Newsom's Gas Failures

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Every time I think things can't get worse for Gavin Newsom,
they just get worse. And it's not just the transgender
controversy with the CIF track meet and transgender athletes and
all that, and then the clash with the Trump administration
that's looming. There was an oversight hearing yesterday in Sacramento

(00:26):
about the oil and gas industry. And this comes off
the news that two major oil refineries in the state
are closing down, meaning, with lessened supply and demand not
really changing very significantly, prices for gas are going to

(00:50):
skyrocket by twenty twenty six. So the state legislatures gathering
together to askool what what happened and how is this happening?
And everyone's all in a tizzy over it, And what

(01:11):
no one wants to acknowledge is that the state legislature
did this. This is all the state legislature's fault and
Gavin Newsom's fault. Chiefly Gavin Newsom's fault. They took actions
in twenty twenty four in which they were warned if

(01:32):
you do this, bad things will happen, refineries will close,
prices will go up, and they did it anyway. It's
all one hundred percent their fault. All right, what am
I talking about? Well, it all has to do with
the extraordinary session of the legislature. Gavin Newsom called last

(01:55):
year he was upset at price spikes for gasoline. Basically,
he's he gets upset that in the summertime, when demand
goes up, the cost of gasoline throughout California goes up.

(02:18):
And Newsome kept insisting basically ascribing these price spikes not
to the normal fluctuations of supply and demand in the market,
but ascribing it all to greed on the part of
oil companies, price gouging on the part of oil companies.

(02:41):
So he introduced legislation a bill called ab X two
dash one ab X two to one that put requirements
on California oil refineries or fine oil and gas for
our cars to maintain a higher supply of gas at

(03:05):
all times in order to avoid the fluctuations, to offset
the fluctuations. Basically, just maintain a higher supply of gas
at all times. Then when demand gets high, you already
have the gas on hand to do that. Well, it's

(03:27):
not that easy. If it were just that easy, that
you could well just maintain a higher supply and then
when the you know that, you know that demand's gonna increase,
So when demand increases, then you're ready. It's not that simple.
Keeping an artificially higher supply of gas, a supply of

(03:51):
gas that's higher than the current demand is costly. It
adds costs, and the gas company have to pass that
cost along somehow, and guess how they pass it along.
They pass it along in the form of higher prices.
And the gas companies at the time last year, around

(04:15):
this time when ABX two to one was being debated,
the gas companies told Gaven Newsom told the state legislature
very bluntly, in no uncertain terms, if you pass this,
it's just going to lead to higher gas prices throughout

(04:37):
the year. We can't. This puts more cost on us
if you insist that we maintain artificially inflated higher levels
of gasoline in our refineries. Because let's remember why it's
like this California specific problem. If you insists that we

(05:01):
maintain this higher level of gas at all times, then
it's going to add more costs to us, and we
have to start questioning as a business whether we want
to keep maintaining our California based refineries because our California
based refineries cost a lot of money to maintain year
over year. To maintain an oil refinery a gas refinery

(05:23):
over the course of a year requires something like three
hundred million dollars per year of investment. It's a lot
of investment. If we're not making enough profit because our
prices have to be too high and a certain point
it's hurting our bottom line, then we're gonna move. We're
gonna stop our California based operations. And if we shut
down our California based refineries, it's gonna have a massively

(05:45):
negative impact on prices for the California gas consumer. The
oil companies told us that last year they explicitly warned
us of this. The state legislature passed this law anyway,
and that outcome has happened. Two major refineries have shut down.

(06:09):
Gas prices are gonna skyrocket. Now, why is it that
we're so dependent on like two refineries shutting down, Like
wouldn't you think the whole California market would be bigger
and bigger and diversified enough to sort of absorb the
blow of something like that. Well, it gets back to

(06:35):
the whole reason why gas is expensive in California in
the first place, a problem that everybody understands, and nobody
with any power in California government wants to grapple with.
The reason why gas is expensive in California is not
a mystery, and it is not the result of oil
or gas price companies being greedy. It's not like they're

(07:00):
greedier in California than they are in Nevada, or greedier
in California than they are in Massachusetts. Gas prices are
more expensive in California because of one, taxes, but more
significantly regulation regulation on the kind of gas that can

(07:22):
be sold in California, which is different from the kind
of gas sold in the rest of the country. It's
a different blend that you can't get that is California specific.
You can't just use the gas that's sold at the
pump in Oklahoma in California, because California has these specific

(07:42):
regulations that make it different. You have to do a
different refining refining process. As a result, oil and gas
companies they still wanted to sell in the California, so
they made the investment to set up refineries that are

