Commentary
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s avoidance of addressing tough energy policy questions will potentially expose his limited energy literacy over the next four years of financial torture inflicted upon those that voted for him.
Despite Newsom’s statewide policy decisions that are driving up costs of energy in the state, only a few Californians appear upset with the ever-increasing costs for their electricity and gasoline, resulting in excessive costs of living, increasing homelessness, and crime. Most voters have just showed their approval of the bizarre energy policies that Newsom promotes and wish to incur four more years of financial punishment.
Meanwhile, the continuous exodus of residents from the state has resulted in the
loss of a representative in Washington for the first time in its 171-year history. Departing residents are being followed by large corporations and privately owned businesses that have
moved their headquarters out of California in 2021 at twice their rate in both 2020 and 2019, and at three times their rate in 2018.
California has a history of having the highest gasoline prices in the country. Why? For one, the West Coast fuels market is isolated from other supply and demand centers since California is an energy island. The Sierra Mountains are a natural
barrier that prevents the state from pipeline access to any excess oil. As such, the West Coast is susceptible to unexpected outages of West Coast refineries as it is unable to backfill an unexpected loss in supply by quickly supplying additional products from outside of the region.
Newsom is emphatically complaining that oil companies are making outlandish profits, but he may be out of touch with reality—two California refineries have shut down under his current watch and two more may be closing in his new term.
In the last few years, two of California’s refineries made plans to cease manufacturing gasoline, aviation fuels, or any oil derivatives. Those two, Phillips66 at Rodeo and Marathon at Martinez, are now only focusing on renewable diesel.
More financial sad news may occur under Newsom’s next term with the permanent closure of two more California refineries, the Chevron Refinery at Richmond and the PBF Refinery at Martinez. After the implementation of the 2021 Bay Area Air Quality Management
rule for a further reduction in particulate emissions, both refineries sued the air regulators, and at least one has stated that they will
shut down before spending around $1 billion to retrofit their refineries to comply with the particulate emission reductions.
The world has seen the impact on Germany and Britain, with their dependency on Russia for most of its energy, but the
fourth largest economy in the world, California, is more than 56 percent dependent on imported crude oil. However, the state continuously seeks further reductions of in-state oil production that places greater
dependency on foreign countries.
California’s growing dependency on foreign countries is a national security risk for all of America. Does Newsom expect a better outcome than what Germany and Britain experienced by not controlling more of its energy future demands?
I’m sure that Newsom had a chance to view the 2006 movie “
Blood Diamond” starring Leonardo DiCaprio that portrays many of the similar atrocities now occurring in pursuit of “Blood Minerals,” i.e., those exotic minerals and metals, to support the “green” movement within wealthy countries that continues promoting environmental degradation in developing countries and human atrocities on their workers.
Despite the Biden administration’s
declaration that electric vehicle (EV) batteries from China are made with materials known to be
produced with child or forced labor, Newsom continues to support subsidies to procure EVs and build more wind and solar when those subsidies are providing financial incentives to developing countries to mine even more of those “green” materials. I personally thought that Newsom had higher moral and ethical standards that would stop him from exploiting the poor in developing countries.
Newsom seems to be oblivious to the reality that everything that needs electricity is already made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. He has yet to identify a replacement for these oil derivatives, which are the basis of more than 6,000 products and fuels for our transportation infrastructure and the economy.
Life without oil is not as simple as Newsom may think, as renewable energy consists of only intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine, so neither wind turbines nor solar panels are the answer. Climate change may impact humanity, but being mandated to live without the products manufactured from oil will necessitate lifestyles returning back to the horse and buggy days of the 1800s and could be the greatest threat to civilization’s eight billion residents.
In Newsom’s all-electric world, his energy policies reflect the belief that all of the infrastructure developed in less than two centuries from the products manufactured from crude oil are not needed by future societies, such as medical, electronics, communications, and transportation infrastructure including airlines, merchant ships, automobiles, trucks, military, and the space programs.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), California’s
cost of electricity is already more than fifty percent higher than the national average for residents and almost double the national average for businesses—and it’s projected to go even higher.
California is the nation’s top producer of electricity from solar, geothermal, and biomass, but an inability to replace the continuously uninterruptible electricity from nuclear and natural gas power plants with the intermittent electricity from renewables is causing the state to import more of its electricity.
Again, under Newsom’s watch, the EIA says that California
imports more electricity than any other US state, more than twice the amount of Virginia, the second largest importer of electricity.
Newsom’s policies continue to force California to be the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil energy from foreign countries. That dependence has
increased imported crude oil from foreign countries from 5 percent in 1992 to 56 percent of total consumption today.
As the price of crude oil approaches $100 per barrel, the imported crude oil costs California tens of millions of dollars a day—yes, every day—paid to oil-rich foreign countries, depriving Californians of jobs and business opportunities.
Richer countries now have higher gasoline prices, while poorer countries and countries that produce and export oil have lower fuel costs. A review of global petroleum gasoline
prices per gallon in U.S. dollars shows the trend of gasoline prices for wealthy countries that have opted to go “green” at any cost, compared with poorer countries and countries that produce and export oil.
Another issue that Newsom has not resolved is funding for future road maintenance. Newsom has banned the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles after 2035, but EVs contribute nothing to road maintenance and repairs. California has almost 400,000 miles of
roadways that are heavily dependent on taxes from fuels that contribute around
$8.8 billion annually, the same tax base that will also fund environmental programs in the decades ahead.
Maybe Newsom will produce a plan in the next four years to finance the billions of dollars needed for the roads being used by EVs or just pass that problem on to his successor.
California voters had a chance to recall Newsom in 2021 but chose to support his bizarre and expensive energy policies. Following the failed recall, Newsom was reelected by the voters, who are apparently willing to accept the highest energy costs in America.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
