50,000 barrels a day of oil are now flowing from a once-shuttered oil operation offshore from Santa Barbara, California. That’s due to an executive order President Trump signed in March. But it’s not enough to solve California’s broader energy crisis. For decades, California leaders have demonized the oil industry while sitting on some of the richest reserves in the U.S. Now, the chickens have come home to roost and there are serious shortages. So the state finds itself in an ironic position — having to alter its long-standing push to drive fossil fuel companies out.
The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.
Years of aggressive green policies have chased oil producers out of California. Now, the state is in crisis: importing record amounts of foreign oil and grappling with escalating fuel prices.
Sharyl: Does California have a lot of oil?
Rock Zierman: There’s a ton of oil. Some of the most prolific oil reserves in the world. We’ve been at it for 140 years, and we’ve only gotten a small percentage of he crudes out there. We know where the crude is, we know how to get it. We just can’t get permission to go get it.
Rock Zierman heads up the California Independent Petroleum Association.
Zierman: The state has a stated policy that by 2045, all fossil fuel producing companies are gonna be out of business in California.
Sharyl: Meaning they won’t be allowed to operate?
Zierman: Won’t be allowed to operate, even though we’ll continue to consume fossil fuels, even in 2045 when the state hopes were carbon neutral.
Sharyl: So in part, at least it’s the green agenda that’s chasing these oil companies out?
Zierman: Right. And I think if we were actually getting a tangible benefit from all of this cost, from all this uncertainty, from people losing their jobs, from local governments losing a tax base, if somehow that was the cost of solving global greenhouse gas emissions, people might be comfortable with that. But it’s not.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has put a target on the back of the oil industry since he was first elected.
Gavin Newsom/CA Governor (Sept. 20, 2023): For decades and decades, the oil industry has been playing each and every one of us in this room for fools. They’ve been buying off politicians. They’ve been denying and delaying science and fundamental information that they were privy to that they didn’t share or they manipulated. Their deceit and denial, going back decades, has created the conditions that persist here today.
But an attitude adjustment was required after a critical tipping point: Phillips 66 closed its Los Angeles County refinery at the end of 2025 and Valero Energy announced plans to shutter its refinery near San Francisco by the end of this month. That will leave California with just six refineries, down from more than 40 in the 80s.
Gas prices were already 50% above the national average—and headed higher. And California has had to quench its energy thirst with foreign oil, that was recently supplying 64% of the state’s supply.
Zierman: Half of all Ecuadorian crude in the Amazon rainforest comes to California. And the reason for that is because we’ve had a hard time getting permits out of the state government to drill for additional oil in California. So as a result, even though we’re under the strictest rules and regulations in the planet when it comes to production, we’re outsourcing our sources of crude to places that don’t have any environmental rules or regulations, don’t have labor regulations, human rights violations.
Sharyl: Don’t Texas and Louisiana have crude oil?
Zierman: They do, but there’s no way to get it to California. So you either have to get it here by ship or by pipeline. There are no pipelines for Midcontinent to California. And the Jones Act, which regulates shipping, prevents crude from Texas and Midcontinent from coming to California. So the, if we don’t produce it here, it has to come from a foreign country.
Sharyl: Has consumption of oil decreased in California during this time period?
Zierman: Not even by a drop. It is true that gasoline has gone down slightly, but it’s been more than made up by jet fuel increases.
In a frenetic last-second deal last fall, Governor Newsom and Democrat leaders took emergency action, extending the legislative session to pass a bill that fast-tracks environmental reviews and pre-approves up to 2,000 new oil wells a year in Kern County, producer of 75% of California’s oil.
Sharyl: Are there ironies here in the fact that California has in essence shunned the oil industry in a way and now maybe looking at trying to attract and convince and woo the oil industry?
Zierman: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been having this conversation for over a decade that this crisis is coming. It was ignored. But the crisis is now here and it needs to be solved. And I think the one thing that is unavoidable is when California consumers, California voters are facing higher gasoline prices than anywhere else in the country, that motivates them to demand from their legislators that the problem get fixed. And so it was ignored when we were going out of business, our workers were going out of business. Our local governments were losing tax base. But once the refiners started going out of business, it could no longer be ignored.
