https://socialistaction.org/2018/11/30/california-governor-signs-legislation-to-bail-out-utility-that-sparked-deadly-fires/
California governor signs legislation to bail out utility that sparked
deadly fires
/ 20 hours ago
Dec. 2018 Fire ruins Malibu (AP)
By MARC ROME
In October, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) reported that the effects of climate change are already
happening, making natural events like wildfires more intense. A month
later, the Camp Fire, fueled by Diablo winds and drought conditions,
incinerated Paradise, Calif., killing 88 people with nearly 800
unaccounted for. More than 16,000 structures, mostly homes, were
destroyed, forcing at least 52,000 to evacuate and leaving tens of
thousands of people homeless throughout the 150,000 acre burn zone in
Butte County. It is the deadliest fire in the state’s history, and was
nearly as destructive as the previous 10 record setting California fires
combined.
As the fires raged in Paradise, an area covering hundreds of miles was
an ominous and forbidding landscape full of smoke darkened skies that
affected millions with hazardous air or nearly two weeks. Air Quality
Indexes measured from upwards of 400 in Sacramento and 238 in San
Francisco. Smoke plumes were detected as far away as Philadelphia.
Factoring in the Woolsey fire in southern California, which left three
dead and upwards of 2000 homes and structures destroyed or damaged,
nearly 150,000 people have been displaced, leading to a
humanitarian/housing crisis in a state where affordable housing is
already extremely difficult to find for working and poor people. Ed
Mayer, executive director of Butte County’s housing agency, said, “Big
picture, we have 6000, possibly 7000 households who have been displaced
and who realistically don’t stand a chance of finding housing again in
Butte County. I don’t even know if these households can be absorbed in
California.”
Lawsuits have been filed by victims against PG&E for their suspected
responsibility in starting the Camp Fire. The AP reported, “PG&E told
state regulators that it experienced a problem on a transmission line in
the area of the fire just before the blaze erupted. In its filing
Thursday [Nov. 8] with the state Public Utilities Commission, it said it
had detected an outage on an electrical transmission line. It said a
subsequent aerial inspection detected damage to a transmission tower on
the line.”
PG&E’s practice of cutting labor costs (which boosts profits) led to
poor maintenance of its electrical grid, and, according to state fire
investigators, caused 17 of 21 wildfires in 2017, including the 2017
Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County, which killed 24 and destroyed more than
5300 homes. A series of lawsuits have also been filed against Southern
California Edison alleging that the Woolsey fire began due to poor
maintenance of their equipment near the flashpoint.
To shield three California utility monopolies—Pacific Gas and Electric,
Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric—from
financial ruin, Governor Brown recently signed SB 901 to pass off the
utilities’ liabilities to rate payers for fires attributed to equipment
owned by these billion-dollar corporations. PG&E alone is facing $15
billion in liabilities for the 2017 fires, and SB901 allows them to
issue bonds paid for by increasing fees for ratepayers. Their
liabilities may be as high as $30 billion if it’s determined that the
utility is responsible for the Camp Fire, which could lead to PG&E’s
collapse without another state government bailout.
SB 901 was proposed by Brown and passed the State Assembly and Senate
with virtually no resistance from Democratic Party legislators (nine
Democrats opposed it in total). There is no comparable bailout
legislation for the victims of the most destructive fire in U.S. history
in a century.
Capitulation to corporate-power-in-crisis by the liberal wing of the
capitalist political system is often the rule, not the exception,
whether in California or Washington, D.C. Democratic Governor Gray Davis
bailed out PG&E after they filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and rate payers
footed the bill while Wall Street energy traders made billions. When
tens of millions were laid off and 5.2 million homeowners foreclosed
upon following the 2008 Great Recession, the Obama administration
presided over the bipartisan bailout of the financial institutions that
caused the economic collapse. They were gifted as much as $30 trillion.
After multi-billion dollar corporations and banks are exposed for their
direct role in widespread unemployment, homelessness, death,
destruction, and environmental pollution, it would seem inconceivable
that they would be given financial gifts by governments at the expense
of millions of people, the very victims of these same corporate powers.
This is capitalism operating as designed; social, political, and
economic control resides with the ultra-rich few who benefit at the
expense of the many.
The role of climate change
California’s climate—largely arid or semi-arid, including large desert
areas—is historically prone to wildfires. Strong wind systems, known as
Diablo and Santa Ana winds, are also a contributing factor, which hasten
evaporation, fan flames, and send embers alight to spread fires further
and more quickly.
Temperatures in the state have increased as much as 1.16°C over the past
hundred years, dating back to a time when modern-industrial global
capitalism contributed less greenhouses gases than it does today. Higher
average temperatures have altered weather patterns throughout the state,
leading to longer droughts, less precipitation, and consequently drier
and more flammable vegetation and forests.
