Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney incited a MAGA meltdown after pointing out that the United States shared responsibility for the climate change currently dumping wildfire smoke all over the upper U.S.

Nearly 900 wildfires were burning without control in the north, as of Friday, in the wake of an abnormally dry and hot summer. This led to air quality alerts throughout the northeast and the Midwest, with Chicago and Detroit having the worst air of any major cities in the world — and more US cities due for pollution further east over the next few days.

But Republicans, who are loathe to admit that climate change is real and regularly jumps borders, prefer to blame whatever nation is currently suffering out-of-control fires, whether they are blue US states or neighboring ally nations.

However, Carney, while speaking of the disaster to Canadian citizens, pointed out in French that “We need a contribution from the Americans in the fight against climate change ... climate change is everyone's responsibility, including the US.”

This sent MAGA into even more of a fury.

“Canada is a doomed state. Can’t wait until their total economic collapse, and have to ask the US to buy them,” ranted one critic on X.

“Nice deflection while hiding behind the con that is ‘climate change,’ railed another MAGA heckler — while ignoring the vanishing US glaciers in Glacier National Park. “Dude is inept as hell and has no clue about forest management.”

“This climate change is a hoax,” blasted another critic on X, in contradiction to the majority of science. “Even Bill Gates had to admit that we are not dying from climate change. Now that they need extra energy that renewables can't produce for their data centers … [C]limate change doesn't start over 100 separate fires.”

President Donald Trump himself blasted the PM later on Friday, while denying the fact that the US has regularly been plagued by raging fires as well as temperatures rise and regions get less, more sporadic rainfall.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it. The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result.”

Last year, Trump lobbed many of the same accusations at California as that state burned under historic flames, accusing state leaders of not raking forests of debris and not maxing out the Colorado River to wet its dry areas — despite competition with other thirsty western states for the same water source.

A few months previous, in 2024, Trump had threatened to withhold federal aid for fighting California wildfires at a California rally.

President Donald Trump’s anti-environmental philosophy has led to many controversies, from his rejection of the scientific consensus about man-made climate change to spreading misinformation about wind turbines.

“During its first year, the second Trump administration used a “shock and awe” approach to environmental deregulation,” wrote Slate's Richard L. Revesz on Sunday. “In an effort to erase climate policies, the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that climate change was not a serious problem, pointing to a report by hand-picked climate skeptics.”

Revesz added, “The criticisms of the National Academy of Sciences and other prominent scientific organizations were so devastating that the EPA abandoned its reliance on the report when it eliminated key greenhouse gas standards, instead basing its decision primarily on shaky legal arguments.”

Slate goes on to explain how Trump has deregulated everything from greenhouse gas emissions to other forms of pollutants, all in the name of creating a more business-friendly environment at the expense of a healthy natural environment.

“The EPA is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution—that is, life-saving health benefits for Americans—are too uncertain to quantify or value at all in regulatory decisionmaking,” Revesz wrote. “The administration is doing this without any analysis or citation to scientific studies. Extensive peer-reviewed science has used sophisticated techniques to quantify the impacts of pollution reductions and account for related uncertainty.”

Revesz continued, “And the EPA has relied on these findings for decades, including during the first Trump administration and other Republican administrations. But, beginning this year, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has decided that every health benefit from air pollution reductions is too uncertain to count—and every regulatory cost dispositive.”

The result of this policy is that the EPA will no longer include estimates about how many lives were saved, how many diseases were averted and how many hospitalizations are not going to happen as a result of Trump’s anti-environmental policies. For this reason, Americans cannot learn about the health hazards posed by such measures as repealing a vehicle emissions rule, learning about the consequences of getting rid of air pollution regulations for wood products and eliminating emissions for coal and oil power plants.

“The EPA’s actions are plainly illegal,” Revesz pointed out. “Agencies cannot put a thumb on the scale by taking account of a rule’s costs but not its benefits, particularly when there are established techniques for valuing the benefits.”

He continued, “Because there is no ‘big ticket’ action like last year’s questioning of climate change, the EPA’s approach has largely gone under the radar. Zeldin appears to be following John Oliver’s adage that if you want to do something harmful, “put it inside something boring” to avoid public scrutiny. But the American people will suffer greatly as a result of these illegal actions, in the form of additional premature deaths, asthma attacks, hospitalizations, and other serious health consequences.”