(08:06):
California specific. California is a gas island, it's supply chains
for getting crude oil and making it into gas are
separate from those of the rest of the country. So
if we've got two refineries shutting down that are producing
California gas, it's not like we can get it from

(08:28):
other places. There are only so many places to get it.
So again, this is yet another Gavin Newsome catastrophe. And
this is like the I don't know, the sixth or

(08:49):
seventh massive Gavin Newsome catastrophe that we've been dealing with
over the last year. Here between the structural deficit in
the California state budget, wildfires being a problem for the
whole Newsome administration and then culminating in the worst wildfires

(09:10):
anyone's ever seen in January of this year, homelessness being
a massive growing problem, and us coming to the conclusion
last year that the state had spent twenty four billion
dollars on homelessness to no impact, to no effect through
programs that had no accountability, no metrics even for measuring

(09:33):
that they were effective, let alone demonstrating effectiveness. The high
speed rail train that continues to just not be problem
after problem after problem after problem, so specifically with gas,
there was an oversight hearing in Sacramento in the state

(09:55):
legislature about the Newsome administration and its approach to the
oil and gas industry. It was present there were members
of the California Air Resources Board and they were discussing
the various problems and difficulties that are coming out of

(10:18):
one the Trump administration sort of undoing the all electric
cars by twenty thirty five mandate, but then also dealing
with again this fact that we're gonna have two refineries
closing down and gas prices are about to go nuts.
So Ashley Zavala is a Sacramento based local news reporter

(10:38):
in Sacramento who's like the only person who actually covers
the state capitol. I'm convinced. She was live tweeting the
event this hearing, and Siva Gunda from the California Energy
Commission was presenting, and she presents this slide show about

(11:00):
gas price spikes that the state is bracing for these
spikes to worsen with the loss of refining capacity. So
because we have two refineries closing down, gas price spikes

(11:24):
are going to be worse than they were last year.
Which the irony of this is so rich. The whole
reason why Gavin Newsom introduced and passed ABX to one
last year. His bill to the whole point of the
bill was to prevent gas price spikes by insisting that
gas companies maintained artificially high supplies of gas at all

(11:47):
times so that when demand spiked, they'd have enough gas
to do it. Well, now we don't have enough refining capacity.
So because the company, the gas companies said, this is
going to be way too expensive for us to do.
It's way too expensive for us to maintain refineries if
we have to jack up our prices this much, and

(12:09):
this is not worth it for us anymore. We're pulling
out of California. So now our supply is so low
that the gas price spikes, they're still going to have
to do gas price spikes, and in fact they're going
to be worse. They're gonna be worse. This bill, whose
whole point was to prevent spiking prices of gas, has

(12:29):
made it worse. And this is yet another, yet another
Gavin Newsom failure, just of epic proportions. No one was
talking about this legislation until Newsome stomped his foot and
insisted on it. Last year, he called a special session

(12:54):
of the legislature to do it because he has to
blame name somebody else. He and the environmentalist wacko controlled
California state legislature that they are so insistent on blaming
anyone other than themselves for high costs of energy, and

(13:15):
it's only their fault. It's only their fault. The idea
that you can blame gas and oil companies in California
based gas and oil companies for being greedy. They're not
any greedier in California than they are greedy anywhere else.
Their greed level is exactly the same. There's no reason

(13:39):
why they would be so much greedier in California than
they are in Hawaii. And everyone knows that greed is
not the underlying reason for why gas prices are so high.
Everyone understands why gas prices are high. They are high
because of policy decisions made by California California lawmakers. Policy

(14:01):
decisions that were made and maintained by California lawmakers. That's it.
That's the first, middle last, only reason why. And Democrats
in California think they can constantly go back to this
well of blaming the greed of big oil for why

(14:24):
stuff is expensive. Ignore, and people keep voting for it,
People keep buying it, People keep buying this notion that
the gas companies are so powerful in California. They're not
very powerful. Clearly, they're not very powerful. If they had power,
they wouldn't they would have stopped the passage of ABX

(14:45):
two one. They didn't because they're not very powerful. You
know who's powerful in California, environmentalist groups, that's who's powerful.
So it's yet another Gavin Newsom failure. And when we return,

(15:08):
I want to talk about the Gavin Newsom failures that
they're not just like partisan failures, they're just non partisan
any which way you look at it failures. Next on
the John Growardy Show, here's the thing with Gavin Newsom's
various failures. And I feel like I do this every show.

