California’s Gas Supply Restrictions Lead Gavin Newsom to World Stage

How is California Governor Gavin Newsom going to jump back onto the national stage? Once his role as Joe Biden’s surrogate presidential candidate was shattered as Democrats replaced him with Kamala Harris, how could Newsom remain present in order to facilitate a run for President in 4 years?

This brings us to Gov. Newsom’s plan to decrease the state’s gas supply in special session legislation, making its way through the Legislature.

Keep in mind that California’s cap and trade program expires in 2030 (more on that below).

Gov. Newsom claims that the state’s highest-in-the-nation gas taxes and prices are not what led to dramatically spiking gas/oil prices but because of price gouging by the oil industry. In May, Newsom even signed a gas price gouging law into place.

The California Energy Commission disagreed with the governor at the time, showing that gas price spikes occurred in the last few years because of refineries temporally going out of commission because not enough oil was getting to them.

But even as California’s own Chevron Oil Company announced in August their corporate relocation to Houston Texas from the Bay Area, where the company has been based since 1879, why is Newsom pushing legislation which will clearly result in even higher gas prices at the pump? Again?

Chevron is just the latest big business to flee the Golden State. Notably, Chevron’s President Andy Walz said in a letter to the Legislature that of the 36 states in which they work, only California has the highest gas prices.

“The math behind this proposal is incomplete and fails to address key operational questions,” Catherine Reheis-Boyd, President and CEO of the Western States Petroleum Association said following passage of Newsom’s bill in the Assembly. “For example, how many days of supply will refiners be forced to withhold from the market? What will the storage costs be? And crucially, what happens if a price spike never materializes—are Californians then stuck paying more year-round for no reason?”

Don’t Democrats buy California’s high-priced gas? I don’t know anyone who isn’t complaining about the cost of gas in California.

The situation is about to get worse. Gavin Newsom is working to become the next Al Gore – the name and face of the worldwide climate change grift.

Every climate change bill passed by Newsom and the Legislature is to “Achieve net zero GHG emissions” in the state, and to Newsom and his acolytes, that means outlawing oil and gas. So pretty much everything we use in modern society needs to be upended, overhauled, and restricted, according to Gov. Newsom and the burgeoning industry of climate change hustlers.

The higher the stakes – including attacking the oil and gas industry – the more notoriety Gavin Newsom receives. The harm to the people, businesses and industries of the state is inconsequential as long as Newsom gets press.

In May the Globe reported that the California Air Resources Board is mandating an additional 50 cents per gallon be added to the price of gas in California in January. This is all part of the goal to force California’s drivers out of their cars, and/or into electric vehicles. But ultimately, the Democrats’ goal is to ban petroleum-powered internal combustion engines by 2035 and gas-powered vehicles.

Gov. Newsom, the Legislature and State Air Resources Board are working hand in glove to restrict the availability of oil and gas and increase the cost of gas at the pump so severely, middle class and working class drivers will be making choices between groceries and fuel for the car.

As we said above, California’s cap and trade program will expire in 2030. A group of lawmakers has already been assigned to lead a discussion on climate change in December. Energy experts anticipate another extension is in the works.

What is Cap and Trade?

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has taken a great deal of liberty, particularly with its interpretation of AB 32. The CARB devised the cap-and-trade system whereby it holds a quarterly auction program requiring selected California employers to bid significant amounts of money for the privilege of continuing to pollute — or be faced with closing their doors.

California’s cap-and-trade program places a “cap” on aggregate greenhouse gas emissions from businesses and utilities deemed “polluters” by the California Air Resources Board, which the CARB says are responsible for most of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The Air Resources Board issues carbon allowances, and businesses are forced to buy or sell these in the open market. Several other countries including Spain and Australia have already acknowledged carbon taxing does not work, but not California’s Air Resources Board, not the Democrats, and not Gavin Newsom. Instead they continue to push for more stringent regulations and taxes on California businesses and taxpayers, and lie that the goal is a reduction in greenhouse gasses. This is just another sizable tax on businesses. And instead of actually reducing carbon emissions through the cap and trade program, a business can merely purchase the get-out-of-jail credits to be able to continue (polluting) doing business.

The state effectively said: Forget carbon emissions, we need the money. This legislation which originated as AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, was financially motivated.

With Gavin Newsom burnishing his climate change chops, he can peacock all around the country and the world, demanding zero carbon emissions from emerging countries. Energy experts anticipate Newsom will attempt to expand the Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy, ‘to align climate change policies and promote clean energy.” I reported in 2013, California Gov. Jerry Brown, together with the Governors of Oregon and Washington and the British Columbia Premier, originally signed The Pacific Coast Collaborative, which links with the West Coast Infrastructure Exchange (WCX), a compact between California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. The WCX is linked to the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative.”

