California Dreaming

I'm not particularly devoted to travel advertisements. I discovered very early in my roving years that the beauty spot the travel ads hope to ensnare you to was very different from the beguiling picture they painted of it.

The charming but modest hotel in the romantic country painted by Manet or Monet was usually on a street where buses clattered and motorbikes ripped through at two-minute intervals through the night.

The nearby ocean, only minutes away, would have tested the best form of a long distance Olympic runner. And so on.

But I saw an ad the other day that tugged at me: "Come with us," it said, "down memory lane."

It was designed for old folks. It offered to accommodate a party of 12 or 20 and let them together decide on foreign spots they'd loved in their youth. The company then arrange the deal.

Well, 20 years ago I might have nibbled at this juicy bait, though I believe I'd have backed out at the last minute and chosen not only my own landscapes but my remembered hotels, restaurants, swimming coves, jai alai stadiums, not to mention what the song calls "all the girls I loved before".

Well now before this thing gets out of hand I'd better get down to the matter in hand. Come with me down memory lane.

You are, or imagine yourself to be, in the passenger seat of a 1933 model A Ford. In the driver's seat would be me, the lucky recipient of a lavish American university fellowship which required you, in the long summer vacation, to drive around as many of the 48 - as they then were - 48 states as possible.

The memory you're about to share puts us deep in the heart of Texas and about 30 miles to the north of the small town of Dallas - a place I was already fond of because it was the theme of a 12-bar blues sung by Fats Waller.

"I've got the Dallas blues," he sang, "the main street heart disease. That Texas town that never seen ice or snow."

It certainly wasn't seeing any ice or snow on that June evening. The outside temperature was well over 90 at twilight, the car was hotter still - we were about 20 more years away from air conditioning - but eventually we came up and over a hill and down there, ahead of us, was Dallas. The most shattering sight of my first trip around the United States.

The sky light had not quite faded from the horizon but across the whole width of it the land was roaring on fire - great, leaping, scarlet flames tearing round the whole curve of the horizon.

It was like - what's his name? - Gustave Dore's illustrations to Dante's inferno. The immediate thought was that I was present at surely one of the most devastating city fires in American history. Surely Chicago's famous blaze could not have done better.

We drove on and closer and curiously there were no screams, no sirens, no recognisable hullabaloo. The scene more and more resembled the faked-up, fiery backcloth of a scene at the Metropolitan opera. The fact is the fire was deliberate, was planned and contained - a regular show.

And when we sat down in a diner in Dallas the fire was still far off - out of town but still flaming away. It seemed best to ask the waitress what it was all about.

She pardoned herself for stifling a small yawn and said: "Natural gas, burning off as usual."

Natural gas, so-called, because it's found in the Earth's crust, not manufactured. And it says here in the dictionary: "Used for heating, lighting and cooking." Which only shows that this edition of the Oxford was printed long after our dive into flaming Dallas 68 years ago.

What the girl waitress said was nothing but the truth: "Natural gas. Burning it off as usual".

I didn't stay to wonder why.

About 10 years later during the Second War I was in Texas on a story and I asked a big oil man about this odd feature of the Texas landscape - the spears of flames stabbing the horizon.

He simply said: "Well it just escapes wherever drilling is being done. It's a useless by-product of oil production, so nothing to do but burn it off."

The evening after I'd bedded down in Dallas I drove 500 miles west to the last town in Texas before you go briefly through a corner of New Mexico and on into Arizona.

El Paso, in 1933, was a raffish, small town on the Mexican border, what they called a one horse town. Much of its business was caring for overnight tourists driving down for a day's visit over to Mexico.

You may get a sharp, painful sense of what California's sudden desperate need of electricity means over its 800-mile stretch when I tell you that many Californians blame the whole crisis on El Paso. On a natural gas company there which is, to be modest but frank about it, the biggest natural gas company in the world.

I ought to say at the beginning that the California power or energy crisis has more causes, more conflicting solutions, more good guys than bad guys than the competing theories that eventually led to Einstein's discovery of the formula e = mc².

