Every spring, investors flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, where Warren Buffett holds court. Insiders call it Woodstock for Capitalists, and CNBC covers it with the fervor of Fox Sports on Super Bowl Sunday. 

Last year’s meeting held particular weight. Investors were watching closely to see if Buffett, the company’s 93-year-old CEO, would name Greg Abel, Berkshire’s vice chairman, as his successor, and how the company would weather the billions in wildfire lawsuits threatening its energy utilities. Buffett dodged the succession question, but the meeting revealed something just as consequential: the company’s strategy to avoid wildfire liability. 

Two months earlier, the Utah legislature had passed a law allowing utilities to charge their own customers to build a fund for future fire damages. The state also has a 2020 law on the books that capped the amount fire victims could sue utilities for damages. Combined, the two laws mean that if homes in Utah burn down due to a power company’s faulty electrical line, the financial damages residents can seek are limited — and they may already have been paying into the fund that covers them. For utilities, the result is reduced costs.

At the shareholder meeting, Abel singled out Utah as “the gold standard” of utility protection — a model he urged other states to adopt. “As we go forward,” he told the crowd, “we need both legislative and regulatory reform.”

Berkshire Hathaway Energy, or BHE, Buffett’s $100 billion energy arm, operates a vast power grid that stretches across the West. BHE subsidiaries such as Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp are responsible for maintaining more than 17,000 miles of transmission lines that serve roughly 10 million customers across 10 states. In recent years, BHE has been slapped with lawsuits in Oregon worth nearly $10 billion for fires caused by its faulty equipment. For BHE, the Utah laws were a significant win, shielding the company from that kind of liability in at least one state. Across the West, BHE-owned utilities and their lobbyists are now trying to replicate that success, securing laws that both cap wildfire damages and shift costs onto customers. 

“It’s infuriating to me that they are creating these situations,” said Stephanie Chase, a research and communications manager at the Energy & Policy Institute and a former consumer advocate in the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. “They’re not doing a good job at maintaining their power lines. Then when they start fires, they don’t want to pay for them.”

BHE’s infrastructure is aging, and maintaining it is expensive. Climate-proofing measures, like running power lines underground, can easily cost more than $1 million per mile, according to the Institute for Energy Research, and would put the cost of sending all BHE-owned equipment into the ground at well over $17 billion. Other resilience measures, such as trimming branches that grow over power lines and inspecting equipment in rural areas, are also expensive. 

“Vegetation management is not one of the things that they receive a return on investment,” said Chase. State regulatory agencies typically set utility prices using a formula known as the rate base, which excludes routine maintenance like vegetation. By contrast, utilities earn a return when investing in new infrastructure, Chase added. “Utility companies have a much bigger incentive because they’re receiving a return on equity on any funds that they put into capital expenditures: building a new plant, building construction, building new lines,” she said. BHE did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Earlier this summer, the Wyoming legislature passed a law that limits damages that can be awarded to victims of a utility-caused fire, so long as the company followed its own wildfire plan. In July, Idaho also enacted a similar law, shielding utilities from negligence if they prove they adhered to their wildfire plan. According to state regulatory filings, at least one representative for Rocky Mountain Power and other utilities operating in the state lobbied lawmakers in March and April to get the law passed.

One state senator who voted against Idaho’s law, Bruce Skaug, told Grist that it leaves little regard for residents who may have legitimate grievances. “We don’t want to bankrupt utilities,” Skaug said. “At the same time, if they burn down your house, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting the claim through a jury trial.” Yet, the law could do just that, he said. Skaug hopes to tweak the law to better protect residents during the next legislative session, which begins in January.

PacifiCorp is also running the same playbook in Washington. The company has petitioned state regulators to start tracking the cost of insurance increases and wildfire liability, which Chase calls a “stepping stone to getting those costs included in customer rates.” From there, utilities could begin to press regulators or legislators for permission to pass those costs on to customers.

In Utah, Rocky Mountain Power’s lobbyists benefited from a friendly legislature. Carl Albrecht, a co-sponsor of the two bills, spent decades working for utilities — including 23 years as CEO of a small electric cooperative — and takes several thousand dollars in political contributions from the energy utility industry and Berkshire Hathaway each year, according to campaign finance disclosures. Perhaps most crucially, Utah hasn’t had any major wildfires in recent memory. 

That’s not the case in Oregon. In September 2020, fires enveloped hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, burning down 4,000 homes — including a state senator’s — and killing 11 people. In the aftermath, PacifiCorp became the state’s arch-villain — and a chance at the perks it won in other states vanished.

Soon the public learned that at least some of the half-dozen fires burning across Oregon that Labor Day stemmed from downed power lines owned by PacifiCorp. A subsequent investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an agency that oversees energy markets and transmission,  found that the distance between vegetation and power lines did not meet safety standards and that some of these violations were so severe that “at least 45 percent of PacifiCorp’s BES lines” should not have had any power running through them at all. 

