California Politicians Now Want Oil Companies, Not Insurers, To Subsidize People Living in Wildfire Zones
Ray Lehmann, editor-in-chief and senior fellow at ICLE, shared perspective on this Reason story about a proposed bill in California that would allow individuals and insurers to sue oil companies for wild fire damages. Read the full article here.
The bill is “a twist on preexisting California law that allows insurers to collect from public utilities if there’s any nexus between wildfire and utility lines,” says Ray Lehman, a senior fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics.
One distinction is that a utility company’s downed power line or sparking transformer can be (and has been) a direct cause of a destructive fire.
In contrast, emissions from oil companies (and their customers) are not the direct cause of any wildfires. They are a contributing factor to climate change, which is then a potentially contributing factor to the frequency and severity of wildfires.
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“There is something of an open door to states doing dangerous things in terms of assigning liability to nationwide and worldwide production processes,” he tells Reason.