California is strangling its own energy base—then blaming oil companies for the predictable fallout, including shortages, wildfires, and policies built on ideology rather than economics. [some emphasis, links added]
Even if the most dire climate scenarios are accurate, and humanity must transition away from fossil fuels, it can’t happen overnight. The rational approach is to first develop alternative energy sources without precipitously destroying the industries that reliably produce oil and natural gas.
Once alternatives are available at competitive prices and in sufficient quantities, demand naturally shifts to them. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry, recognizing that its core business is to provide energy, remains healthy by also investing in the transition.
None of that is happening in California.
The approach the state’s politicians have chosen is irrational and predatory. For more than twenty years, they have legislated and litigated the state’s oil and gas companies down to a fraction of their former size, making up most of the resulting energy shortage not with alternative energy, but with imports.
A recent and particularly brazen case of this ongoing harassment comes in the form of Senate Bill 982, something that only last week came perilously close to moving to a floor vote.
Under the moral masquerade of requiring restitution for allegedly causing climate change, which in turn allegedly caused wildfires, what this bill really amounted to was a state-sponsored shakedown.
SB 982 is a vivid example of how California’s legislature is determined to cannibalize and ultimately destroy entire industries to pay for disasters of its own making.
The so-called Affordable Insurance and Recovery Act (SB 982) would impose liability on fossil fuel companies for “climate-attributable damages,” expected to be assessed in billions of dollars.
It would empower California’s attorney general to sue the state’s oil companies without even needing to prove fault, negligence, or specific causation by an individual company.
This bill is not only legalized extortion, but also a total disregard for economic reality. Combustible fuels remain the primary engine of civilization, and they’re not going anywhere for at least the next several decades.
Despite this unavoidable fact, California’s in-state oil industry is already on the verge of implosion. The results are easily quantifiable.
Well production in the oil-rich state has fallen from over 400 million barrels per year in the 1980s to little more than 100 million barrels per year in 2024.
A major distribution pipeline from fields in Kern County to Northern California refineries was shut down in late 2025 due to insufficient oil supplies needed to move it, nor enough to make it possible for the operators to break even.
Additional regulatory harassment has driven two of California’s major refineries to cease operations, leaving existing refinery capacity insufficient to meet demand.
Californians now import 75 percent of their crude oil and, by some reports, 20 percent of their gasoline from refineries in Asia.
Against this backdrop, SB 982 wouldn’t even permit oil companies to recoup the billions that this predatory legislation will empower the state of California to extort from them.
Where they could find the billions (trillions?) to pay for “climate attributable damages” if they can’t raise prices to consumers is unclear.
A similar disregard for economic reality is what motivated the introduction of SB 922 in the first place.
For years, California’s semi-numerate insurance commissioners, driven by ideology, have made it difficult, if not impossible, for the state’s insurers to [pass on increases in their reinsurance payments to ratepayers], or raise rates to reflect updated risk assessments.
Then, when wildfires immolated more than 13,000 homes in the Los Angeles area in early 2025, many insurance companies had already canceled coverage and left the state.
The remaining insurers offering coverage, including California’s state-funded FAIR insurance plan, were overwhelmed. Without a bailout, these insurers cannot cover the claims.
But the entire premise of SB 982 is flawed. Culpability for the wildfires doesn’t rest with California’s oil companies.
The California State Legislature created these disasters because they have waged a regulatory assault on California’s timber industry for decades, along with property owners and ranchers who once engaged in grazing, thinning, and controlled burns.
In the Santa Monica Mountains surrounding the burned neighborhoods in Los Angeles, herds of sheep, goats, and cattle used to roam the hillsides, and property owners could thin overgrown vegetation on their land as well as adjacent public lands.
All of this became nearly impossible thanks to interference from hyper-regulatory oversight that effectively eliminated almost all the practices that had prevented California’s forests and wildlands from turning into tinderboxes.
Trees and scrublands became overgrown, with the vegetation dried out and stressed not because of “climate change” but because natural and prescribed fires were suppressed; at the same time, any other form of thinning was all but banned.
More than any other single factor, environmentalist extremism has caused California’s catastrophic wildfires.
Rather than admitting their culpability for the entire disaster, the wiped out homes, lost lives, and ensuing economic cataclysm, California’s state legislature blames oil companies.
This entire charade is a prime exhibit of why climate change alarm in California has become, above all else, a scam; it’s designed to deflect responsibility for bad policies and to redistribute wealth and power to bureaucrats who haven’t shown the slightest evidence of learning from their decades of negligent opportunism.
Thanks to what capacity remains for rational climate policy in California, the targets of SB 982’s predatory scheme were able to stall its progress in the legislature this year.
But the state’s appetite for seizing billions from disfavored industries isn’t going to go away.
Top: As the state burned, the Golden State’s climate ringleader, Gavin Newsom, blamed energy companies for his ill-conceived policies.
Read rest at Master Resource
