ALERT! California's Dire 'Straits.' The Countdown Our State Isn't Having

The last Middle Eastern oil tanker has docked. The clock is running. And Sacramento has no plan. Do you?

(Dear Subscribers, I had to make a few corrections regarding how many cities have transitioned to more natural gas and how that is specifically reflected in our reality, so I am reposting this piece with those corrections. I apologize for any inconvenience.

I’m going to get really real with you….

The last oil tanker from the Middle East has docked at Long Beach, California. It is offloading as you read this. And when it pulls away in a few days from that terminal and disappears over the horizon, California will be left staring at the consequences of a decade of policy decisions that nobody in the Capitol was ever willing to fully reckon with.

So here it is, the question they don’t want asked:

What happens when the oil runs out?

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SOUNDING THE HORN: THE CONDUCTOR’S BRIEF: (A fast, clear summary of the key takeaways to keep you informed on the go)

• The New Corolla is the last currently scheduled tanker from the Persian Gulf, not the last tanker California will ever receive. But it marks the end of a supply line, and nothing comparable is behind it.

• California is entering a period of tighter supply, higher costs, longer shipping routes, and greater infrastructure vulnerability, and it is uniquely exposed as a self-made “fuel island.”

• The state has roughly 4–6 weeks of fuel under normal demand, first stress window hits early to mid-June.

• This is not an overnight collapse. Modern systems degrade unevenly, rising prices, intermittent shortages, delayed repairs, rolling strain, and rationing priorities come first.

• California has lost ~18% of its refining capacity and imports ~60% of its crude oil from overseas.

• Cities have more resilience than rural areas, but they are not immune. Backup generators at hospitals, water plants, telecom sites, and emergency operations centers are diesel-powered. Every fire engine, ambulance, police vehicle, and utility truck runs on diesel or gasoline.

• Rural communities, farms, and small towns run mostly on diesel and gasoline with no substitutes and no cushion. They go first.

• Hundreds of independent rural gas stations, often the only fuel source for miles, have already been forced closed by Sacramento regulation.

• Farmers need diesel to plant, irrigate, and harvest. No diesel means no food gets grown or moved.

• Gas prices already average $6.17 statewide. Projections reach $8–$12 by late summer.

• State and federal responses don’t solve supply shortages. They are optics, not operations.

• The real question: is this crisis being managed, or is it being allowed to do its work?

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IT’S UPON US

Not someday. Not in the abstract. Now. This summer. When the tractors can’t run. When the rural fire engine rolls out on its last tank. When the farmer who has worked the same land for three generations finally does the math and realizes Sacramento has made it impossible to stay.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an environmentalist. But I expect that transition to be executed intelligently, and in a way that doesn’t create its own catastrophe.

The clock is already running. And it is not running equally for everyone.

The New Corolla finished offloading around May 10th. State officials confirmed four to six weeks of supply under normal demand. That puts the first acute pressure point somewhere between June 6th and June 20th, right at the doorstep of California’s hottest, most energy-intensive months, when air conditioning loads spike, wildfire season ignites, and demand for every drop of diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline surges simultaneously.

And that four-to-six week figure assumes normal demand. There is nothing normal about what’s coming.

Let me be precise about what this is, and what it isn’t. The New Corolla is the last currently scheduled tanker from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, after the regional conflict disrupted shipping. California officials have publicly stated they do not expect an immediate collapse in supply. This is not the moment the lights go out overnight.

What it is, is the moment the cushion disappears. Every subsequent disruption, a refinery hiccup, a heat emergency, a wildfire, now arrives into an empty room with nothing behind it to absorb the shock. Modern systems under fuel stress don’t collapse cleanly. They degrade unevenly: rising prices first, then intermittent shortages, delayed repairs, rolling strain, rationing priorities, economic contraction, and political conflict over allocation.

That uneven degradation doesn’t fall on everyone the same way. The question is whose room empties first.

