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California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply
- htx80nerd 5mo agoGovernments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.
- Teever 5mo ago[flagged]
- __loam 5mo agoHe started the war!
- empyrrhicist 5mo ago> The President isn't to blame. I mean, there's a lot of blame to go around, but tearing up a working deal that gave us unprecedented, multilateral access to Iran's nuclear facilities, and then later jumping into a war of choice with no clear objectives and seemingly being surprised by the most obvious geopoltical realities that people with any shred of a clue have been talking about for DECADES would seem to have at least something to do with the current mess. In my book, the silver lining is that this might finally push the world to move away from fossil fuels in a meaningful way.
- Teever 5mo agoYeah but he wouldn't have been in the position to do any of that if the people who funded his campaign like the Adelsons, Kushners, Musk, Linda McMahon, Lutnick and so forth didn't contribute millions to his campaign and leverage whatever other resources they have to promote him. And they in turn couldn't do any of that if the teams of professionals from lawyers, accountants to engineers didn't help them acquire and use those resources. Just like violent crime is overwhelmingly perpetuated by a handful of repeat offenders we see the same pattern in white collar crime. A handful of white collar criminals cause damage to American society that cascades through the world resulting in food and fuel shortages that we're talking about. I get that it's really hard but you have to view this dispassionately and from a systems thinking perspective. The professionals and oligarchs are responsible for the mad king scenario that we're all living through right now. They're responsible for the social decay that affects us daily. And it's just going to keep getting worse and worse once the mad king eventually goes the way all mad kings do.
- empyrrhicist 5mo agoI don't disagree with that, but it seems kind of like a acute cause/proximate cause sort of distinction to me. That, and I don't forgive the general populace either.
- CPLX 5mo ago[flagged]
- vablings 5mo agoCorrect, he is the symptom of the problem created by himself. The Iran nuclear deal rode off the back of Stuxnet and concessions were easier with that damage. The recent strikes with the B2 were largely ineffectual so well done.
- Sabinus 5mo agoDemocrat presidents never get this level of charity.
- tialaramex 5mo agoSurely an example of being ready would be to electrify everything?
- vkou 5mo agoThe rest of the developed world is banning ICE car sales, meanwhile the US is scrapping its wind farms, because doing it trolls the left.
- mikeyouse 5mo agoNot just scrapping them - literally paying foreign companies billions of dollars to not build wind farms. Illegally as well, there’s absolutely no authority for these payments to happen outside of Congress.
- htx80nerd 5mo agonot good when the power goes out / grid goes down which has happened repeatedly in the past 40 yrs
- alpha_squared 5mo ago> Bad things happen. You have to be ready. You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee? It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact. It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.
- unethical_ban 5mo agoMoving to green and nuclear energy, pressing hard to upgrade the national grid would be the obvious things to reduce our short-term dependence on fossil fuels. Energy independence is not a pipe dream, and it isn't ever going to be 100%. We should be working toward it. We may be somewhat dependent on China or other sources for solar panels, for example, but once we have the product, it has a multi-decade lifetime compared to an instantly-consumed fuel. Even if you're a fossil fuel fanatic, one should be advocating for more of our refineries to be tooled for processing our own crude oil. But that isn't as profitable in the short term, so we don't do it. P.S. politically, we've seen our system does not have the capacity to deal with a malicious executive taking total control of the government. We need a complete rebuild of our legislative and executive branches.
- htx80nerd 5mo ago>but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? good question but too often what we find is "not ready at all".
- AtlasBarfed 5mo agoWe were fully warned of this with the supply chain disruption of covid. Global supply chain has become dangerously dependent upon a stable geopolitical environment that has been unnaturally provided by the United States for the last near 100 years in post world war II. This unipolar naval supremacy is not a normal situation. One of the things that triggered world war I was an escalating arms race in battleships between Germany and Great Britain. I would recommend the United States practically every country, Force its automobile manufacturers to go very hardcore down the plugin hybrid electric vehicle, which will maximize the battery supply to electrify the largest amount of daily consumer transportation. I would say you should impose a minimum of 40 to 50 mi for an all-electric range, The 20 mile range which is degraded to really about 12 now is not sufficient in my four phev. Hybrids also weighs far less gasoline and idling and low torque low RPM situations like stop and go and sitting in traffic jams, by utilizing gener of breaking, using the electric motor for the 0-25 acceleration that ICE engines are incredibly inefficient at. It's my opinion that the equipment and manufacturing switchover should be much less of an imposition on car manufacturers than the full EV switchover. Consumers do not have such a shocking switch to driving habits because a phev just functions like a normal ICE car if the battery drains, it solves long-range transportation issues and concerns with EVs. Most car manufacturers know how to make turbocharged high efficiency compact engines, most major manufacturers I believe know how to use Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing combined with a hybrid drivetrain to further boost gas efficiency
- baggy_trough 5mo ago[flagged]
- __loam 5mo agoThis is a good reason to move our infrastructure further off of being dependent on a highly volatile region actually.
