California looks to target oil company profits in a special legislative session | Hacker News Reader

California looks to target oil company profits in a special legislative session

npr.org

12 pointsnowandlater10 comments

CaRFG suffers from being a niche product with regulatory capture. It's even legislated that it can't be handled by the same supply chain as EPA RFG. (1)

CARB should recognize that its rules aren't that different than the national ones which came after their own standards were adopted, and that declining gas consumption (2) has reduced asset amortization and driven supplier pricing power. It's time to give up on CaRFG. Reductions in demand also decreased the relative impact of whatever vanishingly small merit the custom fuel might have offered.

Interestingly, the phase three specifications for both fuels are even closer to identical than phase 2, with the proposed EPA rules (3) actually being slightly tighter on sulfur than the proposed California rules (4). At this point the state is needlessly draining billions of dollars away from its people basically for the sole purpose of being different. And they've dragged Washington State and the rest of PADD 6 along for the ride.

(1) https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/fuels-registration-rep...

(2) https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=A...

(3) https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engin...

(4) https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/barcu/regact/rvp2...

According to Wikipedia, California has 5-7 billion barrels of oil in untapped fields in their coastal waters. Some can be tapped using existing wells offshore or onshore wells using directional drilling. This is 10x what is in a full US petroleum reserve. Maybe tapping these would go a long way to lowering prices?

That would make logical sense; instead we will tax oil company profits and disincentivize increasing refining capacity. It's pretty amazing our governor didn't care about this issue until it was an election year. Now all of a sudden he is sick and tired of this price gouging.

Why is california the only state cut off from the pipelines? Does this effect the price of gas?

Gov. Newsome: we have a $56 billion surplus.

California Legislators: keep taking the money.

Now I believe Peter Zeihan when he says we'll likely enter an energy crisis that encompasses the majority of the world later this decade.

Forget that, we will probably be in a financial crisis before that.

I am thinking many nations will crumble due to this, many of the biggest nations are suffering and their markets are being ruined.

China's housing bubble popped and its banks are closing, the usa's economy is not in a good place and the attempts to fix its inflation are damaging many other nations, places like turkiye have had their currency become extremely weak.

Many nations are in stagnation or are in decline.

They could just do the Venezuela approach, that seemed to work pretty well.

lets target congress profits next.

Why not let the market regulate it ? Where is capitalism when you need it ?

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