By Jack Fowler
Friday, August 08, 2025
‘The oil industry has Newsom over a barrel” — that’s the
headline of a new Politico piece about California’s chief executive,
Gavin Newsom, who is now grappling with stark realities that the Golden State,
a fuel-reserve mecca, is becoming a self-induced energy desert. It’s a fitting,
if not inevitable, reckoning for a governor who spent years leading the
Democratic Party’s scorched-earth crusade against fossil
fuels, only to find himself now pleading with the beleaguered and vilified
industry not to abandon the state.
The flinching from Sacramento comes as oppressive,
expensive policies have resulted in Phillips 66 and Valero announcing the
shutting of their state-based oil refineries. Even a self-proclaimed climate-change crusader like Newsom realizes the
deleterious consequences of less fuel for California’s millions of
gas-dependent vehicles and the skyrocketing of already outrageous gas prices
for ever-beleaguered California residents — which is why he’s pressing the California Energy Commission to cut the
refineries slack to forestall their closures.
California’s energy unraveling offers a preview of what
happens when ideology overrides practical governance. And yet, against the
backdrop of closing refineries, ideology cannot but help veering ever left. In
addition to draconian laws, regulations, and executive orders, the left has
intensified its thrill over employing climate lawfare in an effort to break up
Big Oil and turn America into a land of windmills, solar panels, bicycles, and
blackouts. If it all seems intentional — this progressive drive to steer the
state, and the country, toward a brink of supply shortages, out-of-sight energy
bills, economic strain, and significant national-security risks — it is.
Beyond deploying antagonistic laws and mandates against
Big Oil, California is actively weaponizing the legal system to target the
energy industry. Later this month, a state court will hear arguments in People
of the State of California v. ExxonMobil et al., a sweeping lawsuit filed in 2023 by the Newsom administration
accusing five major oil companies of deceiving the public about climate change.
The state is seeking damages related to wildfires, storms, and extreme heat.
(This being the same state that, under Newsom’s
water-hostile leadership, has been blowing up dams generating hydroelectric power, for the
sake of salmon.)
It’s an interesting dichotomy, or hypocrisy: Newsom
hoping to rebrand himself as an energy pragmatist with last week’s refinery
backpedal, while his administration is trying to extract tens of billions of
dollars from the very companies it’s now courting to prevent a supply collapse.
Refinery crisis aside, Newsom’s litigation continues
unabated. And the ferocity of climate lawfare is not confined to California: Blue states across the country are adopting the Golden
State’s strategy, turning to lawsuits and retroactive fines in the name of
climate accountability. New York (an energy bonanza atop the Marcellus Shale,
the massive natural-gas reserve untapped due to a state ban on hydraulic fracturing)
and Vermont have enacted Climate Change Superfund statutes designed to bankrupt
U.S. energy companies for past emissions. Hawaii filed a lawsuit this year
accusing oil producers of negligence, nuisance, trespass, and harm to public
trust resources. Multnomah County, Ore., is seeking over $50 billion in a climate-nuisance suit blaming
oil companies for the 2021 heat dome.
(Meanwhile, climate lawfare efforts are also being
strategized to protect Green New Deal favorites such as offshore wind
power.)
But the climate-change lawsuit activists have struck no
gushers. Indeed, some of the wells are dry, as courts are beginning to push
back. For example, in Charleston, a South Carolina judge dismissed the city’s lawsuit accusing oil companies of
deceiving the public and demanding compensation for flooding and sea-level
rise.
The decision adds to a growing chorus of dismissals, even
in blue jurisdictions, including cases brought by Baltimore, New Jersey, and Bucks County, Pa. Judges are growing increasingly skeptical
of the legal theory behind these suits: In the Charleston case, Judge Roger
Young claimed in his dismissal ruling that “under Plaintiff’s
theory, virtually anyone could be a plaintiff — and a defendant — in what would
effectively amount to a perpetual series of lawsuits that reset after every
storm.”
Nevertheless, similar lawsuits continue to emerge in
Maine, Delaware, Rhode Island, Illinois, Washington State, D.C., and even
Puerto Rico. Together, they amount to a coordinated legal campaign to vilify
American energy producers and impose costs designed to make the industry’s
survival impossible.
California shows where this activism of severe regulations and “profit caps” and litigation is headed. The state’s downward
spiral would be farcical if the consequences weren’t so serious, and so
deleterious to residents. The abuse of stretched-to-the-limit refineries — which have found it nearly impossible to operate — and their forthcoming
closures could threaten 20 percent of the state’s gasoline supply, with an
ensuing price rise that could be as much as 75 percent. This, in a state where residents have already
spent much of the past three years paying over $5 a gallon.
(Or worse: In 2024 in Menlo Park, a gallon of gas went for $7.75, an almost-European level.)
Governor Newsom’s scramble to contain the damage, offering subsidies and
investor incentives to keep the remaining refineries from closing, is a
remarkable about-face from the man who relentlessly disdains the oil industry and spent years
driving refineries toward the exit.
As with lawfare, Democrats elsewhere are continuing down the California path, punishing producers
while ignoring the practical costs to families and businesses, chasing the same
predictable consequences.
By phasing out gas appliances and vehicles, banning gas-powered lawn equipment, constraining supply, and
forcing utilities into costly transitions, progressive states are inflating
energy costs, narrowing consumer choice, and making everyday life difficult.
Californians already pay 56 percent more for electricity than the national average,
despite using less power. In Illinois, another hot spot for climate-change
activism, families are facing double-digit utility rate hikes amid surging demand driven
by EV adoption and the mandated switch to electric heating. And in New York,
energy bills — already some of the most expensive in the country — are rising
even further to fund green mandates and forced gas-to-electric
conversions.
All of this comes just as demand for affordable, reliable
power is poised to explode. AI computing, industrial reshoring, and
advanced manufacturing require uninterrupted electricity at scale. In fact,
demand might reach levels that exceed the grid’s capacity.
A 2024 analysis from the North American Electric
Reliability Corporation warned that much of the country faces elevated risks of
blackouts as a result of rising demand and premature coal plant retirements.
And while adversaries such as China are accelerating nuclear buildout,
left-wing activist groups at home campaign to dismantle existing plants and
block new development. The result is a self-inflicted grid crisis,
driven by a movement that claims to support decarbonization
but rejects the one technology that can deliver it.
The climate movement’s absolutism has brought us here.
For years, progressives treated energy producers as enemies rather than assets,
ignored warnings of grid reliability, dismissed the economic costs transferred
to consumers, and accused anyone who does not play along of being in the pocket
of Big Oil.
California’s current crisis is a direct result of that
mindset. The rest of America would be wise to take note of that. And of Gavin
Newsom’s ploy at being a moderate.
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