Public outcry turned into class action lawsuits against PacifiCorp, which turned into a costly lesson for BHE. Since 2020, juries have awarded more than $300 million to several dozen plaintiffs. Yet the fate of thousands of other claimants remains unresolved as the lawsuits drag out in court. In the end, the company may be on the hook for around $8 billion more in potential damages. 

But the lawsuits may not bring much relief to the victims. 

“Warren Buffett is not just going to dump billions in to settle,” said Bob Jenks, executive director of Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. More likely than meeting the claimants’ demands, Jenks predicted that “the company will go into bankruptcy.” 

Despite its pariah status in Oregon, PacifiCorp has been trying to secure the same protections that it has in Utah. Earlier this year, when state representatives introduced utility-friendly bills in the Oregon legislature, they were dead on arrival. “I didn’t expect the degree of anger at PacifiCorp that’s out there,” Jenks said. “I understand. Your house burns down, and PacifiCorp is playing hardball and doing everything they can to prevent liability.” 

The notion of offering some financial support to utilities in the form of ratepayer funds isn’t inherently problematic, experts acknowledge. For example, utilities in California rely on wildfire funds to pay for damages caused by their fires. As in Utah and other states, ratepayers contribute to the pot. But unlike other states, a government entity called the California Earthquake Authority — and not the utilities — oversees the distribution of that fund when it’s needed. After a tree felled a PG&E power line in 2021 and sent the Dixie Fire burning across Northern California, the fund has provided $445 million in support to the utility.  As a result of the program, utilities like PG&E can avoid bankruptcy, but aren’t allowed to pass on the costs directly to their own customers.

So far, catastrophic fires haven’t hit states where PacifiCorp has won liability caps since they’ve taken effect. But with the track record of BHE subsidiaries and rising temperatures drying out Western forests, experts believe that it’s only a matter of time. 

“The risk is there,” Jenks said. “Climate change has made our forests so much drier than they used to be, and we don’t have the same June rain. Our forests weren’t designed for this.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who pays for wildfire damage? In the West, utilities are shifting the risk to customers on Sep 19, 2025.

Many communities have foods that define them: Los Angeles has tacos, Green River, Utah, has melons, while New Mexico’s Hatch Valley is famous for its green chiles. Historic power dynamics — from colonization to migration — have always influenced how and why people began growing, cooking and consuming these symbolic dishes and crops. Today, these foods and those who prepare, raise and sell them carry cultural power; people travel hundreds of miles to buy a juicy Crenshaw or sweet canary melon from a family-run stand in Green River. And yet the farmers themselves often struggle to stay afloat. They lose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores. 

Most grocery stores across the West trace back to a few major corporations. Whether you’re visiting King Soopers in Colorado, Smith’s in Utah or Fred Meyer in Oregon, you’ll find the same Kroger-brand products. The original names of the once-locally owned grocers might remain, but the shops are now just part of one of the nation’s largest grocery corporations.

A handful of companies control the production and distribution of most of our food, and the West plays a leading role in that system. The U.S. headquarters for the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS S.A., is in Greeley, Colorado, while Driscoll’s, the largest berry producer, is headquartered in Watsonville, California. These companies rarely confront the riskiest parts of agribusiness, raising the cows and growing the berries. Instead, they produce, brand and ship them. 

This global food system has profound impacts on the West’s farmers, workers and consumers. It’s getting harder for family farms to turn a profit, and those who seek alternatives to the consolidated corporate market must navigate complicated policies and finances in order to sell directly to consumers. Berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants — face exploitation and unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state. 

Meanwhile, food insecurity has increased across the West, and yet Republican-led states, including Utah and Idaho, opted out of a federal summer grocery program for kids last year, in part because of anti-welfare politics. 

Beyond its connection to this international system, the West has deeply rooted myths and policies around water and land that create and sustain other layers of power. In the 1800s, settlers stole land from Native people and killed off bison as they drove tens of thousands of cattle westward. Ever since, the cowboy and his glorified cattle have held cultural power that politicians are rarely willing to tarnish. 

As “The Big Four” meatpackers have consolidated most of the beef industry, the economic power of ranchers has dwindled. Only 2% of U.S. beef comes from cows that graze on public lands, and yet multigenerational ranching families and large landowners continue to influence and benefit from antiquated federal grazing policies. 

Most land in the Eastern U.S. is privately owned, but the federal government owns nearly half of all land in the West. Ranchers graze cows on huge swaths of public lands, paying fees well below the actual cost of managing those lands. Over the past century, grazing policies have changed little even as cows destroyed native vegetation and degraded waterways. State and federal policies often put the health of livestock above that of the region’s arid soils or the lives of large carnivores like wolves and bears. 