NOT YOUR 70’S OIL SHORTAGE

When most people think of an oil shortage, their minds go to the 1970s, long gas lines snaking around the block, odd-even rationing, expensive travel, empty grocery shelves. Frustrating. Painful. A crisis, certainly.

But here’s what’s fundamentally different this time, and I want to be honest with you about something I need to correct in how I’ve framed this previously.

Cities are not simply insulated from this crisis. I said that too cleanly, and it deserves a harder look.

Yes, California’s urban infrastructure has transitioned heavily to natural gas over decades. But here’s what that actually means in practice: natural gas is used directly for heating, industrial processes, boilers, and a significant portion of power generation. And California’s electric grid, the thing that powers everything else, still relies substantially on natural gas generation. So when natural gas supply tightens or becomes expensive, the electricity that powers urban life tightens with it.

More to the point: even in fully electrified cities, the backup systems that keep critical infrastructure running when the grid fails are almost universally diesel. Backup generators at hospitals, water treatment plants, telecom sites, and emergency operations centers run on diesel.

Every fire engine, ambulance, and police vehicle in every California city runs on diesel or gasoline. Many garbage trucks, and every utility repair vehicle, and piece of heavy equipment that fixes roads and restores power after a storm —diesel. Supply chains for food, medicine, and water-treatment chemicals move on diesel trucks and diesel rail.

Cities have resilience measures, fuel reserves, mutual aid systems, priority fuel contracts, redundant substations, emergency operations planning. They will fare better than rural areas.

Essential services will receive priority fuel access. But most cities are not designed for a long-term loss of liquid fuels, and a prolonged regional shortage would still create serious, cascading stress even in the most prepared urban centers.

The people who will bear the full, unmediated weight of this crisis fastest, the people Sacramento has never designed policy for, only policy at, are the farmers in the Central Valley, the ranchers in the foothills, the families in rural towns where the nearest gas station is already twenty miles away, and the small businesses that have kept rural California alive for generations.

This is where it gets truly daunting, and as a former elected official, if I were in office right now, I would be crawling out of my skin at the thought of what appears to be coming our way.

The Last Tanker And What Came Before It

State officials have confirmed California holds just four to six weeks of petroleum and diesel under normal demand conditions. No further tankers from the Persian Gulf are currently en route.

California is uniquely vulnerable for a cluster of reasons that didn’t happen by accident: it is relatively isolated from the rest of the U.S. fuel network with limited pipeline connections to other states. Several major refineries have closed or reduced capacity in recent years. California crude production has been declining for decades. Its fuel blends are specialized and harder to replace quickly. And the state imports a meaningful amount of foreign crude oil, roughly 60% of what it needs, from overseas.

The structural rot runs deeper than the war. Phillips 66 shuttered its Wilmington refinery in Los Angeles, and Valero closed its Benicia refinery near San Francisco, together stripping the state of roughly 18% of its total refining capacity in under a year.

As Chevron CEO Mike Wirth put it: the shock absorbers are being drained out of the system.

Granted, Trump lit the match, but Newsom and California’s leaders built the tinderbox.

THE FARMER

Let’s talk about the people Sacramento never talks about.

For decades, coastal farmerswatched Pacific fog roll over fields that feed the community. Today the view is clouded by a different kind of threat, a triple hit of $7-a-gallon diesel, soaring electricity rates, and a regulatory environment so suffocating that farmers are now openly calling it a “master plan” to run the working class out of the state.

They are not wrong.

Every tractor that breaks ground runs on diesel. Every irrigation pump on a private well runs on diesel or electricity, and when the electricity fails, diesel is the backup. Every truck that hauls produce from field to market runs on diesel. Higher fuel costs don’t stay at the gas station, they move through the entire economy. Farmers pay more to run equipment and get crops to market. Delivery costs go up. And eventually all of it lands on the price tags at checkout.

