Business
State officials approve Edison rate hike for 2017 wildfire sparked by its equipment
The California Public Utilities Commission voted Thursday to allow Southern California Edison to raise electric rates to cover payments it made to victims of the devastating 2017 Thomas wildfire.
Investigators found that the utility’s equipment sparked the blaze, one of the largest in California history. The fire’s devastation also helped spur the catastrophic debris flows in Montecito, which killed 23.
With no discussion, the commission approved the rate hike by a 4-0 vote. The vote means that more than $1.6 billion of the $2.7 billion that Edison paid to more than 5,000 victims of the fire will be covered by its customers. The rest will be paid by shareholders of the for-profit company.
After the vote, seven Democratic state legislators sent a letter to the commission, saying the action harmed customers and failed to hold Edison accountable.
“Those in regions prone to wildfires have already suffered the consequences of utility failure by being forced to endure power outages, property destruction, and displacement,” wrote the legislators, who include Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica). “It is reprehensible to require these same consumers to assume the financial responsibility for corporate mismanagement and infrastructure deficiencies.”
Edison said it planned to minimize the impact on customers by spreading the cost over 30 years. Most customers would see an increase to their monthly bill of about $1, the company said.
The commissioners approved the rate hike despite dozens of written comments from the public saying it wasn’t fair to make customers pay for costs of a wildfire that state and local government investigators had determined was started by the utility’s equipment.
“Relieving Edison of its duties to provide safe and reliable services by forcing its customers to foot the bill for their outright negligence is unconscionable,” wrote Emma Mailey, a resident of Los Angeles. She added that such an action “will teach them nothing and lead to more inaction on Edison’s part.”
Edison disputed investigators’ claims that its actions negligently caused the fire, saying in a press release last year that it had “prudently operated its system, managing it at or above what is required by regulators.”
“Climate change is driving catastrophic wildfires,” Pedro Pizarro, president of Edison International, said in the release, “and SCE will continue its work to mitigate the effects.”
The company has also asked the commission to approve a second rate increase for $5.4 billion in payments of victims of the devastating 2018 Woolsey fire, which the commission will consider at a later date. Investigators found Edison’s equipment also sparked that fire.
Combined, the two proposals would increase rates by more than 2%.
California’s electric rates are the second-highest in the nation. Edison’s rates have increased 48% in the last three years, according to a December report by the utility commission’s public advocates office.
After the vote, Alice Reynolds, the commission’s president, said that if she and the other members hadn’t approved the settlement agreement it could have led to litigation “with an unknown result.”
Reynolds and the other commission members were appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
She said the commission was operating under a legal standard in a 2019 law that said if a wildfire was sparked by a utility’s equipment but the company was found to act “prudently” the costs would be covered by customers.
The 2019 law, known as AB 1054, created a wildfire insurance fund. The Thomas and Woolsey fires don’t qualify for money from the fund because they happened before the law passed.
Edison’s equipment is now under scrutiny in the wake of the Eaton firestorm in Altadena, which killed at least 17 people and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses.
Lawyers representing victims point to cellphone videos taken by eyewitnesses that show the first flames below the company’s transmission tower in Eaton Canyon.
Edison said it is conducting its own investigation while cooperating with government fire investigators probing the cause of the inferno.
The 2017 Thomas fire swept through almost 282,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, destroying more than 1,000 structures and causing two deaths.
Investigators said Edison’s equipment was the cause of two separate ignitions on Dec. 4, 2017, near Santa Paula. The two fires eventually merged together.
Cal Fire and Ventura County fire investigators said one ignition was caused by an electric wire falling and igniting dry brush. The other ignition happened, the investigators said, when two wires slapped together, releasing molten metal into the vegetation.
The commission’s safety and enforcement division later said the company had violated five rules and regulations, including failure to cooperate with investigators.
In January 2018, while the fire was still burning, heavy rainfall led to debris flows in Montecito. Officials said the mud and boulders were dislodged in part because of the fire’s impact on vegetation and soil.
Edison has argued that its equipment wasn’t responsible for one of the two ignitions. And it says it disagrees with findings of the commission’s safety and enforcement division that it had violated any rules or regulations, including the claim that it had failed to cooperate with investigators.
Terrie Prosper, a commission spokesperson, said that although the agency’s enforcement staff identified the violations, the commission approved a 2021 agreement with Edison that found no violations related to the Thomas fire. As part of that agreement, Edison agreed to $550 million in financial penalties for multiple wildfires, including the Thomas fire.
Edison said it blames the damage and deaths caused by the Montecito debris flows on “inadequate governmental flood control infrastructure and deficient evacuation communications.”
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
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