UCLA

Recent catastrophic wildfire events in California have turned electrical infrastructure within the state into a source of risk. The purpose of this thesis is to critically examine how this infrastructural risk is legally, financially, and technically negotiated – and to whose benefit. I first demonstrate how the American public utility system, and the malleable definitions of “public” and “private” it has constructed, offers a peculiar vocabulary through which wildfire-related risks can be distributed. I focus on the statutory authority of investor-owned utility companies to pre-emptively deenergize on days of high fire risk (the so-called “public safety power shutoff”), along with the legal efforts of these same utilities to reform California’s liability regime, as examples of what I call “liability technologies”: legal and technical efforts to socialize the costs associated with infrastructure. The second half of this thesis considers infrastructure not as a potential liability, but as a potential asset. Through close attention to the complex and contested bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric (2019-2020), I show how catastrophic wildfires created a “special situation” that artificially depressed the value of financial assets associated with the distressed firm. PG&E’s bankruptcy became a legal-financial occasion in which profit could be won for sufficiently powerful financial firms. I develop the concepts of “social leverage” and “legal arbitrage” to explain the mechanics of this process. These concepts demonstrate how financial power rests on the ability of certain entities to dictate future outcomes and minimize the risks to which they are exposed, and how the law is enrolled into and aids this process. In focusing on the specificities of legal and financial practice within the public utility system in an era of catastrophic fire, I broaden what counts as “infrastructure” in the field of infrastructure studies – and what therefore counts as an object of politics.