Ranchers and Big Beef also intersect and overlap with those who control water in the West. Agriculture consumes nearly 80% of the water diverted from the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, primarily to grow alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops. An investigation by ProPublica and The Desert Sun found that most of the water consumed in California’s Imperial Valley goes to just 20 farming families, with one of them using more than the entire metropolitan area of Las Vegas. Only four of those families use the majority of their water rights to grow foods people consume, like broccoli or onions. The rest use their water to grow hay for livestock. 

Many of these families have senior water rights, and that increasingly means power in the arid and rapidly growing West. Together with livestock associations, irrigation districts and their political allies, they have sought to influence food and water policy. 

Yet in some parts of the West, other interests are gaining power. In the Northwest, years of advocacy from tribes and environmental groups led federal agencies to decommission dams on rivers like the Elwha and Klamath. The farmers might worry about their ability to continue irrigating, but tribes are reclaiming their traditional foodways as salmon return. 

And the Northwest’s rivers aren’t the only places where tribes are reasserting their culture and food sovereignty: Indigenous-run restaurants, farms and cooking classes are springing up across the West. 

Farmers markets, mutual aid efforts and community gardens are creating new forms of cultural, social and economic power, often led by and benefiting those who are excluded and marginalized, including queer, immigrant and Black farmers. Their efforts encourage people to take back intrinsic food traditions while they act in resistance to the global, capitalist food system. 

Still, the corporate structures of our food system are so deeply entrenched that they can be hard to fully comprehend or even notice. In this region, food is power, and that power is not equally shared. Before that can change, however, we need to understand the complexities of this system, tracing its roots to the growth of retail giants and the consolidation of Western agricultural production. 

The grocery giants

The illusion of competition

Farmers markets — a bright spot in the grocery landscape

Get big or get out: Consolidation in agricultural production

The small family farm holds a special place in the American imagination. Today, however, a modest and diminishing portion of our nation’s food is grown on smallholder farms. Production is shifting to larger-scale factory farms in every Western state and across nearly every commodity.

WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.

On Aug. 25, The National Boarding School Healing Coalition’s (NABS) made its 14th stop on a 20-stop national tour in downtown Portland, becoming a place of remembrance and community. Children ran around the decorated banquet tables of the Hilton Embassy Suites, as elders joined together in conversation, laughter and prayer as a hand drum echoed through the second-level hallways.

“Our goal is to provide a safe space for survivors to share their story,” said NABS’ co-director Lacey Kinnart. “It’s to give them this opportunity to speak their truth and record it because a lot of times they’re sharing something for the very first time.” 

Last November, NABS made a tour stop in Hilo, Hawaii, to interview Native Hawaiian attendees of boarding schools. Kinnart, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, said the language used to describe boarding schools in Hawaii is different than in the U.S. and Canada, with students referred to as “attendees” and their schools referred to as “reformatories” and “seminaries,” but the horrors remained the same. 

Although Oregon was home to nine federal Indian boarding schools, Kinnart said the stop was important to gather stories from Native Hawaiians who live on the mainland and attended one of the seven reformatories on the islands.

For around 100 years, the U.S. government abducted Native children, kidnapping them from their homes and sending them to boarding schools to force them to assimilate. In these schools, Native children weren’t allowed to speak their Indigenous languages, stripping them of any aspects of their culture and identity, while many often suffered physical, mental and even sexual abuse.

By 1926, an estimated 60,000 or 83% of Indigenous school-age children were attending boarding schools. There were more than 526 government-funded, and often church-run, schools in the U.S., in which many children lost their lives at the hands of the government.

“Indian boarding schools have been in this country and on this land. It’s American history,” said Kinnart. “It’s not just Native American history, and the general public deserves to know it.”

The collection is the first of its kind in the U.S. and is composed of oral history interviews from federal Indian boarding school survivors. It will be permanently housed in the Library of Congress within the next few years. 

How the process works 

According to NABS co-director Charlee Brissette, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, survivors use their interview time to achieve personal goals, including sharing their story to leave a legacy for their family, to pass down their story to future generations, to educate others about what happened in the schools they attended and to release a burden to find healing.

NABS strives to make the interview process as culturally sensitive as possible, with several steps in place to ensure that survivors are supported mentally and emotionally. A preliminary phone call is conducted with an oral historian to ensure the process is explained thoroughly and to address any questions. 

Then, survivors travel onsite to visit where the NABS oral history project is taking place and spend time in the welcome room. Once at the site, survivors take professional portraits and are interviewed separately. Interviewees are then led to a space where the only people present are the interviewee, their support partner and the oral historians. 

After the interview, they head to the quiet room and spend time with an Indigenous licensed clinical therapist who is trained in Indian boarding school trauma. They can spend as little or as much time as they need in the room. Then, survivors head back to the welcome room where they can have a snack or meal, depending on the time of the day, and receive an honorarium and travel stipend.