Though not mentioned in the Slate article, one consequence of Trump’s anti-environmental policies is the return of an ecological disaster that previous administrations had gotten rid of — acid rain.

"Last year, [ecologist Gene] Likens told The Guardian that Trump’s current assault on clear air and clean water regulations could pitch the U.S. back into a new era of acid rain," The New Republic reported in March. "In the 2025 Guardian interview, he called acid rain a 'major environmental success story' and warned that if Trump relaxed controls on emissions, 'we are going to destroy that success story.'"

If you wanted to save some money by learning how to check your home for air leaks, poor insulation, and power-hungry lightbulbs, the Department of Energy’s website was ready to help. And if you needed an expert, the site guided you to another page for help lining up a professional energy assessment, a well-established first step to cut utility bills and curb pollution at the same time.

That is, until this summer, when both of those resources vanished from the agency’s site, each now redirecting to “Page not found.” They were taken down by July 3, around the same time that the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages from the Energy Saver section of its site, gutting a resource for people looking to conserve energy and lower bills.

“I can’t remember another time that, with DOE specifically, we’ve seen an entire domain go down the way that [it] has been reported on now,” said Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Over a 30-day span this summer, as swaths of the country suffered under heat waves, more than 300 of the webpages had received 160,000 page views, according to an analysis from The Guardian.

The news coverage of the missing websites has focused on the disappearance of one recommendation in particular. Ahead of a heat wave that roasted New York City with 100-degree temperatures earlier this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked businesses and residents to set their AC to 78 degrees to conserve energy, drawing the ire of Republicans who mocked the restrictions as “socialism.” Internet sleuths were quick to notice that similar guidance had vanished from the Department of Energy’s website, which used to direct people to keep their thermostat between 75 and 78 degrees. The timing suggested that the agency might have removed the pages as a rebuke to Mamdani’s advice.

The purge looked suspiciously timed for another reason: On July 2, the Energy Department announced a proposed rule to make it harder for future administrations to approve energy efficiency standards for household appliances, saying it would “permanently end Green New Scam appliance mandates.” The move was part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on energy efficiency requirements.

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative has argued that Trump’s federal agencies tend to remove information from their websites related to regulatory changes they just announced, which limits access to information people could use to oppose agency proposals during the legally required public comment period. But the facts that would be most relevant here — the agency’s information about its Appliance and Equipment Standards Program — remain on the site, pointed out Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “I haven’t seen things come down that are directly related to the appliance standards program,” he said.

The Department of Energy did not respond to questions about why it removed the webpages. But the purge could be understood as part of a broader pattern of removing the most accessible, actionable public information about climate change from federal government websites. Last summer brought an abrupt end to the government website that hosted the National Climate Assessment, a series of congressionally mandated reports that broke down how climate change affects the regions where people live. Around the same time, Climate.gov, the widely used site that translated the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research into easy-to-understand resources, vanished too.

Energy Saver provided a similar service, distilling technical knowledge about conserving energy into advice for ordinary people: shopping for efficient appliances, installing “cool roofs,” and do-it-yourself guides to saving energy and money.

“These things are seen as authoritative resources and tools given to us by the government for us to think about how climate change interacts with our daily lives,” Pacenza said. “And now that interaction, and that relationship, is being broken or interrupted.”

This kind of consumer advice on how to save energy clashes with President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” framing. The administration has promoted a narrative that energy use, powered by fossil fuels, “is a tenet of American values and of our identity,” Pacenza said. Telling people to be aware of their energy use is in tension with this narrative. Even if the DOE’s website purge wasn’t driven by Mamdani’s statements about conserving energy, a similar impulse may lie behind the decision.

The debate over asking Americans to adjust their thermostats to save energy is actually decades old: During a fuel shortage in the summer of 1979, President Jimmy Carter required retail stores, restaurants, and other public and commercial buildings to keep the thermostat no warmer than 65 degrees in winter and no cooler than 78 degrees in summer (sound familiar?). President Ronald Reagan reversed those restrictions in 1981, calling them “an excessive regulatory burden.”

In general, though, energy efficiency measures used to be in the realm of bipartisan agreement. Reagan went on to sign the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987 into law, establishing minimum efficiency standards for refrigerators, freezers, and other household equipment. But recent years have seen air conditioners, laundry machines, shower heads, and other items get roped into the culture wars. Republicans have argued that government efficiency standards interfere with “consumer choice” and have been undoing regulations passed by Democratic administrations.

