California is falling into an unrecoverable deficit of refineries

Despite what out of state friends and families have said for years, California is not going to fall into the Pacific Ocean. But if its policymakers and legislators continue on a path of carbon isolation uber allies, it's possible that California continues to alienate itself from the rest of the world, sinking economically as an energy island, isolated from the rest of the continental USA by the majestic Sierra Mountains.

As more refinery closures are anticipated in the coming years, more of the demands of 58 million gallons of transportation fuel DAILY, will be dependent on Asian refineries to meet these daily supply chain demands to keep the 4^th largest economy humming:

• 11 million gallons/day for Jet fuel for the States' 40 military and 9 international airports.California is the nation's largest jet-fuel consumer. Roughly 20% of supply is now imported, primarily from India and other Asian refiners (South Korea). Imports have surged alongside refinery closures.
• 10 million gallons/day for Diesel for the States' trucking and construction industries.
• 37 million gallons/day for Gasoline for the States' more than 36 million vehicles. Gasoline imports are rising to fill the gap left by the shrinking of in-state refining, from refineries in the Bahamas, India, South Korea, and Gulf Coast.
• In addition, Bunker fuel for the 1,000's of merchant ships serving 3 of the busiest ports in America at Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland.

California's overall demand for petroleum-based transportation fuels is decreasing slightly over the long term. However, supply of those transportation fuels is dropping even faster due to refinery closures, creating tight market conditions. Thus, California regulations are supporting the increasing profitability of the few remaining refineries by reducing the supply chain to meet the humongous daily demands of transportation fuels.

This is not an accident. It's hubris from the deputized bureaucracy that believes in more regulation, not for the sake of the planet, but for the sake of their jobs and pensions. They are enabled by a cabal of true believers in ecology over economy. And that group of environmental do-gooders has enabled the radical growth in agencies, programs and prohibitions that only make the problem worse.

California is regulating itself out of transportation fuel production while the rest of the world expands it. And for some reason, Golden State lawmakers think that they can regulate 99.5 percent of the world's population that do not live in California, under the various climate change regimes they have implemented within California over the last half century of ecological doomsaying, but the weight of the policy changes is displacing much of our productivity to other nations that are not so inclined to kill industriousness.

The history is long and broad, but since the 1970s, the anti-car movement moved from dealing with a legitimate challenge rapid growth in the cities and smog – especially within several of the denser basins in Southern California – to a phalanx of new agencies who were apt to mission creep. Created to manage air pollution through technological improvements, it wouldn't take many years before the radical zero population ideologues had captured the sincere environmental activists.

And even good governors, like Ronald Reagan, were implicated in these movements to uphold their image as sincere conservationists. Naively believing that he could restrict the cancerous growth of environmental activists and restrain the growth of government, Reagan signed both the Mulford-Carrell Act in 1967 - which created the California Air Resources Board (CARB) - and the California Environmental Quality Act in 1970 (CEQA).

CARB's mission was to fight air pollution from mobile sources and CEQA originally slated to oversee the environmental impacts of state and local agencies' projects on the ground. These policies have been taken to court so often against builders and movers that the litigation is wagging the tail of the legislature.

Both efforts have been converted to restrict and inhibit any growth of maintaining or expanding our refinery sector, thus increasing costs and requiring that most of our petroleum products be shipped from hostile countries overseas, like Iran and China.

But it's more than the rabid ecologists that is slowing the development of any refinery capacity to meet the demands for the products and transportation fuels of our materialistic society. Our progressive zeitgeist has produced a few generations of clueless Watermelon Warriors – green on the outside, red on the inside – and we're dabbling in a Marxist oil war, something that former-Soviet-citizen-turned-American-capitalist-novelist Ayn Rand predicted in her work, The Left: Old and New," Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, "It has been reported in the press many times that the issue of pollution is to be the next big crusade of the New Left activists, after the war in Vietnam peters out. And just as peace was not their goal or motive in that crusade, so clean air is not their goal or motive in this one."

While many are quick to opine on the virtue or vice that NIMBY-types ("not in my backyard") played in holding down development of California and its economy, it is the BANANAs activists who have inflicted the most pain, shutting down nearly all progress in energy production in the state. The "build-absolutely-nothing-anytime-near-anything" zealots don't want a drop of oil explored for, drilled, refined, sold or expended in the state, and are able to utilize the useful idiots found in our many agencies and departments at the state level, leveraging the federal government rules and local community outrage to suffocate any opportunity to have a rich refinery future.