(15:29):
I feel like I go back to what's gonna happen
on a Democrat primary debate stage in twenty twenty seven.
In December twenty twenty seven, CNN presents the Democrat Primary Debate,
the first Democrat primary debate, and Gavin Newsom's gonna be
up there, grinning with his slicked back hair and his
veneers shining in the camera and he's going to try to,

(15:54):
you know, obviously, promote himself in the great work he's
done in California, and someone's gonna turn to him and say,
are you kidding me? The great work you've done in California.
Let me give you a list of horrible things that
have happened under your administration. And then they'll proceed to
give a list not of politically controverted things that Democrats

(16:19):
like and Republicans don't like. That's not what's going to
be presented again. It'll be a Democrat primary debate. Okay,
it's Democrats debating other Democrats. The thing is Newsome's biggest failures,
his failure after failure after failure, spectacular failure after failure.

(16:43):
It's all stuff that isn't really up for political debate.
It's just an outcome that's obviously bad. California has the
highest gas prices in the country. They had the highest
gas prices in the country when you entered office, and
their gas prices are now much higher. In fact, after

(17:07):
you passed the law in twenty twenty four to try
to insist that oil refineries in your state artificially keep
a higher supply of gas at all times in order
to prevent gas price spikes, which they told you not
to do, which plenty of smart people warned you not

(17:29):
to do, because it would cause those oil companies to
pull out of the state, close down refineries, and ultimately
lead to higher gas prices. You charged ahead anyway, You
signed the legislation anyway, and that's precisely what happened. Within
a year, two oil refineries were shutting down, and you're

(17:53):
looking at eight dollars a gallon gas in some parts
of California coming up in twenty twenty six, like eight
dollars a gallon. Guess that's not a Republican problem. It's
not a Democrat problem. That's a problem probl em. It
doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat. Homelessness was

(18:15):
a bad problem in California in twenty eighteen when you
ran for governor. It's a worse problem here in twenty twenty.
In December of twenty twenty seven, when this debate's happening,
you inherited a state budget that was relatively stable. By
the time you left office, your state budget was facing

(18:37):
structural deficits of ten to twenty billion dollars every year.
Deficits are just bad. Like, there's no it's not a
Republican bad, Democrat bad. Everyone acknowledges that's bad. And there's
only so many boogeymen Newsom can blame. Whom does he

(19:00):
blame for deficits? Well, it's the fault of uh, it's
not the Republicans fault. And that's the thing with Newsome,
it's all his fault. He has no Republicans to blame.
There are like three Republicans in Sacramento. Republicans are not

(19:22):
just the minority. They're not just the super minority. They
are a super duper minority because Democrats don't just have
a majority. They don't just have a super majority of
two thirds, which you need two thirds majority. If you
have a two thirds majority, there's lots of additional things
you can do. Democrats don't have two thirds. They have
three fourths. They have three fourths of all the seats.

(19:43):
For those of you from Rial Linda, three fourths is
more than two thirds. So Republicans can stump their feet
and shout all they want. They can't do a darned thing.
It's all Newsome's fault. The high speed rail was not

(20:03):
built when he started it's still not built when he's
leaving and not funded. He has these failures on issue
after issue after issue after issue, where it's again, it's
just not like a partisan deal. It's surely just a failure.

(20:30):
Wildfires were a horrible problem his whole time as governor,
and he clearly didn't take effective enough steps to correct it,
because in January twenty twenty five, Los Angeles has the
biggest wildfire in history. New housing construction was a problem
that wasn't happening quickly enough in twenty eighteen when he
ran for governor. By you know, here, we are almost

(20:53):
five months out from the wildfires in January, and how
many permits for new homes to be rebuilt have been
approved a paltry tiny fraction of all the houses that
burnt down, Like he's just failed. And it's stuff that's objective,

(21:15):
doesn't matter where you stand. And even the things where
maybe you could criticize him one way or another politically,
like medical coverage for illegal aliens, he gets it coming
and going. Conservatives can blame him and criticize him for
providing medical coverage for illegal aliens, and then liberals can

(21:38):
blame him for having to embarrassingly roll that back because
it cost way more than he anticipated. So he's just
faced and now with god knows where where his you know,
head's gonna stop spinning on the transgender issue. Democrats might

(21:58):
criticize him, Republicans might criticize him, like he's just got
failure after failure after failure after failure that, and he
it seems like he's racking them up in rapid succession. Really,
just over the course of twenty twenty five, he's cooked,

(22:19):
he's done. I just don't think he's got a snowballs
chance in hell of being elected president. Just the series
of catastrophic California news, from the budget structural deficit, to
the wildfires, to the alarming news about how underfunded the

(22:45):
high speed rail is, how they seriously don't have enough
money to get it done. Just boom boom boom boom,
thing after thing after thing he is. I just don't
see how he can possibly credibly run for president when