“This administration isn’t doing anything to improve efficiency standards — they’re only trying to go backwards,” deLaski said.

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who unexpectedly died of a brief and sudden illness on Saturday, once took pride in standing up to extremism within the Republican Party — at least, before he decided to hitch his political cart to President Donald Trump’s wagon.

In a 2014 Politico article that the website recently began recirculating in light of Graham’s death, reporter Manu Raju wrote that “Graham’s deft maneuvering shows why he’s become the dominant political figure in this deeply red state and is skating to another six years even as he’s angered the base on immigration and other hot-button issues. Far from pandering to the party’s tea party wing in order to get reelected, he’s challenging it head-on: Graham warns that the GOP is caught in a ‘death spiral’ with minorities, says it needs to get real about climate change and defends his move to open debate on gun control legislation after a school massacre.”

On one occasion, as Politico reported at the time, Graham chastised many of his fellow Republicans for demanding ideological purity tests, saying that instead they should be open to a diverse range of opinions.

“What I want is a party that can grow,” Graham said at the time. “What’s my big sin: 1-in-10 [votes defecting from the party line]? If we’re going to build the party around universal agreement, we become a club.”

He also expressed pride in getting lambasted by his own party for supporting immigration reform, even though South Carolina’s Latino population in 2014 was only 5 percent, and warned that the GOP was in a “death spiral” with nonwhite voters that would not end unless they did more to advocate for policies that could help minority Americans. He also argued that a conservative message could sell well with racial minorities if the party would stop taking such a hard-line stance on issues like immigration.

Similarly, Graham expressed a willingness to advocate for issues that he believed involved Americans’ existential futures, even if doing so was unpopular with the GOP base.

“Graham, in the interview, was unapologetic about his unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with Democrats on controlling climate change,” Politico reported in 2014. “Humans, he said, ‘to some extent, absolutely’ are contributing to global warming and the GOP needs a rational environmental policy, with a heavy emphasis on nuclear power.”

By the time Trump became president, however, Graham had flip-flopped on key issues like immigration, climate change and reaching out to minority voters, instead transitioning from a moderate Republican to a staunch MAGA adherent. In return for this evolution, Graham became an influence within the administration, most notably playing a key role in convincing Trump to wage his controversial ongoing war against Iran.

Despite describing Trump as a “jack---” during the 2016 presidential election (in which Graham ran against him in the GOP primaries), saying “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it” and describing him as "the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican party,” Graham subsequently became a diehard backer of the president and his agenda. Yet after successfully pushing Trump to invade Iran, many in his own party’s base turned against him.

“Lindsey Graham needs to be removed from the Situation Room. I don’t want to hear one word from a guy with no kids, desperately sending our sons and daughters into war on the ground in Iran,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) recently wrote on social media regarding Graham’s ongoing support of the Iran war.

My family’s morning routine is usually pretty ordinary. We wake up early, drink some coffee and get our 1-year-old ready for daycare. But one Wednesday morning last month, I found myself uttering to my wife a sentence that sounded frankly surreal to both of us: “Just to let you know, I’m about to call Trump.”

Then, hoping to avoid any urgent diaper events, I ducked into the next room and dialed up the president.

I’d been trying to reach President Donald Trump for a few days. Each time, my heart would start pounding. After nearly two decades as a journalist, I’m reasonably used to talking to powerful people. But cold-calling the president of the United States — on his personal cellphone — made me feel like a cub reporter all over again.

“Hello?” a voice said on the other end of the line. This time, the president had picked up.

I introduced myself and told Trump I’m a reporter with ProPublica.

“I’m writing a story about a big supporter of yours in the oil industry, Jeff Hildebrand,” I said. “Can I ask what you think about him?”

By this point I had spent months reporting on Hildebrand, a little-known billionaire — and major Trump donor — who owns an empire of low-producing oil and gas wells across the country. “Stripper wells” like these contribute relatively little to the U.S. energy supply but emit vast amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.

By calling the president, I was hoping for some color on his relationship with Hildebrand. He had, after all, named Hildebrand’s wife ambassador to Costa Rica. My reporting so far had also revealed that the administration was gathering advice from oil industry groups backed by Hildebrand, and that it planned to weaken environmental regulations on stripper wells — potentially making Hildebrand even richer.

“I hear he does a good job,” Trump replied. “Don’t know him very well. OK?”

