Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) wants to make it unsustainable for people to drive gas cars. The resulting policy effects make it so that rich people can drive gas cars while the poor and the middle class get priced out and forced into less desirable alternatives.
The California Air Resources Board voted to pass new fuel standards two weeks ago, which everyone warned would lead to an increase in gas prices. That decision came on the heels of Newsom signing a law that would require minimum fuel storage levels for oil refineries, an attempt to avoid political backlash from spiking prices during gas shortages. Of course, the increased regulations would require those refineries to spend more money and pass those costs on, leading gas prices to go up again.
That does not even include what happens when the supply decreases because refineries close down, as Phillips 66 announced it would be doing with its Los Angeles refinery immediately after that law was signed.
We now know the resulting effects of those decisions, according to the University of Southern California’s business school: an increase of $0.55-$0.90 per gallon in California gas prices, costing drivers an additional $222 to $449 per year on gas price increases alone. Californians already pay $0.50 more per gallon than any other state in the continental United States, thanks in part to the highest gas tax in the country.
While Newsom pretends to be very concerned about gas prices, this is inevitable given the goal of the California Democratic Party. Newsom and California Democrats have promised to end the sale of gas cars by 2035 and are going through the process of making driving a gas car more and more financially difficult by trying to price people out of them and force people to purchase electric vehicles.
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This, of course, means that Newsom wants to force lower-class and middle-class Californians to abandon gas cars while allowing the rich to continue to drive them up through the state’s deadline because, when you price people out of things, you start from the bottom-up. This also means that Newsom is forcing rural Californians into the electric vehicle transition first, despite the fact EVs are wildly unreliable for rural Californians because their communities require a lot of driving and are not supported by current EV infrastructure.
This doesn’t even get to the fact that Newsom’s crusade to make driving gas cars unaffordable also feeds into California’s overall price inflation, which makes California more and more expensive and adds more financial burdens to lower-class and middle-class Californians. Newsom’s environmental zealotry is making life more expensive, which hurts everyone but the rich elitists with whom Newsom has palled around his entire life.