Business
Edison under scrutiny for Eaton fire. Who pays liability will be 'new frontier' for California
Six years ago, Pacific Gas & Electric filed for bankruptcy after it was found liable for sparking a succession of devastating wildfires, including the blaze that destroyed the town of Paradise and led to more than 100 deaths.
Wall Street investors lost confidence and ratings agencies threatened to downgrade California’s investor-owned utilities, prompting legislators to come up with an innovative solution: the establishment of a $21-billion wildfire fund, split equally between shareholders and utility customers.
Now, after two major wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes and left at least two dozen dead in and around Los Angeles, the state’s wildfire fund would face its first major test if another utility is found liable for sparking the blazes.
Even the lawmaker who spearheaded legislation to set up the wildfire fund is not sure whether his efforts to mitigate the risk to utility companies — allowing them to keep functioning in a state prone to escalating risk of wildfires — is enough.
“This is the most profound test case that the fund will potentially be up against,” said Christopher Holden, a former Democratic legislator who sponsored the bill that created the fund. “This is a new frontier,” said Holden, who lives in Pasadena and had to evacuate during the Eaton fire.
“It was a new frontier when we wrote the bill — and now, just five years later, we’re going through another frontier.”
If investigators determine that a utility company caused the Eaton or Palisades fire, it could send shock waves across the utility industry and the broader insurance market.
Mark Toney, executive director of TURN, The Utility Reform Network, said the massive scope of the L.A. County fires raised significant questions about the fund’s ability to cover insurance liability. Even if the fund is able to bail out utility companies for the fires, it’s uncertain whether it could then cover fires that may crop up in the future.
“Will the fund work right?” Toney said. “Who ends up paying?”
The causes of the fires have yet to be determined.
Investigators looking into the Eaton fire — which caused at least 17 fatalities and damaged an estimated 7,000 structures across Pasadena and Altadena — are focusing on an area around a Southern California Edison electrical transmission tower in Eaton Canyon.
Edison has denied fault in the Eaton fire. In a statement to The Times, the company said that its work to mitigate wildfires had cut the risk of catastrophic fires by 85% to 90% compared with the risk before 2018.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the municipal utility that operates in Pacific Palisades, says it did not opt into the wildfire fund because it would have been too costly for its customers. If the large municipal utility was liable for the Palisades fire, the city of L.A. could face exorbitant financial costs.
But sources with knowledge of the investigation have told The Times that the fire, which started in the Skull Rock area north of Sunset Boulevard, appears to have human origins. Officials are looking into whether a small fire possibly sparked by New Year’s Eve fireworks could somehow have rekindled Jan 7.
Michael Wara, an energy and climate scholar at Stanford University, said the state’s entire insurance landscape, not just California’s wildfire fund, might have to be recalibrated if a utility company were found to have caused a major L.A. fire.
“The big question is how available and affordable is overall insurance?” said Wara, who has served on the California Catastrophe Response Council, the fund’s oversight body. “California, I think, is going to face greater challenges than it has over even the last few years, when it hasn’t been easy for its primary insurers and other entities to access these global reinsurance markets that fund losses after a catastrophe.”
Under California law, utility companies are strictly liable for all damages to real property associated with a fire, including houses.
The wildfire fund is a new model in which the state’s three big owner-operated utility companies — Pacific Gas & Electric Co., San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison — pay into a fund, which they can then tap into if their equipment is determined to have caused a blaze. When that happens, they are responsible, on their own, for the first $1 billion of losses. After that, the wildfire fund will pay.
“If the wildfire fund did not exist today, Edison might be in real trouble,” Wara said. “We would see something probably similar to what happened to PG&E after the Camp fire.”
Back then, Wara said, utilities were held to a standard of strict liability: If electrical equipment was found to have caused the fire, they were on the hook.
Now, if Edison is ultimately held responsible, Wara said, the company can go to the wildfire fund and get money.
“That’s really important in terms of making sure that the victims are made whole, at least for their property losses,” he said.
Although it is too soon to estimate the damage of the Eaton fire, Wara said thousands of structures have been lost in an area where the average home value is around $1.3 million. Costs, he said, could reach $10 billion.
If officials find that Edison caused the fire but acted responsibly, Wara said, as much as half of the fund’s $21 billion could be depleted.
“That’s half the fund in one fire — five years into the life of the fund,” said Wara, who has served as a wildfire commissioner for California and a member of the California Catastrophe Response Council, the oversight body of the California wildfire fund.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the wildfire fund has so far amassed only $14 billion, because utility companies cannot immediately expect ratepayers to pay their share of half the $21 billion.