Analysts project nitrogen fertilizer delivered to the Central Valley could increase 30–80% from pre-conflict levels by mid-2026, on top of fuel costs already at historic highs. Agriculture depends heavily on affordable energy for producing and processing food, and uncertainty over the future availability and cost of diesel makes economic recovery increasingly difficult.

The math is merciless. And Sacramento knows it.

When the farmer can no longer afford to plant, process, or ship, the food stops moving. There is no natural gas tractor. There is no electric combine that can harvest 500 acres before the rain comes. The physics simply don’t cooperate.

THE RURAL GAS STATION… ALREADY GONE

Before the New Corolla even docked, Sacramento had already begun dismantling the rural fuel infrastructure, one regulation at a time.

SOURCE: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-05-08/ships-are-paying-millions-more-for-fuel-at-l-a-long-beach-ports-costs-wont-stay-there

As of January 1, 2026, a decade-old state law mandating upgrades to underground gasoline storage tanks forced approximately 473 to 500 independent stations statewide to cease operations. These weren’t Chevron stations. These weren’t Shell stations. These were the independent, unbranded mom-and-pop operations, often the only fuel source for miles in rural and underserved communities, serving as essential fuel access points for schools, first responders, farms, and medical facilities.

The upgrade cost? Approximately $2 million per station, more than many of these small operations are worth. Sacramento created a loan program to help. In some of the most egregious cases, it took up to two years just to receive a decision on whether a loan application had been approved or denied. The stations closed anyway. Non-compliance triggers fines of $500 to $5,000 per tank per day.

So before the tanker ran dry, before the Strait of Hormuz closed, Sacramento had already methodically eliminated the rural fuel safety net. Station by station. Regulation by regulation. The mom-and-pop operator forced out. The corporate chain left standing.

From my perspective, that is not an accident.

That is a pattern.

Now add the current crisis on top of it. The rural family that used to drive five miles to fill up now drives twenty. At $8 a gallon, headed to $10 or $12, that drive itself becomes a calculation. At some point, it stops making sense to stay.

THE RURAL FIRE DEPARTMENT

Now layer the wildfire reality on top of all of it.

CAL FIRE is forecasting above-normal large fire activity by July and August, with dry fuels, gusty winds, and weakening coastal moisture driving elevated risk across the state.

The fire engines, water tenders, and bulldozers that protect rural California run on diesel, every one of them. The chainsaws run on gasoline. The station building itself may run on electricity or propane, like any rural structure, but when PG&E cuts power during a Public Safety Power Shutoff, which it does routinely in high-fire-risk rural areas at exactly the moment fire danger is highest, the backup generators that keep the lights on and the fuel pumps running at that station run on diesel. There is no natural gas pipeline running to a mountain fire station. When the diesel becomes unaffordable or unavailable, the apparatus doesn’t roll.

This is not unique to rural departments. Every fire engine in every California city, urban or rural, runs on diesel. What’s different in rural areas is there is no redundancy, no mutual aid network thick enough to cover the gap, and no financial cushion when fuel costs double.

THE WATER SYSTEM, CITY AND RURAL

Water and sewage systems deserve special attention here because the vulnerability is real at every level, and it’s more complicated than a simple rural vs. urban divide.

The truth is that water and wastewater systems are among the most vulnerable pieces of infrastructure in any fuel disruption scenario, for the same reasons everywhere: pumps require continuous electricity, treatment chemicals must be delivered by diesel trucks, backup systems almost universally rely on diesel generators, and wastewater plants can become public health hazards quickly if power becomes unreliable.

In cities, those backup systems and fuel reserves are better stocked, better maintained, and backed by priority contracts. In rural areas, a small water district may have two weeks of diesel in reserve, and that’s it.

SOURCE: https://www.c-win.org/state-water-project The State Water Project.

