A compelling and heart-wrenching study.
An account of the failure of a major utility company and how it serves as “a harbinger of challenges to come as climate change exacerbates the vulnerability of the [power] grid.”
In this intensely researched, deeply unsettling chronicle of Pacific Gas and Electric, Blunt, a San Francisco–based Wall Street Journal reporter who covers energy and utilities, digs deep into the company’s erosion and collapse. The author begins in the 19th century when the electric light and a massive migration west attracted entrepreneurs, including the founders of PG&E, who built dams to serve California’s exploding population. Even though most states gave utility companies monopolies in their areas, they were still private businesses with stockholders. Guaranteed a modest profit, they remained a stodgy but reliable investment. In 1996, reacting to America’s conservative swing, California’s legislature deregulated the power industry. Suddenly, investors could make big money in the power market, and many sleazy operators did so (see: Enron). Matters improved after a few years, but the industry remained fragmented and fiercely competitive. As always, profit ruled. Investing in capital improvements increases profits, while investment in maintenance is “money out the door”—as such, the infrastructure continued to deteriorate. Over the past decade, warming temperatures, drought, and deteriorating power lines have produced record numbers of catastrophic wildfires, killing hundreds and destroying thousands of homes and millions of acres of forest. Multibillion-dollar lawsuits drove PG&E into bankruptcy in 2019, from which it is now emerging. Most industries suffering massive liabilities go out of business, selling buildings, machinery, and inventory to pay creditors. A utility, legally bound to supply power, can’t do this. It must either borrow money, which customers eventually repay, or bill customers directly. California electric rates are rising steadily, and Blunt delivers detailed accounts of complex, ongoing political, business, and courtroom maneuvers that would overwhelm readers if not for her abundant journalistic skills. But even this plugged-in author cannot deny that PG&E’s problems may be insoluble.
A compelling and heart-wrenching study.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-33065-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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