“If you are an investor in PG&E or Edison, you might look at this and think, ‘Hmm, I thought the fund was big enough. Maybe now I’m not so sure.’ The fund is there to provide confidence. If the fund isn’t big enough, there will be less confidence.”
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, will lead the investigation into what caused the fires.
Then, the California Public Utility Commission determines whether the utility company acted reasonably or unreasonably and, if so, to what degree.
If a utility was found to have failed to act prudently, Wara said, it would have to reimburse the fund. The amount it would pay, however, is capped on the size of the reimbursement relative to the size of their rate base.
Edison International Chief Executive Pedro Pizarro told Bloomberg Television that state regulations allowed the company’s holder liability to be capped at $3.9 billion.
“The reason the cap is there is if Edison is reimbursing the fund, that’s basically electricity customers reimbursing the fund,” Wara said. “Edison will go to the California Utility Commission and say, ‘We need this money to be expensed in rates.’”
The fund would also have to pay for wrongful deaths, Wara said, but that’s a different kind of claim.
“You have to show negligence, and that may be hard to prove, actually, because Edison may have acted reasonably, and yet the fire still was set by their equipment,” Wara said. “Edison would have a lot of reason to claim that it has acted reasonably, in a sense that it has spent enormous sums to try to reduce the risk, and there’s an agency that’s overseeing all of this and approving and monitoring compliance with its plans.”
Still, even if the wildfire fund bailed out Edison, there could be grave consequences for Edison and other utility companies. If a large portion of the wildfire fund’s $21 billion was depleted, that could affect market perception of the fund, negatively affect utility company credit scores, and plunge investor-owned utilities — which cover about 80% customers across the state of California — into chaos.
On Tuesday afternoon, shares for Edison International, the utility’s parent company, rose less than 1% to $57.27, marking a more than 24% drop in the week since the fires broke out. That represents a more than $7 billion decline in the company’s market cap.
“If the [utility] market collapses, then we’ve got a catastrophic situation,” Holden said. “We have to secure the market going forward.”
Last fall, state regulators criticized Southern California Edison for falling behind in inspecting transmission lines in areas at high risk of wildfires.
Utility safety officials also said in a report that the company’s visual inspections of splices in its transmission lines were sometimes failing to find dangerous problems.
“We have not seen in our telemetry any indication of an electrical anomaly,” Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro said Monday on Bloomberg Television. “Typically, when you have a fire across infrastructure, you see voltage dropping. We have not seen that in our study.”
Pizarro said Edison had turned off distribution lines near the start of the Eaton blaze before it erupted in a canyon near Altadena, but not the transmission lines. “Transmission lines are larger and stronger,” he said, “and so they can operate safely at higher wind speeds.”
Several of California’s most destructive wildfires in the last decades have been caused by aging electrical equipment. The 2018 Camp fire was caused by 100-year-old high voltage transmission towers. The 2019 Kincade fire was caused by a line built half a century ago. It may be the case, Wara said, that California’s older utility infrastructure, even when inspected, is not up to the job.
“A lot of the transmission system in California is quite old,” Wara said. “There were pulses of construction activity that led to the system we have and the last big one was when Pat Brown was governor.. .If something failed on that tower that caused ground faults, at some point we need to ask ourselves… maybe we shouldn’t be relying on old infrastructure?”
In an era when hurricane-force winds can whip up wildfires that engulf vast areas, Toney questioned whether it made sense for a utility company to be responsible for the fate of every home. Wildfires, he said, are caused not just by faulty utility equipment, but by lightning, arson, even legal fireworks, and then fueled by poor development and insufficient cutting back of vegetation and landscaping.
“It’s a mistake just to isolate utility,” Toney said. “It’s time for a new paradigm. When it comes to the cost of rebuilding, the utilities may not be big enough.”
Instacart will stop using artificial intelligence to experiment with product pricing after a report showed that customers on the platform were paying different prices for the same items.
The report, published this month by Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative, found that Instacart sometimes offered as many as five different prices for the same item at the same store and on the same day.
In a blog post Monday, Instacart said it was ending the practice effective immediately.
“We understand that the tests we ran with a small number of retail partners that resulted in different prices for the same item at the same store missed the mark for some customers,” the company said. “At a time when families are working exceptionally hard to stretch every grocery dollar, those tests raised concerns.”
Shoppers purchasing the same items from the same store on the same day will now see identical prices, the blog post said.
Instacart’s retail partners will still set product prices and may charge different prices across stores.
The report, which followed more than 400 shoppers in four cities, found that the average difference between the highest and lowest prices for the same item was 13%. Some participants in the study saw prices that were 23% higher than those offered to other shoppers.
At a Safeway supermarket in Washington, D.C., a dozen Lucerne eggs sold for $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69 and $4.79 on Instacart, depending on the shopper, the study showed.
