By Josiah Hale
WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Chris Wright said it on live television while crude sat over one hundred dollars a barrel: Joe Biden celebrated shutting down oil and gas production and closing refineries. Gavin Newsom’s California then took two large plants offline in twelve months. That is not a weather report. That is how you drive energy prices up and leave them there. The Strait of Hormuz can spike a week. A closed cracker lasts a decade.
The record is not a slogan. Phillips 66 idled Wilmington. Valero idled Benicia — one hundred seventy thousand barrels a day — and California lost nearly a fifth of in-state refining capacity, then told the public it would import the difference. Importing gasoline after you kill the still is not “transition.” It is a tax collected at the pump. DSA energy policy treats that as a feature. Less steel. Less diesel. More dependence on a tanker that has to thread a war. Wright’s line was the opposite: energy addition. Build capacity. Reverse the pause on leases and pipelines. You cannot ration your way to cheap fuel.
Call the party what it calls itself. Democratic Socialists of America write “just transition” on the flyer and then watch the city that hosted the refinery lose its largest taxpayer. That is by design. You do not accidentally erase twenty percent of a state’s gasoline plants and then act shocked when CARB fuel trades at a premium. Biden’s first-year cancel of Keystone XL and the leasing freeze were the national version of the same sermon: production is the sin, scarcity is the virtue. Four years of “normal life” under that doctrine already priced gasoline higher than a shooting war should have to explain.
Wright said diesel and gasoline will come back down if the country adds barrels instead of sermons. The DSA will call that climate denial. The pump will call it arithmetic. A nation that cannot refine its own crude is not green. It is a customer.
References
- https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news/crude-oil/052026-californias-refinery-closures-create-volatile-fuel-prices-supply-gaps
- https://www.kqed.org/science/2000877/californias-fuel-fears-threaten-benicias-just-transition-to-green-economy
- https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/01/06/governor-newsoms-statement-on-valeros-benicia-refinery-update/