At first I thought the exchange undermined my story, making Hildebrand seem less central to the president’s energy policies than I’d suspected. But I realized that Trump’s comments illustrated something important about how this administration works. Trump appeared to have little clue about Hildebrand’s business, but when I mentioned that it was threatened by the “Biden methane rules,” the president was quick to respond, “Certainly we do the opposite of what Biden did.”

Trump, in other words, may be only vaguely aware of the people and groups helping to rewrite all manner of consequential policies. But what matters in Washington right now are not so much technical policy details but support for the president and an affinity with the broader ideological project: Deregulate everything.

Even if the president is only loosely familiar with Hildebrand, the oil tycoon is someone you should know about. As a climate reporter, I’m always looking for ways to make the seemingly abstract problem of global warming feel more concrete, approachable and even personal. With Hildebrand, I felt I had found a compelling character who is also the poster boy for a hugely consequential issue: Stripper wells collectively contribute just 6% of the nation’s oil and gas, but scientists have found they’re responsible for roughly half the sector’s methane pollution. That means they play an outsize role in climate change, which is amplifying heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

My previous reporting has shown that a former lobbyist for Hildebrand’s company — who now has a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency — has been rewriting methane regulations with advice from the oil industry. (An EPA spokesperson said the official “fulfilled all his ethical obligations to the letter.”)

The EPA’s press office declined to comment on the details of its plans but confirmed it is working on a proposal to “provide relief” to the oil industry, saying in a statement, “We heard consistently from American oil and natural gas producers (shocker that we meet with stakeholders) that the Biden-Harris Administration’s oil and gas methane regulations were unworkable and unnecessarily restricted American energy dominance.”

In the story we ultimately published, I took a deep dive into how Hildebrand made his fortune, racking up dozens of environmental violations across the country, and now stands to benefit from the rollback that his former lobbyist is carrying out.

I asked Hildebrand multiple times for an interview, even sending a letter to his home, but he didn’t respond. A spokesperson for his company, Hilcorp, said its operations complied with state and federal rules, adding that Hilcorp was “proud” of recent efforts to reduce its methane emissions.

As with many climate change stories, it can all sound pretty bleak. But in a world where global warming fixes can seem impossibly daunting, limiting methane pollution from stripper wells is the rare low-hanging fruit, Andrew Logan of Ceres, a climate advocacy group, told me. “If you could lose 6% of production and cut emissions in half, who wouldn’t make that trade?” Logan said.

Instead, the Trump administration is doubling down on the forms of energy that contribute most to global warming. In January, the president invited Hildebrand and two dozen other energy executives to the White House to discuss investing in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry — which emits more methane, relative to production, than almost any other major oil producing country, according to the International Energy Agency.

Many of the executives couched their enthusiasm with caveats. ExxonMobil’s CEO called Venezuela “uninvestable” without changes to its legal system. The head of ConocoPhillips wanted U.S. government financing.

But Hildebrand had already seen how loyalty could be rewarded. Even though he had no notable operations outside the U.S., he hunched toward a microphone and said in a halting voice, “Hilcorp is fully committed and ready to go to rebuilding the infrastructure in Venezuela.”

“That’s good,” Trump said. “You’ll be very happy.”

A US$1.5 trillion defense budget isn’t an accident; neither is the hunt for critical minerals, which the United States is fighting over with the same hunger it once reserved for oil. Under President Donald Trump, war has become more of a business plan than a matter of security. Strategic military moves are lining the pockets of Trump’s friends and family with money. This includes the critical minerals rush to fatten Trump’s profitable war machine.

Feeding the War Machine

On February 28, the US and Israel began a ruthless bombing campaign in Iran, killing over 3,000 people in just 39 days, the majority of whom were civilians. Trump campaigned on “ending wars,” but instead has expanded military interventions and escalated new conflicts. In the first 11 months of his second term, Trump has bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. He also threatened to take over Greenland by force to create missile defense bases and mine for minerals.

War-hungry Trump needs a powerful and constantly replenished arsenal, as his wars deplete weapon stockpiles. Military aggression in West Asia, particularly the war with Iran, has burned through the munitions faster than defense factories can replace them. The US used over 45% of its Precision Strike Missiles, about half of its THAAD and Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, nearly one-third of its Tomahawks, and over a fifth of its JASSMs in its war with Iran. These weapons rely heavily on critical minerals, leaving the US desperate for more to rebuild.

