And therein lies the problem: who would commit to any fossil fuel project when the next administration is going to stop it?

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now-shuttered phillips 66 los angeles refinery, february 27, 2026

Refineries, pipelines, power plants, hydro-dams, mines, development of new internal combustion engines

THE OIL IS NO GOOD AT THE PUMP IF YOU CAN’T REFINE IT INTO GAS OR DIESEL:

continued… It's not feedstocks. The US can get all the crude oil it needs in this hemisphere; supply chain disruption at Hormuz mainly affects the Europeans and China. (The Iran War isn't about oil, it's about preventing insane religious fanatics from getting nukes.)

No, the main reason gas prices keep going up is a squeeze in U.S. refinery capacity. Who in their right mind would commit the huge lump of capital it takes to build a new refinery just to have it shut down by anti-CO2 nutballs the next time the Democrats are running the federal government?

This is a justified fear. The state of California shut down two major oil refineries and now has to import gas, very expensively. Which they blame on greedy Big Oil, because of course they do.

For gas prices to come down, potential refinery builders have to believe they'll get their capital investment back. That means we need a major change towards a more permissive regulatory environment.

The Republicans have had two years in power to enact into law the reforms Trump made via executive orders, and failed to act. At the very least, solidifying those orders into statutes would have made them more difficult to reverse the instant the next Democrat president is sworn in. The refusal to do so says all we need to know about both parties’ devotion to keeping government exactly the way it is and they way they like it.