Tag: Industry

New energy policies in California threatening America’s national security.

America’s economy and national security are heavily reliant on California, the 4th largest economy in the world.

From Watts Up With That?

America’s economy and national security are heavily reliant on California, the 4th largest economy in the world.

Ronald Stein, P.E., is an engineer, columnist on energy literacy at America Out Loud NEWS, and advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.” He is also the recipient of an unsolicited Tribute to Ronald Stein from Stephen Hines.

Mike Umbro is an energy entrepreneur, innovator, and advocate for affordable, reliable, and locally produced energy in California.  As **founder** of the nonprofit **Californians for Energy & Science**, he leads efforts to research and highlight the economic, environmental, and security benefits of in-state energy production, including oil, gas, geothermal, and emerging technologies like Geologic Thermal Energy Storage (GeoTES).He’s a vocal proponent of unleashing California’s natural resources to reduce reliance on imports, lower costs for consumers, and support jobs and innovation in the state.  

Co-authored by Ronald Stein and Mike Umbro

Published March 16, 2026, in America Out Loud NEWS

New energy policies in California threatening America’s national security – America Out Loud News

California’s high regulatory burden and taxes have been the basis of corporate business decisions to leave California for more pro-business locations to run a business. The exodus out of California includes such majors as Tesla, Oracle, Chevron, SpaceX, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Charles Schwab, and Yamaha, that have relocated headquarters from California to states with lower taxes and regulations.

An increasingly adversarial policy environment has already contributed to recent refinery closures in California that have significantly reduced U.S. West Coast refining capacity, raising concerns about fuel shortages and price spikes. Key shutdowns include Phillips 66’s Los Angeles refinery (late 2025) and the Valero Benicia refinery (scheduled for April 2026), removing roughly 20% of California’s gasoline supply. 

With no crude oil pipelines over the Sierra Mountains, California, the 4th largest economy in the world, is an “Energy Island” separated from the crude oil supply, and the infrastructure of oil refineries from the other 49 States. Thus, all in-state California transportation fuel demands for the military, ships, airports, cars, and trucks have staggering numbers FROM in-state refineries.

California’s economy faces threats with new energy policy changes as the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the agency responsible for enforcing air‑quality polices in the state—has proposed new limits on greenhouse gas emissions for local businesses. These changes pose serious risks to California’s cost of living, job security and reliable supply chains of transportation fuels.

With the California “Energy Island” losing refineries, and CARB tightening the noose further, we’ll be losing more CA refineries at the time that the 4th largest economy in the world NEEDS new refineries to be built IN CALIFORNIA. The recent announcement of a new Reliance refinery in Brownsville in Texas will be useless to the demands on the California “Energy Island”.  California remains a national security risk to America.

CARB’s Proposed Cap-and-Invest Regulation will upend California’s transportation fuels market and threaten critical energy and national security assets and raise the price of gasoline, jet, and diesel fuels, impact California jobs, and threaten national security for America.

Transportation fuel supply declines from refinery closures are resulting in steep, sudden declines in production capacity of gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, and bunker fuel for the 1,000’s of merchant ships serving three of the busiest ports on the West Coast.    

Affordability is a top concern for California residents, and these proposed amendments would only exacerbate the high cost of living in the state. For consumers, weakened refinery operations translate into tighter fuel supply, greater price volatility, and higher gasoline prices, particularly during periods of peak demand. Reduced in‑state production increases reliance on costly and slow‑to‑arrive foreign imports that are ill‑suited to respond to supply shocks and carry higher lifecycle emissions.

California’s in‑state refining system plays an important role in supporting U.S. energy security, Military readiness, national defense, including military defense installations in the state that could be compromised if this CARB policy is finalized. California refineries supply a broad range of transportation fuels, including aviation fuels that are critical to commercial and military operations, and they operate near major ports, military installations, and strategic hubs serving the Pacific region.

Continued erosion of California’s refining capacity risks increased reliance on imported fuels that are slower to arrive, more exposed to global supply disruptions, and less reliable during emergencies or periods of heightened geopolitical risk.

Refinery closures in California reduce fuel supply resilience on the West Coast, increasing risks to military readiness and national security. Maintaining a stable policy framework that supports continued operation of California refineries is therefore not only an economic and consumer affordability issue, but also a matter of broader national security and national defense.

The proposed CARB regulation changes will cripple the survivability of the State’s remaining refineries, which will result in California losing the entire refining industry to this misguided CARB program.

The California energy industry’s economic, industrial, environmental, and national security benefits have been the foundation of a healthy, prosperous state and nation. Adversarial policies at local, regional and state levels have eroded that foundation. These proposed CARB regulatory changes threaten to destroy it and cause lasting and irreversible harm to California’s economy and energy security and broader vital American interests.

