Ending PG&E Bailouts & Corporate Takeovers - Transitioning To Clean, Safe, Community Based Electricity

California's out-of-control wildfires and power shut offs, and the planet's looming climate crisis, now make our reality very clear. The days of huge private energy corporations owning and running our electricity systems must end. Corporate profit motives, and basic community necessities like electricity, and protection from fires, do not mix, and it is time to make a change.

All over the world, as national and international governments fail to address these growing crises, people and communities are beginning to take local responsibility for their own environmental and energy progress. States, provinces, cities, counties, small businesses, and households, are all taking the lead to build a cleaner, safer, community-based energy future.

California is on the cutting edge of this transition but there are big forces which are still holding us back. We need to demand that the state take over PG&E as a public trust and stop allowing corporations to control our energy choices.

**Click here to contact your state legislators.**

Read on for more information..

Wildfire Bailouts

Following recent deadly wildfires and other disasters (caused by PG&E's criminal negligence) that have killed over 100 people and destroyed entire communities, it should be obvious that the state of California must take over PG&E.

But in the past few years PG&E has rained down campaign contributions and paid lobbying on our elected officials at an unprecedented scale. As a result, instead of taking over PG&E and fixing its hopelessly corrupt and broken system, the Governor and legislature in July 2019, rammed a PG&E bailout bill through Sacramento in just nine days. The bill will force ratepayers to pay at least 10 billion dollars for future PG&E wildfires (and possibly tens of billions more).

Even more alarming was a failed last minute attempt at the end of California's 2019 legislative session, to pass a monster PG&E bailout for a possible 50 billion dollars to make ratepayers cover PG&E's past wildfire liabilities!

Our City and Californians for Energy Choice led the grassroots campaign to block that bailout.

Corporate Sharks Circling To Buy Up PG&E Could Mean An Even Larger, Unaccountable Private Monopoly

Berkshire Hathaway, a private utility grid monopoly ten times larger than PG&E, which controls electricity grids all over the US, is seeking to buy out PG&E, potentially making Berkshire the largest, and most unaccountable private utility in the country.

Also seeking to buy PG&E are vulture capital investment funds like PIMCO, Elliott Management, and Davidson Kempner which make short term profits snatching up distressed companies, gutting them of their value, and casting them aside.

The idea of either Berkshire or these vulture firms taking over California's electricity service is unthinkable, and yet Governor Newsom recently openly invited a Berkshire take over.

Current Campaign

In the 2020s, Our City and Californians for Energy Choice will be working in coalition with other organizations to end the bailouts and corporate takeovers, and to bring full community-based, clean, and public power to all Californians.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Contact your state legislators through the link below, with the following message:

"Please vote NO on any further bailouts of PG&E, and oppose any buy-outs of PG&E by private corporations or investors. Instead, support legislation that will take over PG&E as a state owned public utility, to be run by a Citizens Utility Board that is elected by California voters."

To find your legislators go to:

http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov