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.@PacificPower_OR, owned by Warren Buffett, is now liable for many millions in damages – maybe billions – for recklessly causing wildfires. Who will end up paying those damages?
— Jack Bogdanski (@bojack54) June 19, 2023
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The platform used for this blog is awfully wonky when it comes to comments. It may work for you, it may not. It's a Google thing, and beyond my control. Apologies if you can't get through. You can email me a comment at jackbogsblog@comcast.net, and if it's appropriate, I can post it here for you.
Power customers of course!
ReplyDeleteCustomers of course. However, I have to say that I hate it that we're blaming power companies for natural phenomena. The fires in question happen every 40 years or so and are the result of dry conditions and high winds. Perhaps some power facilities were involved, but most of the fires were ignited by lightning and I suspect just about as many acres would have burned if there had been no electrical facilities.
ReplyDeleteThe bitterness moderns direct toward manufacturing companies that provided employment and necessary products for over 150 years always surprises me. Financial institutions, families, and community (civic life) emerged here through their efforts.
DeleteWe all benefited from the logging industry while the river suffered from its effluents, likewise with ag-chem, and creosoting timber, and so much else. They weren't mongol hordes but most often those that lifted us out of subsistence farming.
It's a fair cop that we taxpayers pay into the remediation. Likewise with power. Prior to the development of the BPA (which an Oregon Historical Society contributer described as a "masculinist project" it was a much different life for all in the PNW.
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/did-you-breathe-smoke-last-week-this
Pollutants from log liquors
If you don't think the Pacificorp lawyers pushed that line relentlessly, you aren't paying attention. The jury didn't blame them for natural phenomena; they held them liable for negligently causing harm to others by the way they operated their system.
Deletehttps://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/local/oregon/2023/06/16/pacificorp-asks-permission-to-pass-oregon-wildfire-liability-costs-customers/70331887007/
Delete"privatize the profits, socialize the losses" is cliche, but apt here.
ReplyDeleteThink any dividends or exec pay packages will be docked as a result of this verdict?
Who we gonna blame when the tsunami hits the coast
ReplyDelete