The California energy island will be increasing dependent on imported transportation fuels from new refineries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The supply chain of fuels and products refined from raw crude oil will face severe imbalance, leading to higher costs and shortages for future generations. In the future, new refinery units that are planned or announced in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will be providing the transportation fuel to California’s 9 international airports, 41 military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping ports!

YES, California will be a national security risk for the entire country!

Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are moving forward with new refineries to meet worldwide demands. New refinery units are planned or announced, mostly in poorer developing countries, to process crude oil into the products and fuels demanded by those living on this planet, to begin operations worldwide by 2030. 

Approximately 181 new oil refinery projects are planned or announced to commence operations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East between 2024 and 2030, with Africa leading with roughly 70–89 projects, followed by Asia and the Middle East. These regions are driving global capacity growth, with significant investments aimed at meeting rising demand, shifting away from aging, less efficient facilities in other parts of the world. 

California policymakers seem to be unaware that other more business-friendly States may be a better business decision for in-state manufacturers, and that Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are savoring the future with their many refineries coming online to meet the supply chain of products and transportation fuel DEMANDS of California.

Again, the proposed CARB regulation changes will cripple the survivability of the State’s remaining refineries, which will result in California losing the entire refining industry to this misguided CARB program.

Please share this information with teachers, students, and friends to encourage Energy Literacy conversations at the family dinner table.

Starmer Slashes Net Zero Taxes to Save Britain’s Industries

Net Zero taxes will be slashed by up to 25% for thousands of manufacturers as Keir Starmer scrambles to save British industry from electricity costs that are the highest of any developed country.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Will Jones

Net Zero taxes will be slashed by up to 25% for thousands of manufacturers as Keir Starmer scrambles to save British industry from electricity costs that are the highest of any developed country. The Telegraph has more.

As part of the Government’s long-awaited Industrial Strategy, the Prime Minister is to cut power bills by up to 25% for some 7,000 “electricity intensive” manufacturers, including car makers, aircraft factories and chemical plants.

From 2027, they will no longer have to pay the Net Zero levies that are normally added to their power bills, such as the renewables obligation, the feed-in-tariff and capacity market charges.

This will be paid for by financial reforms to the energy market and a raid on companies that burn natural gas, through higher carbon taxes, the Government said.

However, the support was at risk of being diluted on Sunday as Iran’s threat to cut off a vital oil and gas supply route in the Middle East risked sending energy prices around the globe soaring.

It comes after repeated warnings that British manufacturers are labouring under the highest industrial electricity prices of any developed country, with output down by a third since 2021.

Sir Keir’s announcement was welcomed by manufacturers, including Derby-based Rolls Royce, as a “giant and much needed step forward”.

The Prime Minister said: “This Industrial Strategy marks a turning point for Britain’s economy and a clear break from the short-termism and sticking plasters of the past.

“In an era of global economic instability, it delivers the long term certainty and direction British businesses need to invest, innovate and create good jobs that put more money in people’s pockets as part of the plan for change.

“Our message is clear – Britain is back and open for business.”

Worth reading in full.

However, Net Zero Watch (NZW) dismissed the move as a gimmick that is “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, as the cost of the discount has to be paid somehow, with hints that gas users will foot the bill.

NZW Director Andrew Montford said:

Ed Miliband is once again merely proposing to shuffle costs from one energy user to another. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is all he has to offer, because his mad fixation on decarbonisation means he will not look at the underlying problem, namely the gross inefficiency of a renewables-based grid.

This latest wheeze will bring temporary relief for sectors favoured by the Secretary of State, but at the expense of others, who can ill afford it. And in the medium term, bills will continue to rise for everyone. The country can’t afford this madness any longer.

Ed Miliband is Losing the Fight for Net Zero

According to various reports of an offshore wind industry conference this week, Ed Miliband has claimed confidence in “winning the fight on Net Zero” against his critics. His main weapon, says the Guardian, is jobs. Billions of pounds of “investment”, reports the newspaper, will “usher in a ‘green industrial revolution’ for workers in manufacturing heartlands such as Teesside, Scotland, south Wales and East Anglia”. But rather than restoring Britain’s forgotten centres of former industrial prowess and taking on any kind of fight with Net Zero sceptics, all Miliband is doing is repeating extremely tired promises that obfuscate signals from reality.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Ben Pile

According to various reports of an offshore wind industry conference this week, Ed Miliband has claimed confidence in “winning the fight on Net Zero” against his critics. His main weapon, says the Guardian, is jobs. Billions of pounds of “investment”, reports the newspaper, will “usher in a ‘green industrial revolution’ for workers in manufacturing heartlands such as Teesside, Scotland, south Wales and East Anglia”. But rather than restoring Britain’s forgotten centres of former industrial prowess and taking on any kind of fight with Net Zero sceptics, all Miliband is doing is repeating extremely tired promises that obfuscate signals from reality.

