Understanding Radio Frequency (Translated from the PG&ESE)

PG&E is facing increasing alarm and outrage from concerned citizens around the state who don’t understand how the company could inflict health damaging spikes of microwave radiation on the nice people of California without at least taking reasonable steps to test the devices for safety first.  How could a major corporation be so stupid and destructive?  Based on the thumbs up we regularly get from PG&E trucks passing our protests, I suspect that many of their own employees are still trying to figure that one out as well.  The growing awareness that all is not well with the smart meter’s emissions has led PG&E to publish a new page on their website: Understanding Radio Frequency.

Now we know that dealing with a mega corporation like PG&E can often feel like beating your head against the wall.  They say things like, “we’re continuing to engage our customers in a conversation about the benefits of smart meters.”  That’s a little like the guy downstairs who chain smokes responding to your complaints by saying that he’d like to engage with you about the advantages of inhaling second hand smoke.  That is not a conversation.  More like psychopathic self-deception as the walls of reality close in.

PG&E can be so obtuse and inhuman that it sometimes feels like they are speaking in a different language.  We believe they in fact are speaking a different language.  We call this corporate language PG&ESE.  So, as a public service to the people of California, we’ve taken the liberty of translating their new web page from PG&ESE- into English:

PG&ESE:  “As PG&E deploys SmartMeter™ gas and electric meters across Northern and Central California, some customers and communities are asking about the possible health effects of radio frequency emissions from the meters. We hope this information will help answer those questions.”

English Translation: As PG&E forces DumbMeter™ gas and electric meters onto residents across Northern and Central California, nearly two dozen cities and counties have demanded a halt to the program based on peer-reviewed scientific studies linking the types of emissions from DumbMeters™ to short and long term health impacts.  We hope the following information will help to play down these fears long enough for us to finish our installation of the millions of DumbMeters™ that we were stupid enough to purchase using the rate increases that our friends at the CPUC approved.

PG&ESE: “We understand that our customers want to be well informed about new technologies. SmartMeter™ devices are digital meters that have been widely used since the 1980s. The new development is a small 1-watt radio that allows two-way communication between the customer and PG&E, which enables the customer to review their daily energy use.”

English Translation: We understand that not all of our customers wish to be treated like guinea pigs, subjected to unprecedented levels of electromagnetic radiation in their home environment, which have increased more than a thousand-fold since the 1980’s thanks to our friends in the telecom industry (where our CEO Peter Darbee hails from).  The truth is that we don’t really care.  What we do care about is our huge billion dollar annual profits, which will increase as soon as we are able to layoff the 1000 pesky meter readers who demand a paycheck every month unlike the digital devices we are replacing them with.  We’re too cheap to spring for the extra cost of using shielded cables to transmit customer usage data so we decided to use wireless technology instead. We just feel like your health is expendable.

PG&ESE:  “A SmartMeter™ device transmits relatively weak radio signals, resembling those of many other devices we use every day, like cell phones and baby monitors. A major radio station, by contrast, usually transmits with 50,000 times as much power.”

English Translation:  “A DumbMeter™ device transmits relatively weak radio signals compared with your microwave oven (which we initially asked the FCC for permission to install but we realized that humans who are cooked like hot dogs have trouble authorizing a debit account).  We’ll conveniently neglect to mention that cell phone and baby monitor wireless technologies have been implicated in brain tumors and other nasty lethal ailments, trusting that the public’s ignorance of wireless impacts will hold out long enough for us to finish installation.

PG&ESE: “Based on years of studying whether radio waves cause health effects, the Federal Communications Commission has adopted Maximum Permissible Exposure limits for radio transmitters of all types, including smart meters. It includes a prudent margin of safety just in case some health effects are too subtle to have been detected. Even so, SmartMeter™ devices operate far below the limit—typically only about one-seventieth as much.”

English translation:  Based on years of lobbying and purchasing of elected officials by the telecommunications industry, the Federal Communications Commission has adopted Convenient Exposure Limits that are far higher than most other countries, who have acted in order to protect human health.  It includes a healthy margin of profit in case any of these pesky “health advocates” interfere with the massive rollout of cell towers and wireless technology that will allow us to play golf and eat steak dinners until we die of a cell phone induced glioma ourselves.

Because the truth is kinda scary- that DumbMeters™ actually emit more intense bursts of microwave radiation than have been found to be biologically damaging – we need to time-average that data to obscure the real impact on you and your family.   With some apartments having more than 30 meters mounted on walls less than three feet from where children sleep, we hope you won’t ask about cumulative impacts, or calculate peak emissions.  We just did the math and realized we might have made a little boo boo and that smart meters might result in bursts of radiation that are far more powerful than the radiation from a cell phone- a miscalculation that might result in thousands of cancer cases in a few years.  Instead of admitting our mistake, we’d rather hide behind outdated FCC standards and hope we won’t end up like the tobacco company executives.

PG&ESE: “Exposure is based on the transmitter’s power and your distance from the source. In general, doubling your distance cuts the so-called “power density” by a factor of four. That’s a major reason why radio waves from a smart meter, at a distance of 10 feet, are only about one one-thousandth as much as a typical cell phone. That’s also why powerful but distant radio and TV transmitters are not seen as posing any danger.”

English translation:  Exposure is based on the transmitter’s power and your distance from the source.  Unfortunately for residents of California, they will never be too far away from a DumbMeter™ that will add to the already significant electrosmog from Wifi, cordless phones and cell phones. We now admit that people with pacemakers should stay at least six inches away from our DumbMeters™ which we sort of forgot to mention when we rolled out the technology.

PG&ESE: “Some people wonder if the long-term use of devices like cell phones might have unexpected health effects even if daily exposure is low. The World Health Organization advises: “A large number of studies have been performed over the last two decades to assess whether mobile phones pose a potential health risk. To date, no adverse health effects have been established for mobile phone use.” And cell phones are typically held against your head when in use, while smart meters are outside your house, on the other side of the wall.”

English translation:  Some people manage to do research for themselves and break through the corporate spin world that everything is okay and they can just carry on using cell phones and wifi and living with their DumbMeter™ as if there’s no problem.  The World Health Organization, which is currently investigating electromagnetic fields from cell phones as a possible carcinogen, is worryingly not immune from the influence of the telecommunications industry itself, which lends itself to convenient quotable statements that we can use to keep people in the dark with.

PG&ESE:  “Should you be concerned about long-term exposure to smart meters, even if scientists can’t find any trace of health problems from cell phones? Common sense suggests not. Consider that SmartMeter™ devices transmit only about 45 seconds a day. You’d have to live with one of our meters for more than 1,000 years to get as much exposure to radio waves as a typical cell phone user gets in just one month.”

English translation: Should you be concerned about long-term exposure to DumbMeters™ considering that virtually every long term study not funded by the cell phone industry has found a connection with glioma brain tumors?  Common sense suggests that- yes- you’d have to be either pretty gullible or totally trusting of our government to think that you were safe being exposed to these levels of radiation.  Consider that DumbMeter™ devices can transmit up to 50% of the time according to independent tests, and may be relaying information from up to 1000 of your neighbors homes, using intense bursts of radiation that have been shown in scientific trials to be the most biologically damaging.  But we’ll just continue referring to it as radio frequency because that sounds a lot more innocuous than microwave radiation, which is what it really is.