(23:07):
we return the inevitable criticisms of Diane Pierce and other
local Fresno politicians talking about this whole state issue with
transgenderism at the California High School Track and Field meet
coming up this weekend that is next on the John
Girardi Show. So I went today to the press conference

(23:32):
that Diane Pierce held for regarding the whole issue about
transgenderism within California high school sports that took place at
the Presno Veterans Memorial and about the California state high
school track and field competitions which are being held the

(23:52):
state wide championships that are being held at Buchanan over
the course of this weekend, and which are prominently featuring
a biological male competing in some of the women's events.
The Californianster Scholastic Federation has updated some of its rules
basically to allow girls who may have been bumped from
qualifying for things to still participate, who may have been

(24:18):
bumped for qualifying for things by a transgender biological male
athlete to still qualify for things, but their policy is
still not in conformity with the Trump administration's Executive Order
et cetera, et cetera, And my thoughts turned to Diane Pierce,
a public figure who has caused no small amount of

(24:41):
controversy in our local politics, and the controversy around her
is always this. It's usually basically it's usually centered around
other members of the City of Clovis City Council criticizing

(25:03):
her for getting involved in issues that they say are
outside the scope, outside the scope of what the city
council is supposed to do. Why can't you just be
focused on fixing potholes, et cetera. Lynn Ashbeck is often
the leading figure criticizing Diane Diane Pierce very publicly for

(25:27):
this kind of behavior, and it leads me to want
to offer a defense of Diane Pierce and of politicians
like her, like Gary Brettefeld. Gary Bretdefeld gets hit with
the same kind of accusation quite a bit, that he's
a grand stander, that he's a self promoter, but also
that he overly politicizes things and focuses on issues that

(25:53):
are outside of his ken. If you will, all right,
City governments are supposed to represent us. That's what they do,
and the work of city governments is limited. City governments

(26:15):
and county governments are themselves purely and simply creations of
state government. The parameters of what they do or can
do are set by state law. This is true throughout
the United States, Okay, cities and county governments only have

(26:35):
latitude to act. They only have freedom to act. They
only have independence to act insofar as the state grants
them that freedom latitude independence to act. So the range
of what a city council can do is fairly limited.
Their football field on which they can play is very small. Okay,

(26:59):
the parameters are set by state law. So as a result,
there's a lot of kind of big picture things national
news controversies, even statewide news controversies that city council's city government,

(27:25):
local government, county government. They may not be able necessarily
to have a big impact on it, or there might
be some issue that's a county issue but not a
city issue, or vice versa. The instinct of any local

(27:47):
government official is to flee controversy, to settle themselves into
something quiet, safe and secure. I think there's very much
a temptation to do that in county government on the
County Board of Supervisors. The County Board of Supervisors made

(28:11):
a lot of headlines by not really changing their boundary.
Their redistricting boundary lines very much. So every ten years
you do redistricting and the County Board of Supervisors, their
individual supervisorial districts have to get redrawn to reflect the

(28:31):
latest census data, and the president County Board of Supervisors
didn't change their boundary lines all that much. County supervisors
make really good money for relative to other elected officials
in California state government. County supervisors make very good money.

(28:52):
They make much more than even City of Fresno City
council members make. They make a comfortable into the six figures.
And county supervisors don't have term limits. It's very comfortable.
You can if you don't make waves. You maybe have

(29:13):
two or three controversial votes per year. You've got your
district that's fairly Republican I mean that fairly Republican or
fairly Democrat, and you can sit tight pretty well. And
yet in the last county supervisor round of elections, two

(29:34):
incumbents lost in favor of two pretty hard charging challengers.
Gary Bretdefeld replaced Steve Brandew. And I like Steve Branda,
and I'll say this, I don't think Steve Randall was
like that. I don't think he was a comfortable sit
around guy. I mean he I'll always credit him for
passing the library ordinance that took a lot of guts
for him to do. But sal Can and Tara All

(30:00):
so he got replaced by Luis Chavis. And I do
believe that there is a real temptation in local government
not to talk about your views on bigger, broader topics
because you don't want to be controverari sial. Even though

(30:22):
this is a thing you may not be able to
impact it. But part of living in a political community
together is affirming what's good and denying what's bad. Alerting
your citizenry about things that are happening that are good

(30:43):
or bad, rallying attention, rallying concern on behalf of your
city for things that are maybe beyond your city's power
to immediately do something, but maybe your city ken if
you will lobby for that thing. I think Diane Pierce

