The debate arrives just as a pointed comparison has been making the rounds: California journalist Joe Mathews recently rode Morocco’s high-speed rail line and came away stunned by how far ahead the North African nation is compared to the Golden State, despite having a fraction of California’s wealth.

Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mathews noted that Morocco and California are strikingly similar in geography and population — both are long, narrow regions with coastlines, deserts and farmland, and both have populations near 38 to 40 million. The difference, he pointed out, is money. California’s economy is nearing $4 trillion, while Morocco’s sits at about $182 billion, ranking it as a lower-middle-income country.

Yet Morocco managed to build a 201-mile high-speed rail line — complete with 286 engineering structures and 13 viaducts, including the massive Hachef Viaduct near Tangier — while California continues to struggle with a project voters approved back in 2008.

That year, Californians backed a $9.95 billion bond measure with the promise that a bullet train would link Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020 for roughly $33 billion. Eighteen years later, the state has yet to complete even its first segment: a 171-mile stretch between Merced and Bakersfield, now projected to cost at least $35 billion and unlikely to carry passengers until sometime in the next decade, if ever.

Finishing that limited segment depends on the state continuing to direct $1 billion annually from its cap-and-invest program, which auctions off greenhouse gas emission allowances. It also assumes the California High Speed Rail Authority can finally deliver on a construction schedule after years of missed deadlines and shifting promises.

What comes after Merced-to-Bakersfield remains even murkier. Extending the line to link Los Angeles and San Francisco would require roughly $100 billion in additional funding, along with construction of multiple long mountain tunnels along a route that critics say was shaped more by political considerations than sound engineering.

Ironically, both the Moroccan and California projects share a connection: France’s national rail operator, SNCF. Morocco leaned heavily on SNCF’s expertise to build its line efficiently and affordably. SNCF also advised California in the project’s early years, urging a more direct route that would avoid costly tunneling. State officials didn’t follow that advice, according to reporting by journalist Ralph Vartabedian in a 2022 New York Times article, and SNCF eventually withdrew from the project in 2011.

“There were so many things that went wrong,” former SNCF project manager Dan McNamara told Vartabedian at the time. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”

Mathews’ piece landed just as California policymakers face a critical funding decision. In recent years, the bullet train project has received about a quarter of the state’s cap-and-invest revenue, roughly $1 billion annually. Last September, lawmakers revised the program but preserved the rail project’s $1 billion yearly allocation for the next two decades.

This year, however, a broader restructuring by the California Air Resources Board — aimed at easing costs for refineries and other industries — is expected to cut overall program revenue roughly in half, down to about $2 billion a year, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. That leaves Newsom and legislators facing tough choices about where to trim spending.

Preserving the bullet train’s current funding level would likely mean deeper cuts elsewhere, adding yet another twist to a project that, for many Californians, has come to symbolize the gap between ambition and execution in state government.

Original source: CalMatters

The post California’s High-Speed Rail Costs $1 Billion a Year in State Funds. Is It Paying Off? appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Two major refineries — Phillips 66 and Valero’s Benicia facility — have shut down in recent months, cutting the state’s refining capacity by roughly 17% and leaving just six major refineries to supply California’s entire market for gasoline and diesel.

That matters more here than almost anywhere else in the country. California requires a specially formulated fuel blend designed to cut air pollution and prevent the kind of smog that once choked Los Angeles and much of the Inland Empire. Because so few refineries outside the state make this blend, and because no pipelines carry outside gasoline into California, the state functions almost like an energy island. When supply tightens, prices have nowhere to go but up.

With fewer refineries competing for business, the ones still operating have had more room to raise their margins. State data show refinery profit margins ran about 50% higher in the two months following the outbreak of the Iran conflict than they had over the prior year. Refining companies have also been earning more on the retail side — branded gasoline, sold through stations tied directly to refiners, now costs about 30 cents more per gallon than unbranded fuel.

Refinery operators argue that California’s environmental regulations, higher taxes and its cap-and-invest carbon market are driving up costs and pushing them toward the exits. They’ve asked the state for more financial support to keep running. In May, the California Air Resources Board responded by approving close to $2 billion in free pollution allowances for refineries, intended to encourage them to reduce emissions rather than shut down.

Yet even with that assistance, there’s no real assurance those refineries will stay open for the long haul. Most are more than a century old, and demand for their primary product — gasoline — is already sliding as more Californians switch to electric vehicles. Roughly one in four new cars sold in the state today is an EV, and that share is expected to keep climbing.

Given these realities, some experts argue California should stop trying to prop up aging refineries and instead prepare for their eventual closure. That means making sure fuel remains affordable for the drivers who still rely on gasoline — particularly lower-income households — by expanding marine fuel imports and building more storage capacity to guard against sudden price swings.