In 2022 alone, California signed Memorandums of Cooperation with Canada, New Zealand and Japan, as well as Memorandums of Understanding with China and the Netherlands, to tackle the climate crisis. The Governor also joined with Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia to recommit the region to climate action.

None of these “climate partnerships” mean anything, nor does “tackling the climate crisis,” and not one of the agreements has accomplished anything. It’s all show, and provides a lame excuse for politicians to travel the world.

Zero carbon emissions from the United States will have no impact on future temperatures, which also applies equally to CARB’s cap and trade, and AB 32 – which makes this the perfect meaningless job for vapid Gavin Newsom.

“There is ‘NO Climate Crisis’ says a coalition of 1,600 actual scientists” in a recent letter to the California Air Resources Board,” the Globe reported in May. “In fact, the scientists find that “California is in no danger of unusual drought: The annual precipitation in California has fluctuated greatly over the last 150 years, with only a slight decrease.”

The CO₂ Coalition’s letter was particularly timely with Gov. Gavin Newsom taking his climate change road show to the Vatican where he was invited to speak by Pope Francis at a Summit of mayors and governors. The Summit, held May 15th to May 17th, covered “the impact of rising temperatures” in local communities, and “climate resilience.”

It is important to note that all tax increases are required to be voted on by the California Legislature. But the CARB – a state agency made up of Newsom’s political appointees – has been bypassing the Legislature for years and passing their own “clean air” and “climate change” taxes – obviously with the implicit approval of the Legislature.

The 2023 CARB Low Carbon Fuel Standard amendments document unabashedly outlines in black-and-white, the new gas tax increases through 2042 (page 57):

Gov. Newsom also signed a package of “sweeping legislation” in September 2022 to achieve statewide carbon neutrality as soon as possible, and no later than 2045, by establishing an 85% emissions reduction target, capping oil wells, slowing oil and gas permitting, making it impossible to increase refining capacity, and entirely phasing out oil and gas starting in two years.

That “sweeping set of laws” Newsom touted was 40 new climate change bills regulating California businesses and its people.

In 2019, During Gavin Newsom’s first year in office, the Trump administration Bureau of Land Management finalized plans to open 800,000 acres of federal land in Central California to oil and gas leasing, primarily located in Fresno, Monterey and San Benito counties. This would have allowed oil and gas drilling to move forward in Alameda, Contra Costa, Fresno, Merced, Monterey, San Benito, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Stanislaus Counties, according to a report by the Bureau of Land Management.

This caused environmentalists’ and Democrats’ heads to explode. California sued the Trump administration in 2020, with then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra calling the Bureau of Land Management plan “half-baked” and “misguided.”

When he signed the 40 new climate change bills, Newsom said, “We’re not interested in investing in the industries that have created the problems that we’re trying to mitigate.” Newsom was referring to the oil, natural gas, agriculture, and auto industries, or “polluters” as Gov. Newsom and climate change grifters would have you believe.

Western States Petroleum Association President & CEO Catherine Reheis-Boyd said Monday morning: “Our government leaders spent significant time and money in a special legislative session and came up empty-handed. Even worse, they knew a 47-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase is coming in 2025, and this session served as a smokescreen to hide it from Californians. Legislators still fail to understand our industry or what drives high gas prices. Regulators remain fixated on controlling businesses with more taxes, fees, and costly demands.”

Reheis-Boyd continued:

Meanwhile, critical questions remain unanswered—questions Californians and the media should be asking of the Governor and our state leaders:

• If you’re truly concerned about price spikes, why aren’t you addressing the cost increases that will result from tightening LCFS and Cap-and-Trade regulations?
• Workers have raised serious concerns about the safety risks this bill poses to both refineries and surrounding communities. Are you prepared to take accountability if incidents occur as a result?
• Energy companies say “California is closed for business” while experts emphasize the need for more competition. How do you reconcile that with warnings from experts that tightening regulations could risk further refinery closures?
• Aside from pushing legislation, what concrete efforts have you made to collaborate with the energy industry to stabilize price volatility?
• Experts have warned that California’s fuel infrastructure is on the verge of catastrophic failure, and that this bill will only make things worse by increasing volatility. What’s your response to these serious concerns?
• Why aren’t you taking the simplest step of allowing access to the abundant petroleum reserves in Kern County, instead of increasing reliance on imported crude through our ports—at a higher cost and with greater environmental impact?