{"id":178298,"date":"2019-01-13T19:22:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T00:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/01\/13\/rats-sinking-ship-pge\/"},"modified":"2019-01-13T19:22:00","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T00:22:00","slug":"rats-sinking-ship-pge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/01\/13\/rats-sinking-ship-pge\/","title":{"rendered":"Rats \u2014 Sinking Ship \u2014 PG&#038;E"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>I&#8217;m not sure if it&#8217;s an attempt to get the hell out of dodge, of if they decided that the woman made a good scapegoat, but t <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/01\/13\/business\/energy-environment\/pge-geisha-williams-wildfires.html\">PG&amp;E&#8217;s CEO Geisha Williams has left the building<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced the departure of its chief executive Sunday as it remained besieged by a financial crisis related to California\u2019s historic wildfires.<\/p>\n<p>PG&amp;E said the company had initiated a search to replace the top official, Geisha Williams, who had led the utility since 2017. It said John Simon, the company\u2019s general counsel, would serve as interim chief executive during the search.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>PG&amp;E, the state\u2019s largest investor-owned utility, faces an estimated $30 billion exposure to liability for damages from the 2017 and 2018 wildfires that killed scores in Northern California. The sum would exceed its insurance and assets, raising concern in the state capital about the utility\u2019s future.<\/p>\n<p>The billions in potential costs have prompted a series of downgrades in PG&amp;E\u2019s ratings, including decisions last week by Moody\u2019s Investors Service and S&amp;P Global Ratings to downgrade the utility\u2019s bonds to junk.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Fire investigators determined that PG&amp;E\u2019s equipment was responsible for at least 18 of 21 major fires in 2017 as well as fires in 2018. Some of the fires have been attributed to power lines\u2019 coming into contact with trees, which critics have said is a result of the utility\u2019s failure to trim the trees.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div>Last time around, with the support of then-governor Jerry Brown, the state legislature bailed them out.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I think that the political climate regarding the much-reviled utility are different now, and the new governor, Gavin Newsom, is far less of a corporate stooge than Jerry Brown is.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>On the theory that a crisis is frequently also an opportunity, I would strongly suggest that someone looks a making significant portions of PG&amp;E state owned.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not sure if it&#8217;s an attempt to get the hell out of dodge, of if they decided that the woman made a good scapegoat, but t PG&amp;E&#8217;s CEO Geisha Williams has left the building: Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced the departure of its chief executive Sunday as it remained besieged by a financial &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,505,457,588],"class_list":["post-178298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-disaster","tag-energy","tag-fail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}