmare waiting to happen.
And what of the millions of bits of personal data collected and stored on servers that could not possibly be secure enough to protect our rights to privacy? It’s not that we have something to hide or that we are guilty of anything. It’s the principle of a utility company owning this information and to whom it could become available and for what purpose.
This whole Smart Meter movement was thrust upon an unsuspecting citizenry and sold as something green and environmentally conscious while claims that it will ensure a cleaner environment cannot be substantiated. What we can be sure of is that a private power company will make a fortune and that many will be made sick and that we will once again fall prey to the greedy machinations of a corporation run amuck.
We have a chance now to stand up for Lake County and support our supervisors as well as the mayors of the cities of Clearlake and Lakeport that passed ordinances banning Smart Meter installations here though PG&E and the CPUC chose to ignore these bans and continued to install despite public rejection. More than 10 counties and 34 cities throughout California have demanded a halt to smart meter installations and more are considering taking action.
In a decision reached May 17 by the state of Maine’s Public Utilities Commission, Maine’s PUC upheld citizen’s rights to retain their existing analog meters and for a nominal charge. We in California have not been given that option because the decision making process has been corrupted by industry insiders who run the CPUC and write blank checks to companies like PG&E. That’s an outrage.
Be sure you’re at the Lake County Board of Supervisors meeting Sept. 13. Even if you’ve never gone to a public hearing before or spoken out in public, now’s the time to do it. The world’s what we make it. Take the leap. Your voice matters!
Howard Glasser lives in Kelseyville, Calif.
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