Another option under discussion is a new pipeline that could import petroleum products from out of state. One such project has already been proposed, which would link Texas to Arizona and reverse the flow of an existing pipeline that currently sends California-refined fuel eastward. More competition from imported fuel could help keep local refining margins in check and cushion the state from further refinery shutdowns.

As California moves through this transition, officials say it’s essential to protect refinery workers who lose their jobs and the communities that depend on refinery tax revenue. Lawmakers are also pushing for greater transparency from refining companies about the environmental cleanup costs tied to shuttering old facilities, so that communities already burdened by decades of industrial pollution aren’t left to deal with contaminated sites once the refineries are gone.

Nobody is suggesting California abandon its refining industry immediately — these facilities still supply fuel that millions of residents depend on daily. But as the state moves toward a cleaner energy future, some refinery closures appear unavoidable. The challenge now is managing that shift in a way that keeps fuel affordable, protects public health, and supports the workers and communities caught in the middle.

Original source: CalMatters

The post California’s Aging Refineries Don’t Deserve More Taxpayer Support — It’s Time to Let Them Go appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The relationship traces back more than 80 years, to a friendship forged when Gordon Getty, son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, lived with the Newsom family while attending school in San Francisco. That bond carried into the next generation. Newsom’s father, William, went on to work as an attorney for the Getty family’s oil empire, and in 1973 he personally delivered a $2.2 million ransom payment to kidnappers holding J. Paul Getty’s grandson in Italy — an episode he later described simply as “an interesting sort of job.”

The connection deepened further after Gavin Newsom’s parents divorced. Gordon Getty effectively took the young Newsom under his wing, a gesture that mirrored the hospitality the Newsom family had extended to Getty decades before. In his recently published memoir, Newsom writes candidly about growing up caught between two very different worlds — the son of a financially struggling single mother, yet also something of an adopted son within a family whose fortune was built on oil.

The ties between the two families only grew stronger once Jerry Brown, then governor and a Newsom family friend, appointed William Newsom to a judgeship in Placer County in 1975 and later to the state appellate court. While serving as a judge in the 1980s, the elder Newsom played a role in helping change California trust law in a way that allowed Gordon Getty to unlock billions of dollars tied up in the family’s oil trust. When William Newsom left the bench in 1995, he went to work directly for Getty, later acknowledging in an interview that his livelihood depended on the oil fortune.

That fortune also helped launch Gavin Newsom’s business career. In the early 1990s, the Getty trust supplied startup money for a wine venture launched by Newsom and Gordon Getty’s son, Billy. The business, named PlumpJack after an opera Getty had composed, became the foundation of what would grow into Newsom’s broader hospitality and wine empire. In short, without Getty oil money, Newsom’s rise as an entrepreneur — and later as a politician — may never have happened.

Given that history, it was something of a surprise in 2022 when Newsom turned sharply against the very industry that had shaped his family’s fortunes. He accused California refiners of price-gouging drivers at the pump and pushed the Legislature to act. Lawmakers responded with a relatively modest law empowering the California Energy Commission to monitor refinery operations more closely.

At the time, Newsom framed it as a major victory. “There’s a new sheriff in town in California, where we brought Big Oil to their knees,” he declared. The rhetoric was bold, but reality soon complicated the narrative — within months, refiners began warning of plant closures, raising fears of fuel shortages and price spikes across the state.

Facing that possibility, Newsom reversed course. He began urging refiners to stay in California and signed legislation making it easier to permit new oil wells. This year, the California Air Resources Board went further, restructuring the state’s cap-and-trade emissions program — now rebranded as cap-and-invest — in a way that grants refiners free emission allowances meant to keep them operating in the state.

Newsom has praised the overhaul as a pragmatic move to protect energy supplies and jobs. But environmental advocates see it as a betrayal of the state’s climate commitments. Earlier this month, the nonprofit Communities for Better Environment sued the state in Los Angeles, arguing the changes violate the California Environmental Quality Act because regulators failed to properly study the environmental consequences of handing refiners such benefits.

The lawsuit contends that the new rules “lock in decades of subsidies for polluting industries” without the required environmental review that would let policymakers weigh the full impact of the decision.

The dispute lands at a politically delicate moment. The Democratic Party’s progressive wing — which has gained influence in recent election cycles and includes many environmental activists deeply critical of the oil industry — is watching closely. For Newsom, a governor whose family history is intertwined with one of the world’s great oil fortunes, and who has now reversed himself to keep California refineries running, the optics could prove troublesome should he seek the party’s presidential nomination.

Original source: CalMatters

The post Newsom’s Complicated Oil Industry Ties Could Haunt a Future White House Bid appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.