We have and have had sufficiently advanced climate modeling to inform whatever decisionmaking they may have needed when they had the best opportunities to invest and maintain infrastructure. Our forest management policies have not changed in forever and California faced seemingly annual firestorms in the years leading up to PGE's disaster. People have been sounding the alarm on climate change for YEARS and YEARS. The current predicament is no excuse.
You want less forest fires? Fucking remove all the overgrown underbrush and older trees that have overstayed their welcome. The Native American Indians of the area would be happy to tell you this, something that worked for millenia before westerners came along, said "MUH CUTE TREEZ", and refused to take care of the environment.
Places like Yosemite National Park even refuse to put out naturally occuring forest fires anymore, because guess what: You need periodic forest fires to avoid disasterous forest fires.
It is a vicious cycle and feedback loop. Weather patterns the previous year create a tinderbox for the next. And then we aggressively suppress the inevitable fires that spring up, leaving even MORE unchecked undergrowth and denying the forest bed the nutritional products of burned foliage, which just worsens its health and creates even BIGGER fires when they eventually roll around.
It's almost like being a public company vs being a government run entity isn't the major decider of effectiveness / optimal outcomes for end users.
Instead, it seems to be "is this company (etc) run by self-interested arseholes trying to enrich themselves at the expense of others?"
If it is, then the structure isn't going to matter. End users are going to have a bad time, regardless of the PR/bullshit said company puts out to say otherwise.
Likewise, if the company (regardless of structure) is run by clueful people dedicated to actually providing the required service, end users are going to be in a decent position.
Unless of course they get screwed over by above mentioned arsehole types. eg starved of budget if they're a gov org, have activist investors cause trouble if they're a public company
1. Don't think of themselves as self-interested arseholes.
2. They are in fact self-interested arseholes.
We have no methodology that allows us to put "good people" in power. And even if we had, power corrupts. So the best we can do is to build a system that works even when all actors are self-serving.
Doesn't seem to be working though eh?
That being said, I don't have any fantastic suggestions either. :(
Typically you just fix a bug, though of course some systems reach a point where a rewrite (either incremental or from scratch) is the only option. I see absolutely no evidence that we reached that point, all arguments are just emotional factoids. I also see no attempts for an incremental rewrite, all people want is to burn the system and hope that something good rises from the ashes.
But I can show you PGE and SDGE as examples of privatization WITHOUT any of that good-faith investment, and then when the situation went critical (massive wildfires a few years back due to bad electricity infra), electricity consumers being forced to foot the bill. Where I live, my utilities bill has quadrupled in the past three years (from ~$100 to ~$450 a month for literally identical usage, I checked my statements), rate regulation (the CPUC) is seemingly toothless, and my utilities company sends me these insultingly understated letters about how they can't control energy pricing and have to pass on rates to consumers.
Except they won't tell you that they are owned by the company they buy their energy from, and that THAT company happily will set prices to whatever they want if it means sucking off their pathetic little shareholders just a little bit more. Sempra Energy has been doing gangbusters on their quarterly earnings reports!