Gavin Newsom’s war on affordable energy
Washington Examiner
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Thanks to President Joe Biden’s war on fossil fuel production, gas prices are rising everywhere, but nowhere are they rising faster than in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California, and they are going to rise even faster after a slew of legislative and legal moves by the state’s top Democrat.
The average gas price nationally is at about $3.85, up from about $3.20 last December, but in California, some drivers are paying almost twice that now, with the average price of a gallon of gas surging past $6 in Los Angeles County.
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California has high gas prices by design. It starts with the country’s highest gas tax, 80 cents a gallon. Illinois is second at 66 cents, and the national average is 30 cents.
But taxes are just the beginning of California’s war on affordable energy. State regulations also mandate unique gasoline blends not found in other states. This means California can’t just ship in gas from around the country. It needs specialized refineries that only produce California environmentalist-approved gas.
Not only do California regulations mandate unique gasoline blends, but state law also forces refineries to pay exorbitant cap-and-trade fees that refineries in other states don’t have to pay. It’s a double whammy. California has both limited the number of gas refineries and then taxed the few that do exist to the point of unprofitability.
Now, on top of all those taxes and regulations, California wants to increase the cost of drilling for oil in the state by forcing oil producers to pay a bond upfront to cover future plugging and restoration of oil wells. The state is also inflicting all businesses with revenues over $1 billion to file an annual report documenting the emissions generated in the production and use of their products. This won’t change the temperature by a single degree, but it will raise the cost of literally everything in the state.
Finally, Newsom is also taking oil companies to state court, including Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP, on the theory that oil companies have known about the damage caused by carbon emissions for decades and their “disinformation” campaign about climate change is to blame for a string of natural disasters in the state.
Whatever the oil industry knew about climate change, they are not the ones that failed to manage California’s forests and underbrush, nor were they the ones responsible for not securing PG&E’s power lines, which are the real factors behind California’s recent wildfires.
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Newsom is seeking hundreds of billions in damages from the oil companies, which he says will go into a fund to help recovery efforts from natural disasters caused by climate change. The lawsuit seems like a huge waste of everyone’s time. Why not just raise taxes on oil companies again and dedicate the revenues from those tax hikes to disaster recovery? Because, if successful, that is exactly what this lawsuit would do: raise gas prices on California consumers yet again just so California’s Democratic Party can have another slush fund for their political cronies.
California is the nation’s leader in electric vehicle adoption for a reason. Newsom’s war on affordable energy will only ensure they maintain that lead.