The word ‘jobs’ in the mouths of wonkish political hacks such as Miliband is equivalent to gifts dropped from the anointed political class to a starving population, like so many chicks begging for worms. They believe that entire industries come into existence by the strokes of bureaucrats’ pencils, executing the political orders from enlightened politicians. In this respect, Ed Miliband’s conceits are exactly the same as Boris Johnson’s, who proclaimed a “10 point plan for a green industrial revolution” in late 2020.

Then, at the height of the Covid debacle, unemployment had reached 5.3%. This fell to 3.6% in the summer of 2022 as the economy emerged from the chaos that Johnson (and many others) had unleashed. Perhaps the ‘green industrial revolution’ was happening.

But perhaps it was not. From there, the unemployment rate rose to 4.1% by the time of the General Election. And since then it has risen again to 4.6%. Percentages often obscure the reality of the numbers. 1,628,000 people were claiming unemployment benefits in May 2024. In May this year, the figure had risen to 1,735,000. A decade ago, the claimant count was just 795,000.

“We are building this new era of clean energy abundance, helping deliver new jobs, energy security and lower household bills through our Plan for Change,” said Miliband, via the Telegraph. This coincides with reports that the Ofgem energy price cap, which was lowered for the quarter beginning July, will likely rise again in October by approximately 3%. Energy companies are further predicting even more rises in the first two quarters of next year, which, if true, will completely undo the modest fall for the July-September price cap.

Miliband’s promises of “jobs” are as good as his promises for “lower household bills”. Yet he seems to suffer no consequences for the failure of either to materialise. Throughout the course of the green agenda, since Miliband was last in office with the energy brief, the same promises of economic growth, jobs and industrial revolution have been made by all parties of government. And the only way these promises have been given a veneer of plausibility is by conceiving of the ‘green’ economic sector as a distinct thing to the rest of the economy.

Of course, if you force, through law, the closure of conventional generation plants and the requirement that energy retailers supply customers with power generated from renewable sources, then the ‘green sector’ will appear to ‘grow’. By the same logic, if some tyrant were to force the closure of your bakery, and to require customers to come to Ben’s Bread Shop, where I sell lower quality produce at three times the price to hungry people with no freedom to choose, then my business will ‘grow’. Thus, the illusion of ‘green growth’ and ‘green jobs’ is created.

There is no market for electricity. Yes, there are suppliers and customers. But the customers are captives, and the sellers are subject to price controls (the Ofgem price cap), and the wholesalers’ and retailers’ profits are guaranteed by legislation and regulations. Visit any so-called ‘price comparison’ website and you will find very little meaningful difference in the offers. Any resemblance to a market is purely superficial.

As then-leader of the Labour Party, Miliband’s great tactic for his catastrophic 2015 General Election campaign was the “weaponisation of the NHS”. Denied the opportunity to lead the country, but now, in 2025, back in power in a smaller office, Miliband’s strategy for winning a smaller political battle is the weaponisation of jobs – i.e., to make the promise of jobs a political issue. If you’re against Miliband’s policy agenda, then ipso facto, you’re against jobs.

It’s an extremely condescending political strategy that requires people to be dim enough to take such a framing for granted and at face value, and insane enough to believe that Miliband means it and is capable of delivering it.

And he isn’t. The statistics from the last 20 years prove it.

Even the Guardian’s attempt to inflate Miliband’s credibility falls flat on its face. Citing analysis from green industry lobbying outfit RenewableUK, the Guardian claims that “55,000 people now work in the UK wind industry”, and that “that between 74,000 and 95,000 people will be needed to meet the government’s plan to quadruple Britain’s offshore wind capacity”. By 2030, it claims, 112,000 people will have “green jobs” in the wind power sector. Green jobs at last?

Well, no. Let’s look again at the unemployment figures. Elsewhere in the Guardian, though pinning the blame on Miliband’s colleague, ONS data are revealed to show that “at least 250,000 jobs were lost since Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget”. Even if we took the green lobbyists’ claims as read, it would not undo even a few months of the Labour Government’s bonkers policies.