As exposed by the Oakland Institute in its recently released report, a key driver of the current race for critical minerals is the military-industrial complex. Military spending in the United States is growing rapidly, and with it, the need for critical minerals. Trump’s proposed 2027 defense budget is a shocking US$1.5 trillion, almost twice the 2023 budget. The only thing a budget this large signifies is plans for future military expansion and campaigns. To support this growth, up to US$100 billion was allocated to the Department of War by Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to produce critical minerals and related industries and projects.

AI, Critical Minerals, and Modern Warfare

This record-high military budget isn’t just for building more of the same defense machines. The military is expanding its tech capabilities, with a plan for an “AI-first warfighting force.” The Trump administration has declared that its priority is to secure critical minerals for “vital national security and economic activities, including rising military threats and growing high-tech industries, such as artificial intelligence, data centers, nuclear energy, and new energy technologies.”

This web between the government, tech and AI corporations, mining companies, venture capital firms, and military institutions has emerged around a common goal: securing critical minerals and advancing the use of AI in the military.

In 2022, the Pentagon awarded US$9 billion of contracts to Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon to develop and manage the US military’s cloud computing infrastructure. In addition, the Department of War has administered US$75 billion to AI-driven programs and another US$9 billion to data centers since 2016. Since 2020, the Pentagon’s contracts with AI firms have grown exponentially, with Palantir Technologies and Anduril Industries seeing the fastest growth. Palantir was the lead contractor on the Maven Smart System, which enabled the US military to sift through large volumes of data and rapidly select targets on the battlefield. The US used Maven in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, despite grave concerns about its accuracy. The Pentagon has still not answered whether AI systems like Maven played a role in the massacre at Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls School in Iran, where the US bombed and murdered 156 people, the majority being young schoolgirls.

Cronyism at Large

Expanding the military-industrial complex has created unprecedented opportunities for Trump’s inner circle to profit. Business partners, family members, and close friends and associates have secured lucrative government contracts and preferential access to exclusive military and mineral ventures.

Donald Trump Jr. was heavily involved in selecting candidates for Pentagon jobs in 2025. Soon after, companies that his firm, 1789 Capital, had invested in—such as Vulcan Elements, Firehawk Aerospace, SpaceX, and Anduril—secured contracts with the Pentagon. Likewise, Trump’s sons are proprietors of a shell corporation that has invested in a New York-based mining investment group, Cove Capital, which is working on a US$1.6 billion tungsten project in Kazakhstan, granted by the Trump administration. US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) correctly called it “corruption in plain sight.”

By gaining access to more critical minerals, Trump can expand the war machine and, in turn, make a profit. His administration has shown it will stop at nothing to achieve that. A March 2026 leaked memo from the US State Department included a proposal to withhold lifesaving HIV assistance to Zambia if its government denied access to the country’s critical minerals.

The Human and Environmental Price

Beyond the abuse of power, the US takeover of critical minerals comes with devastating impacts on the land and Indigenous communities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that mining has “severe environmental impacts” with “often […] few if any redistributive benefits for communities in regions where extraction takes place.” Instead of local development, the extraction of strategic minerals is linked to violence, human rights abuses, and conflict. None of these repercussions are a matter of concern for the Trump administration. Conflict and destabilization, in fact, help secure access and control over critical minerals, as evident in Congo.

This web between the government, tech and AI corporations, mining companies, venture capital firms, and military institutions has emerged around a common goal: securing critical minerals and advancing the use of AI in the military. This should be an urgent concern for people around the world, as the hunt for critical minerals will deepen extractivism, militarization, and geopolitical competition at a time when our focus should be on ending conflicts, securing peace, and international cooperation to fight climate change. The administration has also turned its back on Americans in the hunt for critical minerals and the strengthening of the war machine; Trump has drained funding from sectors like education, climate change, healthcare, and science. If this disregard for everyone and everything remains unchecked, irreversible damage will occur to the planet and the people of the world.

When it comes to California’s climate future, the most important figure in the state’s chaotic governor’s race may not be any of the candidates on the debate stage. It may not even be outgoing governor Gavin Newsom or President Donald Trump.

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Instead, it might just be Chevron, the multinational oil company that was founded in the Golden State more than 100 years ago. It is among the largest producers, refiners, and sellers of petroleum products in a state rapidly shifting toward electric vehicles. Depending on which candidate is talking, the company is an example of how Big Oil is strangling consumers or an example of how climate regulations are strangling the state economy.