At a Safeway in Seattle, a box of 10 Clif Chocolate Chip Energy bars sold for $19.43, $19.99 and $21.99 on Instacart.
The study found that an individual shopper on Instacart could theoretically spend up to $1,200 more on groceries in one year if they had to deal with the price differences observed in the pricing experiments.
The price experimentation was part of a program that Instacart advertised to retailers as a way to maximize revenue.
Instacart probably began adjusting prices in 2022, when the platform acquired the artificial intelligence company Eversight, whose software powers the experiments.
Instacart claimed that the Eversight experimentation would be negligible to consumers but could increase store revenue by up to 3%.
“Advances in AI enable experiments to be automatically designed, deployed, and evaluated, making it possible to rapidly test and analyze millions of price permutations across your physical and digital store network,” Instacart marketing materials said online.
The company said the price chranges were not dynamic pricing, the practice used by airlines and ride-hailing services to charge more when demand surges.
The price changes also were not based on shoppers’ personal information such as income, the company said.
“American grocery shoppers aren’t guinea pigs, and they should be able to expect a fair price when they’re shopping,” Lindsey Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, said in an interview this month.
Shares of Instacart fell 2% on Monday, closing at $45.02.
Big Tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and ServiceNow, have warned employees on visas to avoid leaving the country amid uncertainty about changing immigration policy and procedures.
Following an attack on National Guard members in Washington, the Trump administration expanded travel bans earlier this month, and beefed up vetting and data collection for visa applicants. The new policy now includes screening the social media history of some visa applicants and their dependents.
Soon after the announcement, U.S. consulates began rescheduling appointments for future dates, some as late as summer 2026, leaving employees who required appointments unable to return.
“Please be aware that some U.S. Embassies and Consulates are experiencing significant visa stamping appointment delays, currently reported as up to 12 months,” noted an email sent by Berry Appleman & Leiden LLC, the immigration firm that represents Google. The advisory also recommended “avoiding international travel at this time.”
Business Insider earlier reported on the travel advisories.
Microsoft’s memo noted that much of the rescheduling is occurring in India, in cities such as Chennai and Hyderabad, and that new stamping dates are as far out as June 2026.
The company advised employees with valid work authorization who were traveling outside the U.S. for stamping to return before their current visa expires. Those still in the U.S. scheduling upcoming travel for visa stamping should “strongly consider” changing their travel plans.
Apple’s immigration team also recommended that employees without a valid H1-B visa stamp avoid international travel for now.
ServiceNow, a business software company, similarly issued an advisory recommending that those with valid visa stamps return to the U.S.
Microsoft declined to comment on its memo. Apple, Google and ServiceNow did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Companies warned that delays due to enhanced screening is for H-1B, H-4, F, J and M visas.
H-1B is a high-skilled immigration visa program that allows employers to sponsor work visas for individuals with specialized skills. The program, capped at 85,000 new visas per year, is a channel for American tech giants to source skilled workers, such as software engineers.
Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Google, and Meta have consistently topped the charts in terms of the number of H-1B approvals, with Indian nationals as the largest beneficiaries of the program, accounting for 71% of approved H-1 B petitions.
H-1B visas are awarded through a lottery system, which its critics say has been exploited by companies to replace American workers with cheap foreign labor.
In September, the Trump administration announced a $100,000 fee for new H-1B employee hires. But after severe pushback, it clarified that it applied only to employers seeking to use the H-1B visa to hire foreign nationals not already in the U.S.
The H-1B program is an issue that has not only animated the right but also splintered it. Those on the tech-right, such as Elon Musk and David Sacks, are strongly in favor of strengthening skilled immigration, while the core MAGA base is vehemently opposed to it.
Proponents of the program often highlight that skilled worker immigration made the U.S a technological leader, and nearly half of the fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, creating jobs for native-born Americans.
If it began to sound a lot like Christmas earlier than usual this year, it wasn’t your imagination.
Halloween wasn’t even over before Spotify users began curating songs about mistletoe, snow and presents under the tree.
Holiday playlists created on Spotify in the U.S. jumped 60% in October over last year, the Swedish audio company said. Some Spotify users started crafting holiday playlists as early as summer.
“It’s a combination of wanting to feel good and nostalgia, and these are testing times,” said Talia Kraines, editorial lead for pop at Spotify. “Somehow Christmas music brings comfort and I think that’s a real part of it.”
Indeed, eight of the top 10 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the week that ended Saturday were Christmas songs, with the top five being familiar holiday classics, including Mariah Carey’s 1994 hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Brenda Lee’s 1958 recording of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” released in 1984.
On-demand streams for holiday music in the U.S. increased 27% to 8.3 billion this year, compared with a year ago, according to L.A.-based data firm Luminate.
