In 2017, seventeen major wildfires in California were connected to P.G. & E. Photograph by George Rose / Getty

Sheelah Kolhatkar has a note, The P.G. & E. Bankruptcy and the Coming Climate-Related Business Failures, that gets me thinking. The standard thinking on why climate change is so difficult to do anything about is how it is seen as a problem we will encounter far off in the future. It obviously is not far off. It has started. Farmers have suffered. Big city folk have suffered. California dreamers have suffered. The immediacy needs to be framed accordingly:

On January 15th, the World Economic Forum issued its annual Global Risks Report, which presents the results of a survey of what policymakers and experts perceive to be the world’s greatest challenges and threats. The report categorizes concerns by color: blue for economic risks, orange for geopolitical risks, purple for technological risks, red for societal risks. This year, green, which denotes environmental hazards, was dominant: the top three risks, listed by the “likelihood” that they would occur, were extreme weather events, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, and natural disasters. (Threats such as data fraud and cyber-attacks appeared lower down on the list). “Is the world sleepwalking into a crisis?” the report’s authors wrote. “Global risks are intensifying but the collective will to tackle them appears to be lacking.”

The same week, as if to illustrate the point, the California-based utility company Pacific Gas and Electric (P.G. & E.) announced that it would be filing for bankruptcy protection as a result of costs related to recent wildfires in the state. Between June, 2014, and December, 2017, P.G. & E.’s equipment helped start some fifteen hundred fires, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal. Many were caused by falling trees that toppled power lines, which then threw sparks onto the surrounding grass and forest. Once the fires started, they spread rapidly due to the dry condition of the brush, which was partly the result of droughts that have plagued the state in recent years. The company had reportedly been working to improve the safety of its infrastructure for the last few years, including trimming trees that posed a danger to its power lines, but this effort wasn’t enough to avert disaster. In 2017, seventeen major wildfires in California were connected to P.G. & E.; the fires destroyed 193,743 acres in eight counties and led to the deaths of twenty-two people. The fire season of 2018 was worse; the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported it as the deadliest and most destructive season on record. P.G. & E. said that it was facing approximately thirty billion dollars in liabilities as a result of its role in the 2017 and 2018 fires.

The case of P.G. & E. illustrates the complexity of assigning responsibility in cases where preëxisting problems are exacerbated by a changing climate. The origin of the Camp Fire, in November, which was one of the worst fires in the state’s history and led to the deaths of eighty-five people, is still being investigated, but P.G. & E. reported finding equipment problems—including power lines downed by falling trees, equipment with bullet holes, and also damage to a transmission tower—close to the area where the fire is believed to have started. The company is already facing multiple lawsuits over the damage caused by the fire. William Alsup, a federal judge overseeing a case involving a P.G. & E. gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people, in 2010, has asserted that the recent fires were caused by P.G. & E.’s negligence. “In two years, three per cent of California burned up,” Alsup said, during a hearing in January. “P.G. & E. is not the only source of these fires, but it is a source, and to most of us it’s unthinkable that a public utility is causing that type of damage.” Alsup also noted that the company had given out four and a half billion dollars in dividends to shareholders over the last five years while failing to take adequate safety precautions. Still, the intensity of the wildfires was not entirely the company’s fault. P.G. & E. is legally required to provide power to residents in rural parts of the state; as conditions have become drier, the damage wrought by individual mistakes has increased. It may now be impossible for utility companies to operate in California under the current conditions, given the risks.

P.G. & E. may be the most high-profile company to date to face collapse for reasons linked to climate change, but it won’t be the last…

Read the whole note here.