October 2019: more, massive fires sweeping through Northern California, where I live. Let us count the blames:
Climate change - dryer, hotter climate for us
Deferred maintenance (that’s putting it very nicely) on PG&E’s grid
More homes in more at-risk areas
PG&E gets lots of blame. In a hellish consequence, in October 2019 we see people in the dark - with no power and no phone service, because of a PG&E blackout - fleeing wildfires caused by PG&E equipment. The Wall Street Journal (ARTICLE HERE) reported that the company “knew for years that hundreds of miles of high-voltage power lines could fail and spark fires, yet it repeatedly failed to perform the necessary upgrades.” Some power lines were built in the 1920s - and had an expected life in service that ended decades ago.
It was at fault in major fires in 2017 and 2018 - and it seems as at fault again for the 2019 Kincade fire in Sonoma County in 2019. Yes, it did cut maintenance costs across the board, and push some maintenance staff out - to return as lower-cost contractors - while paying nice C-level bonuses and dividends and stock buybacks. It’s easy to see this as a moral issue, but it’s also, or principally, an issue of financial obligations and corporate incentives. Once PG&E was liberated from its historic tightly-regulated utility origins - an outcome it sought via generous lobbying campaigns - the incentive structures and the ‘fiduciary obligations’ to maximize return to shareholders led to the outcomes we see.
The point: to get different corporate partnerships in solving global problems, such as climate change, we need different corporate incentives.