The behemoth — it reported $12.3 billion in profit last year — took the spotlight last month when an interviewer asked leading Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra about Chevron’s contributions to his campaign. The former state attorney general and Biden-era health secretary gave what seemed to be a candid response:

“Chevron, that’s the problem with politics. They’re not the bad guy. Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle? You need Chevron. I need Chevron. My people of the state of California need Chevron … Chevron wants to give me a check, that’s — that’s their prerogative.”

The phrase “I need Chevron” soon appeared in anti-Becerra videos by the likes of climate hawk Jane Fonda, implying that the candidate was saying he needs Chevron to get elected. Progressive billionaire Tom Steyer, Becerra’s lead Democratic opponent, urged him to return the contribution and said he is “doing [the] bidding” of Big Oil. Representative Katie Porter, another leading Democrat, said in a statement that she “hasn’t made millions off Big Oil or taken their checks.”

Becerra is not entirely wrong. California consumes around 13 billion gallons of gasoline annually, all of it specifically formulated to meet the state’s stringent clean air standards. Most of it comes from just six refineries, and Chevron owns two that account for one-third of the state’s production. That gives the company and its peers tremendous leverage. But California’s gas consumption has declined by about 15 percent from a peak in 2004 due to improved fuel economy in conventional vehicles and growing adoption of electric vehicles. It could fall by half over the next two decades.

The primary is June 2. The challenge for the next governor will be to continue the energy transition while retaining the infrastructure needed to move and refine oil. This has never been accomplished in a place as large as California, which was the world’s fifth-largest economy in 2025. The risks are tremendous: If the state moves too quickly, it could create shortages and price spikes for drivers already paying the highest prices in the country. If it moves too slowly, it could lock in decades of air pollution and hinder global climate progress.

“It’s messy,” said Emily Grubert. She is a civil engineer and sociologist at Notre Dame who has studied fossil fuel transitions and advised the state government on oil infrastructure. “As soon as you realize that actually transitioning away from fossil fuels means you have to close things, people get really freaked out.”

Newsom spent much of his governorship going after Big Oil, an effort that included a series of executive actions to restrict fracking in Kern County oil fields. When the war in Ukraine sent gas prices surging, Newsom and Democrats in the Legislature passed a series of bills to stop what he called “price gouging.” These laws empowered a new oil-focused watchdog agency, created a tool that could impose refinery price caps, and required refineries to maintain certain storage reserves, all of which cut profit margins for Chevron and others. The new refinery rules added to multiple carbon taxes that make selling gasoline in California more expensive.

However, there is some evidence refiners have overcharged Californians. Even after accounting for state taxes, environmental fees, and production costs, a gap remains between gas prices in the Golden State and everywhere else. This gap appeared in 2015 after a refinery fire in Torrance and has come to be known as the “mystery gasoline surcharge.” It now averages about $1. Last fall, a state regulator concluded that refiners’ monopoly power may be the reason for the price spikes.

Oil companies accused Newsom of trying to regulate them out of existence, and many threatened to leave. Two major refiners, Wilmington and Benicia, announced last year that they would close their operations, forcing a state that already imports about 60 percent of its oil to rely on imports of gasoline refined in Asia. Chevron relocated its corporate headquarters from the San Francisco suburb of San Ramon to Houston in 2024, and it has delivered a series of ominous warnings this year as climate regulators have revised the state’s almost 15-year-old carbon tax.

“The proposed regulation will cripple the survivability of the state’s remaining refineries, which will result in California losing the entire industry,” Andy Walls, the president of Chevron’s refinery business, wrote in an open letter to Newsom in March. The implication was clear: unless you relax your regulations, we will leave the state and strand you without gasoline. That would mean paying Asian refiners to produce more of the state’s specific blend, at significant cost.

The Newsom administration spent much of 2025 trying to work out a grand bargain with the industry. The Legislature eased rules governing drilling in Kern County oil fields, helping maintain a stable supply of crude to refineries. It also delayed implementing a refinery profit cap and allowed the temporary sale of gasoline with higher concentrations of ethanol. The state’s climate regulator has also suggested giving refineries free allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade system, even if it means less money for big projects like high-speed rail and sustainable housing. The idea is to give investors enough certainty that they’re willing to remain in California even as the state uses less gasoline.

