Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, laid it out plainly in a recent Sacramento Bee op-ed: the current push to limit utility liability for wildfires helps companies that are already highly profitable, at the expense of the survivors who need and are entitled to compensation. He is right, and the tactics being used to sell that push to the public are worth a closer look.
Start with the front group. “Wildfire Victims First” sounds like a survivors’ organization. It was funded and created by California’s three largest investor-owned utilities: PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric. Its purpose, as Chemerinsky notes, is to manufacture the appearance of grassroots support for changes that would make it harder for utilities to be held liable, cap emotional distress damages, and restrict what survivors can pay their own attorneys. Add to that Governor Newsom’s proposal to pull these cases out of the courtroom entirely and route them into an administrative claims process, away from juries. Every piece of it points the same direction: less accountability for the utility companies, less recovery for the people who lost everything.
The duplicity is not new. PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter over the Camp Fire, a fire its own faulty equipment caused. Only after that plea, and only after liabilities topped $30 billion, did PG&E commit to burying 10,000 miles of power lines. Edison’s own CEO, Pedro Pizarro, has acknowledged that his company’s equipment may have ignited the 2025 Eaton Fire, a fire investigators are still examining for links to old, unused transmission equipment, the same failure mode that caused PG&E’s Kincade Fire in 2019. These companies know exactly what drives their behavior. It is liability, not goodwill, that gets vegetation managed, lines undergrounded, and dead equipment finally removed.
These utilities are not struggling. Edison posted a 2025 profit margin near the top of the entire utility industry nationally, with profits jumping from $1.3 billion in 2024 to $4.5 billion in 2025. In the three years before the Eaton Fire, Edison International paid out more than $3.3 billion to shareholders. That is the same company now funding a campaign that claims to put “victims first.”
The public is not fooled. A Hart Research poll taken this August found 71 percent of respondents opposed limiting wildfire survivors’ legal rights, a number that barely moved, down to 63 percent, even after pollsters told them restrictions might stabilize utility finances and hold down rates.
None of this is complicated. A utility that causes a fire, minimizes its own admitted role, and then bankrolls a PR campaign dressed up as a survivors’ movement to shrink its own liability is not protecting victims. It is protecting itself, and hoping the marketing works before anyone reads the fine print.