Gov. Newsom took office not long after the Camp Fire and just before PG&E filed for bankruptcy. As he prepares to leave office he is proposing limiting utility liability.
Gavin Newsom picks the West’s most complicated fight
It is an extraordinarily complex — and risky — undertaking, and almost everyone with a stake in California’s wildfire fights has something to lose. If Newsom gets his way, he’ll anger insurance firms, which argue his proposed changes would upend their marketplace. Local officials worry they won’t be able to secure enough money to rebuild after future fires. And wildfire victims, fearing that future survivors could be shortchanged, staged a recent protest on the steps of the governor’s mansion…
The controversy points to the difficulty of retaining California’s status as a pioneer in renewable energy and climate policy while also shoring up a power system increasingly strained by wildfire costs…
Back in 2019, Newsom ultimately oversaw the creation of a ratepayer- and shareholder-funded wildfire fund, a behemoth back-up pot of money that power companies can tap to cover claims from fires they spark. Newsom acknowledged to reporters this month that critics called that first effort a “bailout,” too. He faced similar criticism last year, when he successfully pushed state lawmakers to reup the fund to make sure it had enough money to cover the tens of billions of dollars in claims against Southern California Edison for starting the Eaton Fire in Pasadena in January 2025…
To prevent power companies from collapsing financially when they spark big wildfires, Newsom wants to stop insurers from suing them to recoup what they paid policyholders. He also wants to bar financial firms from purchasing those claims from insurance companies, which can bring deep-pocketed competitors into a utility bankruptcy proceeding.
The obvious solution is for the state to acquire and operate electric utilities in the state. Then tax payers can share the fire risk that benefits many.
Pretending that the fire risk can be funded some other way (affordable insurance) boggles the mind.
California rate payers already share the fire risk. After the Camp Fire the state set up the California Wildfire Fund. It covers damages for the three large utilities (PG&E, SCE and SDG&E). It currently has $21 billion in assets and another $18 billion has been requested by Newsom. LADWP is not covered in the program. The latest report notes that “should Southern California Edison ultimately be found liable for the Eaton Fire, the resulting claims may be substantial enough to fully exhaust the Fund.”
Yes! Same for water. And definitely same for housing - housing is so ridiculously expensive and very difficult to acquire, and nearly impossible to properly insure that the state really needs to take over housing. And gasoline/diesel as well, nearly all things can only function well with ready supplies of fuels, and oftentimes the “market” can’t provide fuels at reasonable cost, so the state really should step in and take over. And maybe even food, food supplies are critical to human life and sometimes certain food items become ridiculously expensive, so the state must intervene somehow to ensure adequate supply. Etc.
When many of those homes were built, it was not a tinder box.
Paradise CA has an average precipitation of roughly 50 inches a year - more than enough to keep it from being a tinder box.
But, as we have learned, climate change is causing weather to whiplash back and forth. Paradise had too much rain early in the year, causing a lot of extra growth, then it had a severe drought (less than 1 inch of rain) from May through November - causing all that extra growth to become the proverbial tinder box.
Lower elevations in Butte County went more than 200 days without a single measurable rainfall event of 0.5 inches or more before the fire ignited on November 8, 2018. [1]
Any place can become a tinder box when you go without rain for 200 days.
But, the story isn’t just about climate change. It is also about corporate negligence:
I responded that Pacific Gas & Electric caused the Camp Fire by failing to maintain its lines. This negligence, I added, was not unrelated to the 2010 explosion in a residential neighborhood in San Bruno, just south of San Francisco, when a 30-inch PG&E gas main exploded, killing eight and sending a fireball 1,000 feet into the air. 13 But, I insisted, while PG&E’s equipment failure had sparked the Camp Fire, the ignition and behavior of the blaze were affected by conditions marked with global warming’s imprint: the consequences of the state’s longest ever-recorded drought, including an abundance of unusually dry vegetation, compounded by an unusual late-season wind event. This, I said, was a global warming-intensified fire.
There have always been many wildfires in California. A paper by Stephens et al. estimates that pre-1800 more than 4.4 million acres of California forest and shrub-land burned annually.
Fire suppression has resulted in larger, more severe fires. Probably the most important change in the last 50-100 years has not been climate change but rather settlement patterns. Many more people/homes/structures are now built in what is called the wildland-urban interface (WUI) – developed areas that meet or intermingle with undeveloped land. In California, for example, it is estimated that a quarter of the population now live in the WUI.
