On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore interviews Katherine Blunt, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and the recent author of California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric and What it Means for America’s Power Grid.
The conversation begins with the book’s narrative of criminal charges, with Blunt briefly describing the cast of characters and situations in the book that led to prosecutions for a violation of the Federal Pipeline Safety Act and 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. The latter was one of the first situations in history in which a company was charged with homicide. (0:32-7:06)
Even with these successful criminal prosecutions, many were left with a sense of dissatisfaction. (7:07-10:30) Livermore and Blunt discuss some of the moral complexities of collective criminal liability. (10:31 – 17:45) Blunt highlights the fact that the victims compensation fund is tied to the future stock price of the company; different types of penalties have the potential to weigh on the company’s share price. The two also discuss the difficulty of recruiting new talent to work at a corporation when criminal liability may be at stake. (17:46 – 28:49)
The two move to discuss broader policy issues, including how regulated utilities receive returns on capital but not operating and maintenance (O&M) expenses. Blunt believes that the company had significantly underspent on O&M with serious negative consequences. (28:50 – 33:59)
Blunt discusses possibility that the charge given to PG&E — delivering safe, reliable, affordable, and clean energy — might be an impossible task. (34:00 – 41:21) The two shift to the topic of renewable energy. Blunt describes California’s ambitious targets for carbon reduction. California’s early investments in wind and solar helped create the economies of scale which made these forms of energy are affordable, but California’s ratepayers paid billions of dollars for this power. (41:22 – 45:25)
Livermore asks how people in California should feel about how this has all played out. Blunt responds that California’s contribution to reducing carbon emissions is rightfully a point of pride. But as a leader in climate change efforts, California has incurred a real cost. (45:26- 49:29)
Blunt then discusses the broader implications of the PG&E story. Utilities everywhere are going to have to confront new risks as a result of climate change. PG&E’s story demonstrates that if any company has a narrative of mismanaging risk, it’s going to be very challenging to get ahead of things. The consequences of the failure of the electric system are becoming greater, in both an acute and a broader sense. There are lessons here for every region of the country. (49:30 – 52:10)
A question that comes out of the book is how bad PG&E’s risk management practices were compared to other utilities in California. Blunt highlights the inherent tension between private interests and public good, which is present in every utility company. PG&E is hardly the only utility to mismanage that. Historically, PG&E’s mismanagement has been more acute than others and the consequences have been much greater. (52:11 – 55:55)
Blunt then turns to bigger picture questions of centralized versus distributed energy. In her view, distributed technology will play a role in how we generate and consume power and it has the potential to reduce the amount of large centralized infrastructure in the future. But, it is hard for her to foresee a future without a need for centralized generation and transmission carried over large distances. The model has a lot of challenges which are becoming more acute, but there is no great solution for a substantially different model. The only solution is to work within the parameters of what we have and make it better. (55:56 – 1:01:00)
Tag Archives: journalism
Season 1, Episode 14
On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert is a writer at The New Yorker, as well as the author of several books, including The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Her most recent book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, was published in 2021.
The podcast begins with Kolbert discussing how journalism, as a profession, has changed over the course of her career. While praising the accessibility that the internet has provided journalists, Kolbert also laments the way it has profoundly altered the industry’s economic model, resulting in less funding being made available for in-depth reporting. She also warns that one of the unexpected byproducts of the freedom of information has been the freedom of disinformation. This has been exacerbated by changes in how journalists do their job in the internet age, where there is far less personal interaction between writers and the individuals they are writing about. Kolbert explains that the type of long-form journalism she specializes in still requires a serious investment, and this has led to new funding options such as non-profit journalism organizations. (:40 – 7:52)
The conversation then shifts to Kolbert’s new book, which Livermore describes as a book about unintended consequences and tragic choices in relation to the environment. One example in Under a White Sky is gene drive technology, which Kolbert explains are biological mechanisms that preferentially pass down genetic material from generation to generation. Currently there is an effort to create synthetic gene drives that would allow for the suppression of malaria in mosquitoes. Given its powerful implications, this technology is controversial, and some have compared it to the invention of the atom bomb in the sense that our scientific ability has exceeded the limits of our control. Along those lines, Kolbert states that the goal is to eventually release these modified mosquitoes in regions of Africa with high malaria transmission, but presently there is significant worry about the unintended consequences of that action. (8:13 – 18:02)
This leads to an extended conversation about geo-engineering, another technology that Kolbert examines in her book. Like gene drives, geo-engineering is a technology that, hypothetically, would allow humanity to control the environment. Kolbert talks about the two primary forms of geo-engineering – removing carbon from the atmosphere and reflecting solar activity away from the earth. She emphasizes that although we do not have the capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere at a massive commercial scale, most carbon neutrality plans place great weight on the ability to commercialize that technology in the near future. The other alternative – blocking sunlight from entering the atmosphere — poses its own set of problems, from altered weather patterns to a change in the color of the sky. Kolbert also makes the point that no amount of geo-engineering will counterbalance continued carbon emissions, and the challenges associated with controlling emissions are only increasing as the world becomes more unstable. (18:10 – 29:53)
The podcast concludes with Kolbert offering insight into how she remains motivated to report on material that is often quite depressing to consider (29:55 – 31:55).
Free Range Podcast 