Oil and Gas Companies Should Pay for the Los Angeles Fires
It’s time to require oil and gas companies to compensate communities, homeowners, businesses and even insurers for the losses.
It’s crazy our energy companies are still private. Keeping up the infrastructure + energy generation + operations + making the company a profit seems unrealistic in the first place and they always seem ready to compromise (read: neglect) the infrastructure bit of the equation where the bulk of the cost ends up on the government/taxpayers anyway when something inevitably goes wrong. Unrelated to LA but Newsom needs to stop sleeping with PG&E.
It’s worth noting that this state of affairs is highly localized. Like my power company (Public Utility District) is run by the county government distributing power generated by a federal government organization(Bonneville Power Administration). Electricity is at sub 9c per kwh plus 52 dollars a month for a line. The BVA also somehow manages to keep its transmission lines trimmed despite a bunch of heavy forest.
Not only is a better system possible, it has provided power to millions for nearly a century right here in America a few hours drive away. Cali could absolutely copy Washington’s homework, but that would involve actually undoing something Ragen did to benefit private industry at taxpayers expense and so Newsom isn’t exactly rushing to make it happen.
I live in a city (in California) where the power and water is regulated by a public quasi-government thing. It's not a private business, and it claims to be not-for-profit. Everywhere surrounding the city (including all the smaller towns) is handled by PG&E afaik, tho.
This makes me both sad and happy (to know there’s a working solution right nextdoor where wildfires are also an issue).
If you give some rich people a butt load of money they will tell a judge that the wind is the real culprit here. The blame truly belongs to a butterfly. If you give that judge some fancy rich people trips, they'll agree and that's perfectly legal and perfectly fine. If anything, noticing it and making the judge feel bad about it is the problem that really needs to be addressed.