Moreover, it was Tony Blair’s own analysis that warned of the risks to the jobs of “700,000 people who work in the oil-and-gas, automotive, boiler-manufacturing and steel-manufacturing sectors and their wider supply chains, which could all be considered at risk from the green transition”. As I reported earlier this year, the former Prime Minister’s putative criticism of Net Zero should not be read that way – he wanted to save Net Zero by selling Britain out to Chinese manufacturers – but the point that Net Zero undermines more jobs than it creates is well observed.

Miliband promises “green jobs” but cannot answer the criticism that these jobs will cost employment elsewhere in the economy. This has been a point of controversy for the duration of the climate policy agenda, with critics explaining this very simple fact as far back as the mid-2000s. But it fell on deaf ears in the news media and met a brick wall in Wesminster’s offices of all parties. They each merely repeated the promises of green jobs over, and over, and over.

But it is very simple to understand. All forms of green generation are more capital-, labour-, land- and resource-intensive than conventional forms of generation. It doesn’t matter what the so-called ‘learning rate’ beloved of green economists actually is, green technology will always be less efficient with respect to these measures than conventional techniques are. No amount of ‘innovation’ can make it possible to produce usable energy from ambient sources for less manpower, less money, less land and with fewer bits of machinery than is required to produce the same from extremely dense sources of energy, such as coal, gas, oil and uranium.

Green lobbyists leant into the fact of green energy being inefficient with respect to labour, to turn it into a virtue: ‘creating jobs’. And that explains why it the myth of green jobs has persisted. Miliband will perhaps one day say, “Look at all these green jobs I made,” citing the shiny new 112,000 wind workforce. But he will omit from his analysis the 700,000 jobs that he destroyed. He will say he got something right, and that there should therefore be more ‘investment’ in the green sector. Another 112,000 ‘green jobs’ will be ‘created’, but another 700,000 jobs elsewhere will be destroyed.

It is the other inefficiencies that count. It should be written on every idiot civil servant’s forehead: jobs are a cost. That might sound like an argument for mass unemployment. But that’s not how it rolls. When people have money to spend, which is not being spent on utilities, then they spend it on other things. And that spending allows the seemingly spontaneous creation of industries and jobs, without Westminster’s help. As I put it previously: “Look after the cakeshops, and the AI data centres look after themselves.” And by “look after”, I don’t mean subsidise them, or incentivise them, or whatever. I mean simply represent energy consumers’ interests in energy policy. Make Energy Cheap Again. Or more precisely: Stop Making Energy Expensive.

But SMEE is not how Westminsterians think, if they think at all. They believe that jobs and industries are created by politicians, acting on data produced by extremely clever and morally unimpeachable academics and think tanks – Green Blob lobbyists. They think that the ‘green industrial revolution’ must be ‘kickstarted’. And consequently, when the myopic intervention inevitably fails, they think it just needs more ‘kickstarting’ to ‘boost’ the sector back into life. Only bad people could disagree. And that is why Miliband’s weaponisation of ‘green jobs’ is doomed to fail: he cannot even hear, much less comprehend, criticism. He’s a coward, not a fighter, and has no answer to critics. His agenda is a wrecking ball, aimed at and in motion towards what remains of our industries and jobs.

Major British Chemical Plant Faces Closure as Energy Prices Soar

One of Britain’s biggest chemical plants is at risk of closure after the site’s Saudi owners paused a multimillion-pound upgrade project, citing high energy prices and a lack of Government concern for the crisis-hit sector.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Will Jones

One of Britain’s biggest chemical plants is at risk of closure after the site’s Saudi owners paused a multimillion-pound upgrade project, citing high energy prices and a lack of Government concern for the crisis-hit sector. The Telegraph has the story.

The Olefins 6 ‘cracker’ facility in Teesside, controlled by Sabic, employs hundreds of workers and had been undergoing a major conversion to run on gas feedstock.

But Sabic paused that work months ago and is now understood to be on the verge of announcing the plant’s closure amid spiralling costs and concerns about high energy prices.

The company, which is owned by Saudi state oil giant Aramco, has not responded to a request for comment.

However, bosses recently said they were looking to scale back their European presence or exit the region entirely. Another cracker in the Netherlands was shuttered last year.

The closure of one of the UK’s most significant chemical plants would deal a fresh blow to the Government as it prepares to unveil its industrial strategy.

Earlier this year, chemical company bosses warned Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, to expect mounting closures as the industry reached “breaking point”.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s richest men, has also warned the UK’s multibillion-pound chemicals industry faces “extinction” because of soaring energy costs and the shift to Net Zero.

Sources close to Sabic suggested the plant’s closure was partly due to Britain’s high energy prices as well as the perceived lack of interest shown by the Government in the crisis-hit sector.

Worth reading in full.