Editors at the Washington Examiner issue a warning to Californians.
California has the highest gas prices in the continental United States, but they are set to rise by at least 50 cents a gallon in 2025 thanks entirely to new regulations approved by the Democratic Party that controls the state. These regulations may be intended to reduce carbon emissions, but thanks to the refusal of California drivers to give up their increasingly expensive cars, importing fuel into the state will most likely raise overall emissions.
On Nov. 8, three days after Election Day, the California Air Resources Board, a notionally independent agency whose appointees are controlled by the Democratic Party, is set to vote on stringent new fuel standards and apply them next year. CARB estimated this year that regulations similar to the ones being voted on Friday would raise the price of gas by 47 cents a gallon in 2025. The University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy did its own analysis of CARB’s new regulations and found that a price hike of 65 cents per gallon was more likely.
The backlash against these estimates earlier in the year was so strong that CARB said it would reconsider the new standard, which it did, before rereleasing basically the same regulation. This time, instead of estimating how much the new regulations would raise prices for consumers, CARB claimed it had simply lost the ability to determine how much its regulations would affect prices.
“I don’t expect them to,” CARB Executive Officer Steven Cliff told reporters. “There will be additional impacts to costs to refiners,” but he said he doesn’t “think” those costs will be passed on to consumers.
If only that were true.
Keep in mind that the new CARB standards are on top of new costs inflicted on refineries by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) anti-price gouging legislation, which forces refineries in the state to build new storage facilities to hold reserve gasoline in case refinery maintenance disrupts supplies.