PG&E Files for Bankruptcy Following California Wildfires
wsj.com
wsj.com
Pretty sure it's the first time that I see, in the wild on the web, a result of erroneous sed-style replacement.
This seems like a mistake to me. I mean, even if PG&E did everything right (and I'm not saying they did), the statistical chances of electrical equipment sparking a fire, and that fire causing huge damage, especially with global warming making things worse, seems like it would be impossible to have an electric company that wouldn't go bankrupt.
Seems maybe we'd want something similar to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Board. That is, no matter how safe a vaccine is, some (very, very small) percentage of people will get injured, but we still want to have viable vaccine producers instead of having them getting sued into oblivion, the VICP will provide compensation to the injured but in a no-fault system (details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court ).
Not sure how this would work for electric companies, as you'd still want to punish negligent behavior, but putting all of the causes of huge wildfires (global warming, poor fire safety design, people not trimming trees away from their houses, etc.) just onto the company that sparked the initial fire seems like a mistake.
Since estimating the risk is highly dependent on information that the electric company has and that the property owners generally do not have, it makes sense to want the electric companies to deal with insurance.
Also making the electric company be the one that buys insurance means that the costs can be passed on to the electric company's customers. The risk was taken to benefit those people, not to benefit that property owners, so it makes sense that those people should be the ones who pay.
It's also easier to have one electric company deal with obtaining insurance for their risks in a place than it is for hundreds of property owners to separately each do so.
I disagree, completely. In fact, part of my main point is that when, say, a single sparking transformer can result in $50+ billion in liability, no sane insurance company (or even reinsurance company) would take that risk, and that is what happened.
What about all the homes and businesses and people who died and were injured? What about all the land, and crops, and trees? What about air quality and harm done to all the peoples' lungs being in that? Usually how bankruptcy courts work, those are considered "unsecured debts". They're handled below everything else, and usually not paid at all. And that's why PG&E is doing this, to dump them.
As a person (and not a figment of my imagination corporation), I can't declare bankruptcy for student loans, even though they're eating me alive. Not available. And that's for dubious "classes" of various quality at the local university. Yet if a company kills people, or has malfeasance that leads to their deaths, its cool... Just declare chapter 11 and rid yourselves of "dead weight".
Global warming is an issue at play even though it is always easier to point the finger "at the evil [X] corporation"