(31:03):
was admirable for doing just this in the context of libraries.
Here's the Clovis City Council, which, for those who haven't
been to the closed City Council, it's this. It's right
across the street from Clark Intermediate School. It's right near
San Joaquin College of Law on Bullard, which turns into

(31:26):
Fifth Street. Once you get to Old Town Clovis it
becomes Fifth Street, and then as you leave Old Town
Clovis it turns back into Bullard. So the Clovis City
Council is in this sort of complex of buildings that
all look the same. It's right next door to a
Fresno County Library, the Clovis branch of the Fresno County Library,

(31:50):
and in the Clovist branch of the Fresnoe County Library.
They had all kinds of smut aimed at kids. I
go to that library, I've seen it to. It's not
just Diane seeing it. I've seen it too. And so
Diane Pierce made a big public stink about it and said, hey,
this is really bad. And it was right in the

(32:11):
middle of this being a big national, you know, news
story talking point in what was I guess this was
twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, that
public schools were introducing public schools and county run public
libraries introducing more and more aggressive sexual content to younger

(32:35):
and younger audiences, and Diane Pierce said, why the heck
do we have this the al Basically everyone on the
Clovis City Council sort of wrung their hands and said, well,
that's a controversial topic, and you're making city staff feel
uncomfortable by drawing attention to it. And by the way,
it's a county it's a county library, it's not a

(32:55):
city library. So it's not your job. It's not your
job to deal with that. You know what else isn't
part of our you know, the Presdent City Council's job,
or the Clove City Council's job. The Presno City council
is not going to do anything to fix the Armenian genocide.

(33:16):
It happened one hundred and ten years ago. And yet
every year in April, what do we do. We ceremonies,
public ceremonies, speeches, gatherings in which we honor the victims

(33:40):
of the Armenian genocide. Why, because this is a community.
We are part of a community. Living in a polis,
in a political community, in a city is a natural
thing for human beings to do, and a city is

(34:02):
a kind of naturally occurring thing. A city has stuff
that ties it together. Things they think are good, things
they think are bad, are shared. American heritage, Pride in
our country, pride in our agricultural economy, pride in this

(34:22):
that there's a lot of ideas, ideals, principles that in
a functioning city can and do unite you and city governments.
It's good for us to honor things that are good
and to object to things that are bad, even if
it's a little beyond our ability immediately to legislate to stop. Yes,

(34:45):
I understand that the closed city council can't fix the
problem of transgender athletes competing in California high school sports.
It's above their pay grade. But I commend local government
leaders for saying, you know what, it's happening right here
in our town. I have citizens in my town who

(35:07):
don't even realize this. Don't don't grasp the enormity of this,
don't grasp the enormity of how this has taken away
the rights of women. And it's the state championships are
happening right here in Clovis, California. So I say bravo
to Diane Pierce, Bravo to Gary Brettfeld, Bravo to local
government leaders who are willing to say you know what. Yeah,

(35:31):
I know, my job is mostly concerned with potholes and
fixing roads and hiring cops, but this is what I
also But I also believe that this is right and
this is wrong, and as a city leader, as a
civic leader, I think it's right and just for my
voice to be heard on this. So kudos to them

(35:55):
when we return the power of AI to really screw
up your job. Next on the John Girardi Show, Misty
her is in hot Water news story in GV wire
by Edward Smith. Apparently the Fresney Unified administration presented the
Teachers Association, the teachers' union that represents teachers in Fresney Unified,

(36:21):
with a document this month that cited every instance that
union leadership criticized Misty Herr in a quote inflammatory, unprofessional,
or dismissive way. But there was a problem this document
that they gave the Teachers Association. It's nine pages long,
document was sharing a bunch of quotes that were completely fabricated.

(36:48):
None of the stories actually the actual news stories. When
you went back to them, they didn't have the quotes
that this dossier said they did, leading everyone to realize
that this nine page dossier was created by AI. I
would just like to give this little thought. Everyone needs

(37:13):
to realize that there's a lot of lazy, stupid people
in the world, and that all of them are going
to try to use AI, even in professional settings to
cut corners at work, and it's going to lead to
a lot of embarrassing situations like this. So mistery Hurr,
you probably want a fire whoever made that document for you,

(37:35):
just just my two cents. If you don't want your
students all using AI to cheat on work, you probably
don't want people working for you who also use AI.
And it's part of my ongoing luddite hatred of AI
that I find. Look, if you want to use AI, Hey,

(37:55):
I've got this kind of cheese and this kind of onion.
There's a AI. Find me five recipes that will use
these ingredients. All right, that's fine. Other than that I
hate it. That'll do it, John Glady Show. See you
next time on Power Talk