The popularity of music streaming has helped to fuel a surge in users seeking out more holiday music, and earlier in the year.
The change has been driven by technology. In the pre-streaming era, consumers would play Christmas music through CDs and records or catch tunes on the radio during the winter months.
But the rise of Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services opened the floodgates by offering large libraries of songs on demand.
The new platforms created and marketed holiday playlists, making it easier for consumers to discover seasonal songs and add new ones to their own song collections.
“You used to have a bunch of Christmas albums around and rotate them through as you’re decorating the house or wrapping the presents,” said Dave Bakula, vice president of analytics and data insights at Iconic Artists Group. “The availability of all the music, all the time is such an incredible gift that streaming services have given us.”
For musicians and record labels, holiday music also has taken on growing importance.
Vince Szydlowski, executive vice president of commerce at Universal Music Enterprises, the centralized global catalog division of Universal Music Group, said he starts planning the year’s campaign for holiday music in January.
“For UMG and many of the artists that you associate with holiday music, it will be the most important time of the year, without a doubt,” Szydlowski said. “In some cases, especially with certain legendary artists, it could make or break their year.”
Artist Brenda Lee performs at the “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” concert at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2015.
(Laura Roberts / Invision / AP)
One campaign Universal Music Enterprises worked on was promoting Elton John’s 1973 holiday song “Step Into Christmas.” The song was featured in Amazon Prime Video’s holiday movie “Oh. What. Fun,” starring Michelle Pfeiffer.
John posted viral social media videos with the song playing in the background that drew more than 100 million views.
Those efforts helped boost the track’s consumption by 44% this year compared with last year, according to Universal Music Group, citing data from Luminate.
“It’s a very comprehensive campaign in which to continue to boost that track visibility among the holiday perennials,” Szydlowski said.
Many of the popular Christmas songs in the U.S. date back decades, making it challenging for new, original holiday songs to break through.
Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has been the longest-running No. 1 song in Billboard Hot 100 history at 21 weeks, according to Billboard.
The holidays are an important time for older artists like Brenda Lee, whose rendition of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” remains a winter hit.
In November 2023, Lee’s version of the song topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the first time, 65 years after the song’s debut, making Lee, then 79, the oldest woman to top the Hot 100, according to UMG.
Then there are artists like the late Nat King Cole, known for hits like the holiday classic “The Christmas Song,” and Dean Martin, who died in 1995 and whose rendition of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” is especially popular during winter months.
Nat King Cole in 1963. “The Christmas Song” became one of his enduring hits.
(Capitol Records Archives)
Another source of appeal for Christmas music is that it‘s timeless.
It isn’t really affected by trends and the songs highlight themes like love, hope, joy and family that remind us of our friends, family and past Christmases, said Jimmy Edwards, president of Iconic Artists Group.
“It’s the one music that you can share it together from any age. As Nat would say, from 1 to 92, right?” Edwards said, referencing a lyric from Cole’s “The Christmas Song.” “Those emotional bonds you have with that music stay with you forever … It promotes the best of us and all the good things. That’s why people love it so much.”
.
Starting 2026 on solid financial footing
Here’s how strong your grip should be in each decade of your life
Eesha Movie Review: Predictable tropes weigh down this eerie horror thriller
Map: 6.6-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Near Taiwan
This painting is missing. Do you have it?
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
The biggest losers of 2025: Who fell flat as the year closed
Niger’s military rulers order ‘general mobilisation’ against armed groups
Disability rights advocate Bob Kafka dead at 79
‘Unlucky’ Honduran woman arrested after allegedly running red light and crashing into ICE vehicle
Podcast: The 2025 EU-US relationship explained simply
-
Connecticut3 days agoSnow Accumulation Estimates Increase For CT: Here Are The County-By-County Projections
-
Entertainment3 days agoHow the Grinch went from a Yuletide bit player to a Christmas A-lister
-
Entertainment4 days agoPat Finn, comedy actor known for roles in ‘The Middle’ and ‘Seinfeld,’ dies at 60
-
Milwaukee, WI4 days ago16 music and theater performances to see in Milwaukee in January 2026
-
World1 week agoPutin says Russia won’t launch new attacks on other countries ‘if you treat us with respect’
-
Indianapolis, IN19 hours agoIndianapolis Colts playoffs: Updated elimination scenario, AFC standings, playoff picture for Week 17
-
Education1 week agoHow Trump’s Policies on Tariffs, Health Care, Immigration and More Impact You
-
World3 days agoSnoop Dogg, Lainey Wilson, Huntr/x and Andrea Bocelli Deliver Christmas-Themed Halftime Show for Netflix’s NFL Lions-Vikings Telecast