A petition to take PG&E to public ownership

letsownpge.org

8 pointsluckydata5 comments

It sounds like a good idea. Utilities are natural monopolies, and government is better at factoring in the societal cost of externalities than private owners are (who, at a minimum, may be inclined to gamble for more profit with the costs of legal liability given their limited liability).

limited liability

The correct solution, then, is to eliminate this "limited liability" concept. Public ownership is probably the one thing that would make an outfit like PG&E even more of a mess than it already is.

Without the limitation of liability, there will only be one entity left willing to run the company: the public.

The argument that it is simply too dangerous to provide electricity when it is hot and windy is just so bizarre. What was the point of building all that infrastructure if you built it so poorly it keeps killing people?

> What was the point of building all that infrastructure if you built it so poorly it keeps killing people?

The decision makers may not have fully understood the danger when they built it, or they did and judged that someone else would end up taking the blame and cleaning up the mess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com