The larger picture is sobering regardless of geography. The Edmonston Pumping Plant at the base of the Tehachapi Mountains, which lifts water nearly 2,000 feet over the mountains to reach 27 million Southern Californians, consumes 40% of all electricity used by the entire State Water Project, making it the single largest electricity consumer in California. It runs entirely on the grid. The grid runs substantially on natural gas generation. When that chain strains under a summer heat emergency, rural communities and those at the end of the distribution line lose pressure first, because they are last in line and furthest from the source.

They are always last in line. That is the point.

THE CLOCK IS ALREADY RUNNING

There is no single date circled on a calendar where California simply runs out. What is actually coming is a tiered unraveling, a slow-motion cascade where each pressure point fails in sequence, each failure accelerating the next.

And that cascade does not fall evenly.

In the short term, weeks to months, what we’re most likely to see is much higher gasoline and diesel prices, increased transportation costs, more expensive goods, supply-chain stress, and pressure on municipal budgets. City services would probably continue functioning, but at higher operational cost. The areas affected first: trucking, construction, agriculture, airlines, shipping, commuters, and emergency fleet fuel budgets.

By June, prices spike hard. Spot shortages emerge first in rural communities, in the places Sacramento has always found easiest to ignore. The stations that already closed under storage tank regulations aren’t coming back to absorb the demand.

In the medium term, months to years, if supply instability continued, cities may delay infrastructure projects, reduce non-essential services, increase utility rates, reduce fleet operations, or accelerate electrification. Transit agencies might push electric buses faster, electrify maintenance fleets, invest in microgrids and solar-battery systems, and prioritize fuel rationing for emergency services.

By late summer, analysts project $8 to $12 per gallon in some regions. At that price point, the farmer who was already barely breaking even makes a decision. The volunteer fire department that runs on a shoestring budget makes a decision. The rural water district with six weeks of diesel in reserve makes a decision.

And here is the detail nobody in Sacramento will say out loud: those decisions don’t go in favor of staying. They go in favor of leaving. And once the farmer leaves, the land doesn’t go back to farming. It goes to developers. It goes to the interests that have always wanted it.

Particularly the AI Data Center developers.

Sacramento didn’t accidentally create conditions that make rural California uninhabitable. The regulatory squeeze on independent gas stations, the refinery closures, the emissions mandates that fall hardest on diesel-dependent industries, the EV transition that assumes everyone lives within range of a charging station, these are not isolated policy errors. They are a coherent pressure system. And rural Californians are what’s being pressured out.

Oh, and cellular service? When the backup generators at cell towers run dry, that goes too. Get out your two-way radios and solar power packs if you plan on communicating from a distance.

This is infrastructure math. And Sacramento has no answer for it. They aren’t even talking about it.

As a former elected official, that is ticking me off.

WHAT IS SACRAMENTO DOING ABOUT IT?

Some legislators are at least asking the right questions. A bipartisan group sent an urgent letter to state energy officials demanding answers, admitting that even lawmakers don’t know whether the state has months, weeks, or days of fuel available. That alone should stop you cold.

Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones had been warning Newsom for months that the refinery closures would drive prices to $8 a gallon and beyond, offering to help find solutions. Newsom never responded. When the crisis could no longer be ignored, he blamed the Trump administration and the conflict overseas.

The stopgaps on the table? Trump issued a temporary Jones Act waiver. Congress is debating an 18-cent federal gas tax holiday on a six-dollar gallon of gas, which doesn’t help much if there is no gas. Newsom and state lawmakers admit their emergency measures may not avert near-term consequences.

That is Sacramento’s official position. That is their plan.

Can California Pipe Its Way Out?

No. Not in time.

There is a pipeline in the works, the Western Gateway, a 1,300-mile conduit stretching from Midwest refineries through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona directly into California. It would be the first domestic fuel pipeline this state has ever had. It won’t be operational until 2029 at the earliest, and only if permits clear, lawsuits don’t pile up, and the regulatory gauntlet doesn’t swallow it whole.

