The entire concept of the law of unintended consequences is lost on the Left particularly the Ruling Class Left.
The Left delights in ridiculing and demonizing industry particularly utility companies.
“The electric company is so cruel turning off the power of people that don’t pay their bills!”. “People have to choose between food and electricity”.
Yes, it is true, the electric company does turn people’s power off if they don’t pay their bill. The electric company has bills to pay as well. If the electric company isn’t payed for their product they can’t pay their creditors and go they go bankrupt.
But this is lost on Leftist states like California. California like other states regulates what PG&E can charge for electricity. Lost on California is the fact that PG&E will try to cut cost so that they can still make a reasonable profit so that their investors don’t sell their stock and lower its market value.
One of the first things to go for an electric utility hurting for cash is tree trimming and right of way maintenance (the land under high tension lines). The consequences of this is that trees grow under the transmission lines. What happens then? Fires.
Trees eventually get tall enough that they will contact transmission lines and those lines will short to ground through a tree setting it ablaze.
Forest fires and burned homes are the result.
If the state won’t permit the electric company charge the consumer enough money to do proper maintenance and still make a profit the company will cut back on maintenance. It is a simple fact of economics. The company will do what is necessary to survive for as long as possible. They will gamble that nothing bad will happen.
The same equally applies to PG&E’s gas lines.
Leftist pandering to popular feelings of animosity to power companies are really to blame for the fires in California.
Your post 5 relies far too much on facts and logic.
“Trees eventually get tall enough that they will contact transmission lines and those lines will short to ground through a tree setting it ablaze.”
Well in the most recent Paradise, CA fire, the problem has been identified as the failure of a transmission tower. And the problem here was that the tower was one of a number of towers in the same transmission line that had been identified as structurally unsound. Further information says that the tower in question should have been replaced several years ago, but wasn’t.
For a number of years PG&E has had maintenance issues in both their electric and gas distribution systems.You may have read that they had a conflagration in San Bruno, CA where an entire block of home were destroy by a gas fire which was caused by PG&E’s not making a replacement of an aging Hp gas line. Furthermore, down in Carmel, where we have a second home, in the process of relining the gas lines there, they blew up a house. We found them moving our gas meter from the side of the house beyond the kitchen exit door to the front of that area, which would have blocked egress. The issue was that the meter was located under a kitchen window which could be opened. It had been there causing no problem since the home was built in 1940. When I told them that they could not put the meter where they had relocated, they put it back in the original location, promising to put a vent line on the regulator to get it away from the window. That was three years ago, and they have never installed the vent. At the end of the day, after several lawsuits were settled, PG&E completely repaved our street along with a number of others. They have had bad management for years. Their CEO just resigned. Go figure!
As far as why the Left supports people not paying their electric bill and they are against the electric company, the video below explains it. The Left has one philosophy. There are oppressors and the oppressed. That’s it. The world looks simple to them. (The video uses the left’s move against Israel as the example. I remember when the Left was 100% pro Israel.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwaM7F2UVWg
“The electric company is so cruel turning off the power of people that don’t pay their bills!”. “People have to choose between food and electricity”.
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Yet they never whine “The grocery store is so cruel turning off the groceries of people that can’t pay for them”.