Lately, I’ve dreaded more than ever filling up my aging, wheezing 2010 Camry. I’d love to buy a new, $110,000 Tesla. But I don’t make the salary of a government functionary, and my apartment complex doesn’t have charging stations.
I keep track of my gas purchases. When I just went to Costco, it was $5.79 a gallon for premium. That’s up from $4.30 in January. A 35 percent increase just this year. With more likely to come.California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom recently filed a lawsuit against the five biggest oil companies “for allegedly engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception and creating statewide climate change-related harms in California,” according to Mr. Bonta’s announcement, which reads:
“Filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, the complaint asserts that although the companies have known since at least the 1960s that the burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet and change our climate, they denied or downplayed climate change in public statements and marketing. As detailed in the complaint, California has spent tens of billions of dollars to adapt to climate change and address the damages climate change has caused so far, and the state will need to spend multiples of that in the years to come.”
Notice the amount: “tens of billions of dollars.”
Let’s be clear who’s really going to pay for this. As Mr. Newsom knows, because he owns some restaurants, companies have to make a profit. If costs go up, those added expenses are either passed to the customer or the company goes broke—or if it’s a big company, it will halt unprofitable operations.
In this case, the costs will be passed directly to consumers at the gas pump. And it wouldn’t surprise me if one or more of these five companies decided it couldn’t afford to operate any longer in California. If that happens, competition will decline, further boosting costs at the pump.
Let’s remember that Mr. Newsom earlier this year pushed into law Senate Bill X1-2. It set up a new bureaucracy, the Division of Petroleum Market Oversight, to control gas prices and will only encourage higher prices by increasing companies’ compliance costs. As I wrote in The Epoch Times on Aug. 11, it's a key strategy in deflecting attention from California’s high gas prices should the governor run for president. I noted that prices had just risen above $5. Now, it’s almost $6.
