Sable Offshore, The Defense Production Act & California's Energy Death Spiral
How Sable Offshore's Pipeline is Back in Play & How it is Desperately needed
Opening Quotes
“Chevron is deeply concerned and strongly opposes the California Air Resources Board (CARB) proposed amendments to the Cap-and-Invest (C&I) regulation. The proposed regulation will cripple the survivability of the states remaining refineries, which will result in California losing the entire industry to this misguided program. This regulation will increase transportation and aviation fuel prices for consumers. It will risk significant job losses, including many high-paying union jobs, while reducing funding for essential public services. It will upend California’s fuels market and threaten critical energy and national security assets” – Andy Walz, Chevron Corporation, President, Downstream, Midstream & Chemicals (Walz Letter Link) March 2026
“We proved we can actually beat Big Oil…“What are they going to do? Spend some of their billions of dollars, try to go after us, try to demean us, try to lie to you, try to manipulate,” he told reporters. “That’s status quo here. Give me a break. I’m just sick and tired of those guys…. Gavin Newsom, March 2023 (Link to Source)
“We are all the beneficiaries of oil and gas. No one’s naive about that so it’s always been about finding a just transition,”… Gavin Newsom, September 2025, (Link to Source)
Introduction
“The future is not one with fossil fuels. We should be prioritizing the health, safety, and pollution reductions over the profits of oil and gas companies,” - Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, San Diego, 9/2025
It is an intellectually lazy activity to take moral high ground against any US politician at this point in our country. We know they all lie, we know they are all greedy and back handed. The question is never if, it is why. When Gavin Newsom and elected officials in California so obviously contradict themselves the question we should be asking is why might they do this – what is the incentive? As much as I dislike Newsom and his misguided stance on energy that is boring to poor out on paper one because it is so easy to do and two because it does not actual offer a unique perspective in what is shaping up to be a total energy collapse in one of the largest states in our union.
When Newsom or Assembly members say things like “the future is one without fossil fuels” I used to get incredibly frustrated by their lack of basic energetic understanding but now, being a bit wiser and a bit more seasoned I try to peel back the onion on why a politician might seemingly be acting so far against what looks to be their constituents and their own interests. While I often receive that statement that “well, the rich coastal homeowners do not care about high price energy” that can not be the beginning and the end of the discussion. California is not comprised of only lunatics who spend everyday cutting of their nose to spite their face.
Instead, what I would like to do in this piece is given an honest view of the situation at hand, one that is quickly spiraling for the state for certain but neighboring states and our military preparedness if we do not reverse course. California has a right to run its state the way it sees fit, and I do not dislike environmentalists and what they stand for on principle. It is extremely important that we are taking care of our planet and environmentalists have done much good for our country as a whole that have left our natural environment more preserved, and have literally saved lives. There was a time in our country where we had no regulation around what kind of waste was dumped in our communities, where we drilled, what sort of working environment our men and women in the oil industry enjoyed, etc.
The problem I have with the environmentalist group is now it has gone too far. What happens with activism broadly is there is a well meaning uprising that is needed and solves a major environmental/ humanitarian crisis. As the success grows and more folks get interested the money starts to flow from governments, charities etc and once that happens it no longer becomes a question of advocating for social change or environmental change and if it is needed and at what scale, the movement becomes a victim of its own success and when the major problems have been solved too much money is now invested in these schemes for them to be reasonably winded down or sized down.
What happens then is we get an environmental movement that is based on misinformation and fear. Almost religious in nature the environmental movement sounds good and morally it is easy to find high ground because well, it is our planet after all? That then leads to the warping of the brains of the populous that we actually do not need hydrocarbons in our societies and more than that we vilify the men and women working in these industries who work every day to raise our standards of living, keep our homes warm in the winter and cool in the summer, on top of a list too long to name of other benefits. Newsom himself admits as much.
As is the case with all things there is a grey area that must be explored but when the unsilent “fringe” minority on either side controls the narrative all grey is lost and the line that has been drawn is you can either protect the planet from fossil fuels and be on the good side, or you can publicly deny that there is any threat to the environment now or ever in the past and this has all been a hoax. Neither of these perspectives are rational but these are the voices that ultimately get propped up and unfortunately win elections.
Since Newsom has taken office the oil and gas industry as a whole has been decimated. Jobs have been permanently destroyed, affordability is nonexistent in the state unless you enjoy the lifestyle of the elite, and public education on energy remains piss poor. The majority of our population knows more about their iPhone than they do about the basic energetic realities that they interact with the survive and thrive on a daily basis.
California, as we detailed in our piece The Barrel and the Ballot published October of 2025 we laid out in great detail the energetic collapse that the state was facing. Highly exposed refinery capacity to seismic activity, low stock piles of fuel (14 days), high taxes on producers and refiners, refinery closures, all pointed to a collision course with energetic reality at some point. We also wrote this piece in the backdrop of the Martinez fire that shut down on of the states largest refineries and luckily caused only minor damage.
Since then not only has Phillips 66 Los Angles based refinery closed, Benicia owned by Valero is also closing.
Canada O&G Letters – State Responses to CARB