California will certainly continue to be a major contributor to global
emissions, owing in no small part to Governor Brown. In addition to
expanding offshore oil drilling in alliance with the Democratic
governors of Oregon and Washington, Brown’s office approved nearly
22,000 permits for oil and gas exploration issued in mostly low income
communities of color. California is current the country’s 2nd largest
emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for over 12% of the total.
But California’s carbon load, well-head expansion, and massive fires are
merely symptomatic of a global capitalist economy that depends on
burning fossil fuels, the major contributor to C02 emissions. Over the
past 100 years, atmospheric C02 has gone from 307ppm to 410 ppm, leading
to global temperature increases of 1.17ºC (2.1°F). (Temperatures
measured between 1880 and 1920 are widely accepted as the
“preindustrial” baseline).
Globally, climate change has led to the increased number, intensity, and
duration of extreme weather events. This year alone, there have been
unprecedented forest fires in the Arctic Circle, a deadly conflagration
in Greece, massive flooding in Japan, while intense heat caused
dehydration that has led to a deadly epidemic of kidney disease in El
Salvador. We have seen bigger, wetter, and slower moving hurricanes,
global freshwater shortages, and the increased likelihood of crop
failures. Climate change is also increasingly affecting global
migration, pointing to new challenges and possibilities as activists
grapple with these related issues.
Forests, the lungs of the planet, lock away between ¼ and 1/3 of global
greenhouse gas emissions, and they are under threat more than ever. In
Brazil, for example, newly elected extreme right-wing president Jair
Bolsonaro promises to expand mining, agriculture, and pasture further
and more rapidly into the Amazon in order to boost economic growth.
In Borneo, widespread deforestation and the resultant release of massive
amounts of carbon is actually the result of U.S.-led changes in
environmental laws that promoted growing highly profitable oil-palm as a
less carbon intensive alternative to fossil fuels. A recent story in The
New York Times Magazine explains the extent of it: “NASA researchers say
the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the
largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two
millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s
fourth-largest source of such emissions.
“Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s
carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb
that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than
the entire continent of Europe.”
Other technocratic fixes (geoengineering) are in development, including
releasing millions of tons of sulfuric dioxide into the atmosphere to
dim the sun. There are also technologies to suck carbon out of the
atmosphere and store it underground. These untested so-called solutions
threaten to alter delicate and complex planetary systems, with unknown
and possibly catastrophic consequences. But capitalists are already
seeking ways to commodify and profit from them, which means that they
are likely to be amplified as climate change solutions.
For Republican Rep. Randy Weber of Texas, chairman of the Energy
Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology,
“The future is bright for geoengineering.” And pivotal ruling-class
figures like Bill Gates are investing in these technologies.
Over the past 28 years, world leaders have deliberated at periodic
conferences over ways to solve the climate crisis, but have failed to
enact a single mandate, in large part because they are politically
incapable of thinking outside core capitalist principles of continuous
economic growth, accumulation and, therefore, profit.
IPCC and FNCA reports
According to the IPCC, only 12 years remain to “limit” climate change
catastrophe, let alone avert it completely. Trump has been widely
criticized, and rightly so, for pulling the U.S., the greatest
contributor to global carbon emissions over the past 150 years, out of
the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement. But even if every country met their
target carbon reduction goals, global temperatures would increase by at
least 3°C by 2100 compared to preindustrial levels, making certain a
dooms-day climate scenario. And this would be the outcome of the most
ambitious climate accord to date!
In an ironic twist, the Trump administration, which denies climate
change, issued a major scientific report from 13 federal agencies, the
“Fourth National Climate Assessment,” while the Camp Fire still raged on
Nov. 23. The findings of the 1700-page document have received wide media
coverage, although Trump, true to form, stated, “I don’t believe it.”
The FNCA report detailed the far-reaching effects climate change could
have on the country, including massive crop failures; larger, more
intense, and increasingly frequent forest fires; and infrastructure
collapse across the South, all of which could lead to an economic toll
double to the losses of the 2008 Great Recession. Poorer communities
would be hit the hardest, according to the report, keeping with the fact
that climate change affects the most those whom contribute to it the least.
The IPCC and FNCA reports are clear about the danger of inaction
regarding climate change, but neither point to the kind of unprecedented
systemic change necessary to limit, let alone reverse, an impending
climate catastrophe.
Climate change is already affecting billions of people, and the energy
industry is primarily responsible for the crisis at hand. Solutions that
fail to address the fact that 100 fossil fuel and coal companies and
state enterprises contribute to 71% of carbon emissions will mean
irreversibly dire consequences for the planet. The entire energy
industry must transform to become carbon-neutral, and this is only
possible under a system of democratic workers control as part of broader
world anti-capitalist mobilization whose aim is to build an
environmentally sustainable society.
Photo: Ruins from the fire in Malibu, Calif. (AP)
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November 30, 2018 in Environment, San Francisco Bay Area.
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J.K. Rowling
“ I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing
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