PG&E to cut power to 800k customers across California early Wednesday morning

Partly that but also partly "we spent that sweet infrastructure money on other stuff so we have to turn things off now because our infrastructure is decrepit and we learned that we get sued when our transformers explode and cause fires, so we are, again, passing the inconvenience on to consumers.

Oh come on, as a consumer you do have to choose a bit between "I want it...cheap!" and "I want to sue you to rebuild when you giving me what I want inevitably causes a fire."

We should expect fires. We should expect more if we run spark generating machines through the forest. That's fine. Just raise the rates to cover the insurance cost.

Forest fires don't have much of a carbon footprint because all the carbon (e.g. vegetation) is already part of the carbon cycle.

Your carbon footprint is determined by how much carbon you're adding (e.g. burning gas that was previously sequestered deep underground) to the carbon cycle.

I suppose if a bunch of plastic got burned in the forest fire, that would technically be adding a carbon footprint, but it's likely negligible.

The connection you are trying to make is somewhat unclear. Yes, forest dwellers probably have a higher carbon footprint, but probably not much more than a wealthy city dweller. People living in the forests actually reduce the near term impact of forest fires because people don't like their stuff burning up, so they have fires put out which reduces carbon in the short term, but in the long term creates conditions for devastating megafires.