This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 28th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

When Californians learned of a plan to let the Public Service Commission take remote control of their

thermostats during emergencies, they got more

than a little heated.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Peter Van Doorn, editor of Regulation magazine, says the program,

had it not been withdrawn might have given consumers

more choices about how they consume electricity. The California Energy

Commission proposed that all new structures in California be The California

be equipped with high-tech programmable interactive internet

facilitated thermostats so that the electricity providers in California could

communicate with that thermostat and during what are called stage two and

three electricity situations which are

situations of extreme shortage that the central controllers could

communicate with that thermostat and shut off in in effect raise the temperature so that your central air conditioning units

would be cycling or inoperative during these potentially devastating blackout

periods.

The media picked up on this and said,

in a kind of New York Post fashion,

said basically the government is now

going to control the thermostat in your house and will tell

you when to run your air conditioner.

And of course, the people on our side went nuts and I'm not sure what the reaction was on the left but people on the

...