In public debate it's been simplified into something very much cruder than the truth by exponents of the two main ideologies:

The free-market Republicans who complain that the discovered shortage of oil refineries is due to the crippling anti-pollution regulations built up during the past eight years by the Democrats.

At the other end of this national shouting match are the green conservationists who concentrate on one, and to be truthful very minor part of the quarrel, the Alaska wildlife refuge into which the Bush administration wishes to begin oil drilling on 8% of this vast reserve.

In between these extremes are citizen opponents of the Bush plan to rig up a thousand power plants and transmission towers on the general NIMBY principle - not in my back yard.

Opposed to them also are the Democrats who think the federal government should move in and re-regulate an industry that was clumsily de-regulated.

And against them of course is the whole Republican Party, which since the morning of Ronald Reagan's inauguration, has sworn to reduce Washington's interference in most everything.

As for California's crisis Vice-President Cheney, who's in charge of the president's energy plan, said: "The best solution is to let the free market prevail."

Natural gas was known to the ancients who thought it a supernatural phenomenon. Probably they just stayed at a safe distance and prayed. It was taken to be a warning symbol of the displeasure of one or another god.

Leap from the ancients to the 1950s. With the Second War over but the Soviet Union glaring across the borders of Western Europe, the Eisenhower administration began to worry, in abounding post-war prosperity, about the huge consumption of oil, the soaring demand for electricity with the nationwide spread of air conditioning, and a little more nervously, the need for a strategic reserve of oil in case of war, since America had to depend - as we all do - on Middle Eastern oil.

There was a lot of work done on synthetic fuels but it was very expensive, and offshore drilling was in its infancy.

Then somebody, I don't know who, remembered the flaming horizons of Texas. It was a sign of huge reserves of natural gas in this country. In Texas more than anywhere.

How to get it across the continent? The government at the dictate of Roosevelt had ordered an enormous pipeline called Big Inch to transmit oil from the Gulf of Mexico to the California coast for the needs of the Navy in the Pacific War.

Well Big Inch was eventually sold to a Texas transmission company and the longest part of it converted to a natural gas pipeline reaching to Los Angeles from - you've guessed - the little town of El Paso, Texas 700 miles to the east.

That pipeline was owned by El Paso Natural Gas Company. El Paso signed a long-term contract with a Pacific gas and electric company and El Paso prospered exceedingly.

Came the boom of the mid-90s, the deregulation of oil, and the fears of the Pacific electric votes that the price of natural gas would sink beyond trace. So one day the Pacific company dumped the El Paso contract.

Since two thirds of all El Paso's natural gas flowed to make electricity for California El Paso went, overnight, from riches to rags, losing close to $200m a year on the California feed alone. And began to look into bankruptcy proceedings.

California revelled in cheap petrol. But El Paso saved itself by expanding into states north, midwest, east - with everything from gas drilling to electric generation plants. In two or three years in the late 90s it had 60,000 miles of pipe from Arizona to the coast of New England - it didn't need California any more.

But the economy waned and only in the past year did California come to realise the huge increase in demand for electricity in industry and homes by the bounding 90s prosperity and the arrival of computers and the internet which suck up electricity like a famished schoolboy with an ice cream soda.

California wanted El Paso's natural gas again urgently. El Paso responded by quadrupling the price.

"It was as if," one California legislator said, "they'd shut off most of their pipeline to us."

So now El Paso says: California never gave a second thought to the idea of our bankruptcy. And California says: El Paso is an outrageous price gouger. The whole hassle is up before a state commission of inquiry.

That's only one story but it points like no other to the root cause of the California energy crisis - characteristic not only of California but of the country at large.

The tendency in good times to convert luxuries into necessities, to loot a cornucopia of CDs, VCRs, extra air conditioners, to build a second house, tear down a fine old house and build a 30-room monster, to make better, bigger gas-guzzling cars - everybody trying out the feel of being one of the new rich, buying more than ever - on credit if you have no cash.

This has happened about every 20 years since the 1890s. The 1990s were the biggest splurge, the longest day of sunshine.

For the pleasure of which, as my old Scottish caddy said, setting out on a beautiful day at St Andrews: "Aye, but we'll soon be paying a price for it."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.