- smlacy 5mo agoHow about just ditching this disgusting use of a finite resource and switch to an infinitely abundant resource?
- conradev 5mo agoThere’s this crazy thing that happens where you need to use carbon to decarbonize. Solar panels are made in factories where energy and inputs are cheaper and then shipped on diesel cargo ships to the rest of the world. Our cars run on gas, so we need new electric ones, but the ships and car carriers are themselves… not electric yet. Because energy is more expensive, everything is more expensive, including electrification.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> California leaders have done everything they possibly can to chase refiners out of state The refiners are running out of crude. Having more refiners wouldn’t solve the problem.
- linksnapzz 5mo agoThere's plenty of crude oil in CA. Certainly enough for California's needs, in fact.
- john_strinlai 5mo agothat is not my understanding or what is implied in the article. where would i go to find this fact?
- iqihs 5mo agothe entire economy of California being dependent on how Iran is feeling on a given day is crazy work
- smlacy 5mo agoYeah especially given that California is a leader in renewable energy sources.
- hvb2 5mo agoRenewables is for electricity. Oil is used for a lot of things that electricity can't replace, or not yet
- jeffbee 5mo agoMuch of what fossil fuels are used for is to refine fossil fuels, a use that we don't need to entirely replace.
- bdcravens 5mo agoYes, but even the renewables market is dependent on petroleum-based transport and infrastructure.
- triceratops 5mo agoBut the more renewables get used the less true that is.
- bdcravens 5mo agoPossibly, or more infrastructure is needed to support the growing demand for renewables, and the equipment is often trucked around using standard freight (large trucks or airplanes), concrete trucks to pour slabs, etc.
- 5mo ago
- __loam 5mo agoPeople will blame climate policy on this but this is evidence that we've failed to move off our fossil fuel dependency.
- throwforfeds 5mo agoWe've had decades to do something about it, but if Trump deciding to step into a completely unnecessary war and blundering the entire thing is what makes everyone wake up then I guess that's a silver lining.
- dylan604 5mo ago4D chess baby. He's a genius. All of his oil investing friends think so.
- tinyplanets 5mo agoHe's the best, the best at everything. Including tanking the world economy...
- com2kid 5mo agoIt is funny that propaganda has somehow convinced conservatives, people who used to idealize self reliance and independence from government dependencies, to move away from solar and EVs. A EV and a home solar setup with a large battery bank, is the ultimate in self reliance. I remember even 10 years ago you'd see the occasional right leaning homesteader talking about the benefits of being off grid with a solar setup. Now days removing our dependencies on foreign powers is somehow a liberal conspiracy. O_o
- hamdingers 5mo agoA bicycle and moderate fitness is the ultimate in self-reliance but you never heard them promoting that either.
- 5mo ago
- sfghsdgh 5mo ago6 weeks are standard. If you want to keep it for longer it needs additives which increase price. Noone does that usually.
- rconti 5mo agoI think in this case it's 6 weeks but _declining_, but that's a good distinction to point out.
- Plasmoid 5mo agoYeah, but what's the burn rate? If it's going down at 1 day per week then it's not so bad. If it's closer to 0.75 days per day, that's much more serious.
- _air 5mo agoYeah, seems like a standard supply level to me. "California’s inventory has averaged just over 20 days of supply over the last five years (2019–23), compared with the U.S. average of 21.6 days." https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63944 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63944
- wat10000 5mo agoI think they mean that it's 4-6 weeks until they hit zero, accounting both for stored products and the current rate of production/imports.
- FrustratedMonky 5mo agoUsually when something like this is reported, it is because of some other milestone. Like, they have 6 weeks, on hand, in tanks already delivered. But, all of the ships in-bound are now done. After the war started, there was a record number of ships, already filled, already in-transit. But now they have all reached their destinations. So there is no more incoming.
- josuepeq 5mo agoSoon gas stations in the Bay Area will have to price Gasoline in quarts, because the gas pumps can only display up to $9.99.