Experts believe it will take a lot more than that to manage inevitable changes.

“You actually can’t have a smooth and safe and effective transition without some form of coordinating function for that decline,” said Grubert. She believes a degree of state ownership of refineries will be necessary to keep facilities open if they stop being profitable. The wrong approach, she says, would be to respond to each potential refinery closure with ad hoc subsidies and state support, since that would allow refiners to extort the state one by one.

That point was reinforced this month by a report from the California Energy Commission that has not received much notice. The analysis of the state’s shaky fuel system found that “California cannot sustainably manage this transition through repeated crisis interventions at an asset-by-asset level.” It suggested options that included “legal obligations to operate,” “centralized planning of closures,” and “direct state management or ownership of assets.”

The Iran war will accelerate a decline in both the supply of, and demand for, oil. Gas retailers like Chevron are already struggling to find additional imports of refined fuel, and some experts predict shortages if the Strait of Hormuz does not open within weeks. Meanwhile, electric vehicles continue gaining market share, and Newsom plans to roll out subsidies for them this year. Wider adoption of these vehicles, and hybrids, will further crimp demand, making any remaining refineries more likely to shutter.

All of this helps explain the showdown between the leading Democrats in the governor’s race, who are each trying to find a lane in a field that at one time included more than 50 candidates.

Becerra has given lip service to clean energy, but many public statements suggest a friendliness toward oil producers. As attorney general, he initiated a few lawsuits against petroleum companies, and supported other state climate lawsuits, but punted on major investigations. He has focused his gubernatorial campaign on vows to fight Donald Trump and protect healthcare, and has made controversial promises to freeze utility and insurance rates. On decarbonization, he has noted that “climate action only succeeds if it is affordable, reliable, and fair.”

After the chaos of the early primary, many oil producers have decided that Becerra is their candidate. Chevron last month contributed the maximum allowable amount of $39,200 to his campaign, the first time in a decade it has backed a gubernatorial candidate. Last week, the company contributed another $500,000 to an independent political committee supporting Becerra. California Resources Corporation, the state’s largest driller, also gave $500,000 to a Becerra committee. And gas companies like Sempra are among the donors to an anti-Steyer political committee that has raised more than $24 million.

Steyer, meanwhile, has made attacking Big Oil the focus of his campaign, as it was during his 2020 presidential run. He says he would lower gas prices by activating the refining profit cap that Newsom has declined to use, investigating what is causing high gas prices (something the state has already done), and taxing private jet fuel. When refineries “inevitably” close, he says he will stockpile an oil reserve and import more refined fuel for as long as California needs it.

Steyer has also had to address his own fossil fuel ties. The hedge fund he founded, Farallon Capital, remains a major player in coal power finance abroad, including in Indonesia and Australia. Steyer still holds a stake in the firm, which he left in 2012, but his campaign says he no longer receives dividends from its fossil fuel investments.

California uses a “jungle primary” in which the top two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party. The latest poll shows Becerra essentially tied with former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican, with Steyer trailing at around 15 percent. The most likely outcome is that Becerra or Steyer will make it to the general election. (The other Democrats, including Porter and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, trail behind in the double digits.)

Railing against Big Oil has long proven to be good politics in California. But in the wake of Trump’s second election victory, Democrats have sought to downplay climate issues and focus instead on affordability. The question in the governor’s race is how best to achieve that in the long run. Is it better to use a bully pulpit against companies like Chevron in an effort to break their market power, or conciliate them in the hope that they don’t flee?

Mike Madrid, a veteran California political operative, believes Becerra’s approach will resonate more with the young and Latinos, both of whom often decide statewide elections.

“This attack on Chevron, it works for the base Steyer already has,” he said. “Young Latino working-class men are the demographic most affected by gas prices. Do you think they’re saying we need to get rid of Chevron? Of course not.”

Steyer’s campaign may not get him over the line in the primary, but he has at least been consistent. In a 2013 blog post for this very publication, he celebrated the result of the Virginia governor’s race, where a climate-focused Democrat beat a fossil-fuel-friendly Republican with help from Steyer’s own war chest.

“A new political dynamic is emerging,” he wrote at the time. “Climate change is a winner, not a loser,” and is “no longer electoral Kryptonite.”

If Chevron has its way, next week’s primary results will prove otherwise.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/chevron-oil-california-governor-becerra-steyer/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org