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.

Newsom followed up his lecture with a letter calling on PG&E to issue rebates to everyone who went without power — $100 to residents and $250 to small businesses. In response, the company put out a statement saying that it had “received the Governor’s letter” and “appreciated its intent.” This is corporate utility–speak for “lol no we’re not going to do that.”

The reason the company can respond this way is that PG&E president and CEO William D. Johnson isn’t appointed by the governor or approved by the legislature. He’s responsible to a board of directors and ultimately to shareholders—mostly “institutional investors” (read: hedge funds). The company is regulated by various levels of government, of course, but even there, the influence goes both ways. Ten years ago, when PG&E — since bankrupted by litigation resulting from last year’s fires — was riding high, it was named and shamed by the nonpartisan Public Campaign for being one of thirty major corporations that spent more money on lobbying than it paid in taxes.