During the following weeks after the interview, oral historians reach back out to check on the survivors and follow-up. The process takes several months, during which time survivors receive a copy of their interview on an engraved flash drive or DVD, along with a transcript of their interview and a care package sent to their homes containing goods from Native artisans and crafters across Indian Country.

“They have that immediate care. But then even afterwards, they’ve gained a whole family,” Kinnart said. “It’s not like we come in and extract their story and leave. No, they’ve gained a whole family. They’ve gained grandchildren, they’re part of the family.”

Kinnart said recording these stories by Native people makes all the difference in how Native history is remembered and reported.

“I think it’s important for everybody to have access to information directly from the people that experienced it,” Kinnart said. “Oftentimes, the American history books are written about us, but not by us. They’re written historically that we’re not here anymore, or that Indian boarding schools are a thing of a long time ago. But no there’s still survivors here that are alive, that we can learn from, to not do it again and  to not perpetuate the same things.”

If survivors or attendees weren’t able to make it to a past tour date, they can visit bit.ly/OHPsignup.

The post Mainland Living Native Hawaiians Asked to Contribute to Boarding School Oral History Project appeared first on Underscore Native News.

LOWELL— Lowell’s city council gathered Tuesday evening for its regular meeting. Although the meeting was short, plenty of ground was covered. The City Administrator Max Baker, Mayor Weathers and attending […]

The Trump administration has ended funding and protections for the Columbia River Basin.

President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of a Biden-era agreement that aimed to restore native salmon populations and clean energy production with two Pacific Northwest states and four tribal nations.

Tribal leaders quickly denounced the memorandum.

“The Yakama Nation is deeply disappointed by this unilateral decision to terminate the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, particularly without prior consultation,”said Yakama Tribal Council Chairman Gerald Lewis in a press release on June 12.

In his June 12 memorandum, Trump said he was protecting the American people from the “radical green agenda policies.”

In a press release on June 12 in response to Trump’s memorandum, Nez Perce Tribe chairman Shannon Wheeler said the memorandum only exacerbates the problem.

“This action tries to hide from the truth. The Nez Perce Tribe holds a duty to speak the truth for

the salmon, and the truth is that extinction of salmon populations is happening now,” he said. “People across the Northwest know this, and people across the nation have supported us in a vision for preventing salmon extinction that would at the same time create a stronger and better future for the Northwest.”

In 1855, the United States and four tribal nations of the basin entered into treaties specifying that those tribes have a right to harvest fish on their reservations and at all usual and accustomed places.

Since 1855, however, the federal government’s construction of dams has severely depleted fish populations.

On September 27, 2023, former president Joseph Biden issued a memorandum to restore healthy salmon populations in the Columbia River basin.

In his memorandum, Biden said it was a “priority” to honor federal trust and treaty responsibilities to tribal nations.

“This remains the shared vision of the states of Washington and Oregon, and the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Nez Perce tribes, as set out in our Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative,” Wheeler said. “It is a vision we believe is supported, publicly or privately, by most people in the Northwest. And it is a vision underlaid by the treaties of our Northwest tribes, by the U.S. Constitution that protects those treaties, and by the federal statutes enacted by Congress to protect salmon and other species from extinction.”

Part of Trump’s memorandum cited a proposed plan by the Biden administration and Pacific Northwest tribes to potentially breach the four lower Snake River Dams.

Trump said there would be “no viable approach to replace the low-cost, baseload energy supplied” if this were to be completed.

According to actual generation data from 2010-2015, the lower Snake River dams generate 930 megawatts of power per year, vastly different from the 3,000 megawatts Trump said they produce in his memorandum.

The lower Snake River dams are “run of the river” dams, which means they rely entirely on snowpack and its rate of runoff. This makes them unreliable, especially with the onset of climate change and decreased snowpack.

“The Administration’s abrupt termination of the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement jeopardizes not only tribal Treaty-reserved resources but also the stability of energy, transportation, and water resources essential to the region’s businesses, farms, and families,” Lewis said. “This agreement was designed to foster collaborative and informed resource management and energy development in the Pacific Northwest, including significant tribal energy initiatives. The Administration’s decision to terminate these commitments echoes the federal government’s historic pattern of broken promises to tribes, and is contrary to President Trump’s stated commitment to domestic energy development.”

The president’s memorandum can be seen as part of a larger plan of Trump’s Unleashing American Energy executive order, which aims to explore energy production on federal land through oil and rare-earth mineral drilling.

“The federal government’s historic river management approach is unsustainable and will lead to salmon extinction,” said Lewis. “Courtroom battles cannot provide the innovative, holistic solutions we need. This termination will severely disrupt vital fisheries restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”

The post Tribal Leaders Denounce Trump’s Decision to Cut Funding Protecting Salmon appeared first on Underscore Native News.