Sharyl (on-camera): Zierman says it’s a national security issue too. California and its 41 military installations are indirectly using Russian oil refined in India.
Watch the video here.
Lisa,
Sharyl
—and Full Measure Team :
Re : “ Zierman says it’s a national security
issue too. California and its 41 military
installations are indirectly using Russian
oil refined in India. “
So many national security issues :
1) Traitorous U.S. businessmen off-shoring to China our critical manufacturing plants (( Rush Limbaugh had advised us not worry about that, as the INFORMATION Age would save us. “Let someone else get their hands dirty making things,” he had ignorantly advised. Then, the L.A.Times had provided those TRAITORS an excuse in an editorial : ‘They really believed helping China build its military would persuade her to adopt Western values.’
2) Hollywood lowered the moral tone of Christian Americans, arguing use of F-Bombs “reflected real life.”
Now we hear that vulgarity and others everywhere. Note :
– Once Equal Critic –
Now South Park Cartoon
Champions Democrat
Goals :
“However, over the past five years or so, South Park has changed dramatically. And not for the better. I looked forward to their take on the COVID psyop. All that irrational hysteria and nonsensical ‘science’ should have added up to comedy gold. But no, instead, they opted to make fun of anti-vaxxers, and seemed to take the ‘pandemic’ all too seriously. And at that point, they really lit into Donald Trump. In fact, during the Biden presidency, the doddering codger was not once depicted on the show. He should have inspired some incredible laughs. Cackling Kamala Harris was missing as well. I didn’t really contemplate this too much at the time. Yes, it was disappointing to see the supposedly iconoclastic show peddle the party line on COVID, but it wasn’t until just a few months ago, with the debut of season 27, that it became clear that South Park was now little more than a cartoon version of Saturday Night Live.” :
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/09/no_author/the-american-male-humiliation-ritual/
3) UBIQUITOUS Pornography venues spread deadly VD organisms (( see Gwyneth Paltrows sec club in San Fransisco )), erasing respect for traditional home-life, erasing marital trust between husband and wife, and their rejection of child-bearing. Those Traitorous Business men hide in gated communities while flooding once-WHITE Western Civilization with foot-traffic from those invading Third Worlders, rushing into their stores using WELFARE cash in the form of federal debit cards..
4) Not teaching public school kids moral instructions via the Holy Bible while allowing them to be corrupted by pornography and gambling cites.
5) Legalization of psychosis-causing WEED and PSYCHEDELIC mind-altering drugs. Crazy-Stupid moves by
6) So much more that’s threatening national security, such as moronic, LIBERTARIAN radio talk-show hosts
(( see Glenn Beck, having undemocratically decided for Y-O-U —if you want Iraq or Afghan refugees flooding into your once-white/once-safe community; see Aristotle’s warnings, below )).
Study Aristotle’s warnings:
On race-mixing:
“Another cause of revolution is difference of races which do not at once acquire a common spirit; for a state is not the growth of a day, any more than it grows out of a multitude brought together by accident. Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution.”
On bad democracy:
“[T]he last form of democracy . . . [in which] all share alike . . . [and] the leaders have been in the habit of including as many as they can, and making citizens not only of those who are legitimate, but even of the illegitimate . . . This is the way in which demagogues proceed. Whereas the right thing would be to make no more additions when the numbers of the commonality exceeds that of the notables and of the middle class,—beyond this not to go . . . [these] measures taken by tyrants appear all of them to be democratic. Such a government will have many supporters, for most persons would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner.”
On how to install bad democracy:
”Fresh tribes and brotherhoods should be established; the private rites of families should be restricted and converted into public ones; in short, every contrivance should be adopted which will mingle the citizens with one another and get rid of old connections.”
“Tolerance and Apathy
are the Last Virtues of
a Dying Civilization.”
-Aristotle
( thanks, Dr. Malone )
-Rick