Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) has a lot to answer for. The California electric utility company’s faulty transmission lines were widely blamed for causing last year’s Camp Fire, which killed eighty-five people and destroyed 18,000 structures. Last week, it cut off power to millions of people as a clumsy precaution against history repeating itself. Meanwhile, as former Public Utility Commission administrative law judge Steven Weissman notes, “it’s not inconceivable that PG&E’s electricity customers, who already pay comparatively high prices, could see those rates double if wildfires continue at the levels we have seen recently.”

All of these problems have a common cause and a common solution. PG&E and other utilities should be brought under public ownership.

California governor Gavin Newsom made headlines by slamming the company for the “scale and scope” of the shutoffs. He made clear that he’s not against de-energizing the grid to minimize wildfire risk. Indeed, he noted that many lives were lost because of PG&E’s failure to do exactly that in the Paradise area last year. Even so, there’s a world of difference between small-scale, surgically targeted shutoffs and simply telling millions of people that they’d have to go without power for several days on end. If a company like PG&E is going to be given a monopoly and allowed to extract profits from a captive customer base, it has a responsibility to provide energy whenever those customers need it, whenever this is at all possible.