The other lifeline, importing fuel by tanker from alternative sources, runs directly into a wall California built itself. The state requires all gasoline to meet its unique CARBOB formula. Very few refineries in the world produce it. Ships take three to six weeks to arrive from the handful of facilities capable of making it. A proposed bill to temporarily waive that requirement, the single fastest way to open the supply spigot, has not passed.

And then there is this: while Sacramento lectures the world about clean energy and progressive values, California has quietly been importing gasoline made from Russian crude oil, refined in India, shipped across two oceans to Long Beach, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kremlin in the process.

You cannot make this up.

Some municipalities are already exploring longer-term solutions: electrification, solar-plus-battery systems, microgrids, renewable natural gas, electric fleets, and localized resilience infrastructure. These are the right conversations to be having. But today, most California cities and virtually all rural communities still fundamentally depend on a stable flow of electricity, diesel, natural gas, and the industrial systems supporting them. The transition isn’t done. Not even close.

THE QUESTION TAHT MUST BE ASKED

So here it is, plainly: what is the actual plan?

Not the press release plan. Not the ridiculous 2045 net-zero target. The plan for Tuesday afternoon in August when a heat emergency, a wildfire, and a grid failure converge simultaneously, as they have before and will again.

What fuels the tractor trying to get the harvest in before the heat breaks?

What powers the irrigation pump keeping the orchard alive?

What fuels the fire truck heading for the fire?

What keeps the hospital generator running and chemicals delivered to the water treatment plant?

California’s leadership is extraordinarily good at announcing policy and extraordinarily quiet about the operational realities those policies produce. The transition away from fossil fuels may well be necessary, I’m not arguing against cleaner air or a healthier atmosphere. I’ve spent years fighting for exactly that.

But banning the very fuels that rural California, and ultimately all of California, runs on, without a credible, tested, fully-funded replacement, isn’t environmental leadership.

It’s a land grab dressed up as climate policy.

Someone needs to say that out loud. Loudly. Repeatedly. On the record.

So: what’s the plan, Sacramento?

What You Can Do When Your Leaders Won’t

Sacramento isn’t coming to save you. That much is clear. Individual preparation doesn’t solve a systemic crisis, but it buys time, protects your family, and reduces the pressure on the systems most likely to fail first.

AT HOME

• Keep your gas tank above half. Always. If you have a second vehicle, keep that tank full too.

• Store fuel legally and safely, in approved containers, ventilated outdoor space, treated with a fuel stabilizer. Rotate every three to six months.

• If you have or can acquire a generator, keep it fueled and run it periodically. Know what you’ll power first: refrigeration, medical equipment, communication.

• Store water, a minimum of two weeks for every person and pet. Water storage barrels, quality filtration, and gravity-fed filters are worth the investment right now.

• Stock food that doesn’t require cooking or refrigeration, enough for two to four weeks…. better yet, grow your own and raise some chickens.

• Get your two-way radios charged and your solar power pack ready. When cell towers lose backup power, communication goes dark.

IN YOUR COMMUNITY

• Find your neighbors, not the ones you wave at, but the ones you’d call in a crisis. Know who has medical needs, mobility limitations, or no family nearby.

• Form or join a neighborhood preparedness group.

• Ask your local elected officials directly: what is our backup chemical supply for the water treatment plant? How many days can our fire department operate if diesel becomes unavailable? Make them answer on the record. Record it. Share it.

Politically

• Demand your state legislators immediately waive California’s CARBOB fuel blend requirements, the single fastest way to open the supply spigot.

• Demand the Governor invoke emergency powers to mandate fuel reserves for critical rural infrastructure, water systems, fire departments, hospitals, separate from the commercial market.

• Tell everyone you know. Not to panic them. To prepare them.

Sacramento built this cliff. Rural California didn’t. And rural California will be the first one pushed off it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This situation requires calm, direct action. I will be posting again with exactly what you can do right now, but don’t wait for that post. Talk to your neighbors, your friends, your family. Start preparing today. There is no backup plan unless you build one yourself. You have a matter of weeks. Act accordingly.

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