- jerlam 5mo agoIn the previous 2022 gas price spike, some stations could not dispense more than $100 worth of gas since that would previously indicate something wrong with the station.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dylan604 5mo agoThat'll confuse the average driver. The number of people that know the various measurements for fluids is not that high. I can totally see some future social media posts excited about the $2.99 price and then getting upset when the pump shows .25 gallons.
- xboxnolifes 5mo agoEven if you know the measurements it would be confusing to see a sign say $2.99 for gas and it turn out to be for a quart and not a gallon when you pull up. It's assumed at this point that it's per gallon.
- dvh 5mo agoMaybe this would be a good time to switch to metric system and use liters
- xethos 5mo ago"The United States switched to Metric to show smaller numbers at the pump", due to a surge in gas prices, caused by a war in the Middle East started for fabricated reasons, would be the most on-brand thing for America I can think of
- Sabinus 5mo ago
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoI’m surprised that only “18.9% of new car sales” in California are electric [1]. [1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2026-01/california-surpasses-25-million-zev-sales https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2026-01/california-surpasses-...
- com2kid 5mo agoOther countries have $15k new electric city cars for sale. The US doesn't. Our domestic car manufacturers are either uninterested or unable to make them, and import bans are in place on foreign cars that meet that price point. Also our infra not being 240v is hurting us. The rest of the world can just plug in overnight to any regular outlet and it is good enough for almost any commute. My EV on a 120v outlet I can manage, but it'd be hard with a second EV. The lack of ecosystem for good electric scooters is also sad. The weather in much of cali is perfect for it. Last time I went back to China the streets were so quiet as all the electric scooters drove by. An incredible change for the better. I remember stepping into an apartment parking garage that was filled with scooter charging spaces, like hundreds of them. It was crazy. Then I went to Taiwan and while walking around I barely talk over the noise from all the gas mopeds. I joked that the streets in China and quiet and the sidewalks noisy, and the streets of Taiwan are noisy and the sidewalks are quiet.
- kibwen 5mo ago> Also our infra not being 240v is hurting us. The rest of the world can just plug in overnight to any regular outlet and it is good enough for almost any commute. US homes don't need any significant accommodations for 240 volt infra. Plenty of US home appliances are already 240 volt; this is a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4
- irishcoffee 5mo agoYeah this confuses me. I was under the impression that every electric oven and clothes dryer in the US was 240 (220) volts already. I was not aware or tracking that 240v was an issue. Is that the case in places in the US?
- rconti 5mo agoI'm a bit perplexed on this one-- Yes, we refine our own blend of gasoline, but it's based on market oil -- nothing about the war we started with Iran impacts our domestic refining capability. Also, oil takes longer to get from Iran to the west coast than to the east coast. Shouldn't the east coast be the first to notice decreased shipments, because the west coast essentially has a stock still in transit for longer? EDIT: Nevermind, now I see that 25% of CA gas is refined overseas.
- daedrdev 5mo agoCA’s requirement that it gets its own blend of gas is combined with how its openly hostile towards its ever decreasing refineries and that it is impossible for a new refinery to ever open makes it’s supplies absurdly limited
- guyzero 5mo agoEveryone loves gas and hates refineries. It's a tough choice.
- doug_durham 5mo agoPeople in LA need to breathe during the summer time. So yes we demand a blend that protects our residents. And the refiners are choosing to close refineries. They are not being compelled.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoYeah, I remember flying into LAX in the late 80s and early 90s. Smog so thick it looked like a physical obstacle. Whatever they're doing seems to be working nicely.
- johnvanommen 5mo agoCar emissions are far lower now. I lived in CA when the air was grey in July. That ended a long time ago. A modern Honda generates something like 1% as much pollution as a car from the eighties.
- bdcravens 5mo agoAll the more reason why we need to move off of everything that doesn't require gasoline/diesel: those are precious resources that shouldn't be wasted on Starbucks runs.
- hx8 5mo agoIsn't 4-6 weeks about normal conditions? It feels like a large amount of slack for a modern JIT logistical system. Anymore enters strategic reserves territory.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoSure, but these aren't normal conditions. So that JIT amount is gonna rapidly become NJIT.
- dylan604 5mo agoI'm not very creative, but if we could use DJiT to go along with the at fault party's initials, that could be fun.
- gruez 5mo agoNot sure about california specifically, but elsewhere in the world stocks are definitely lower than normal. https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=100,format=auto/content-assets/images/20260425_FNC963.png https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...
- tpurves 5mo agoWhat this article fails to mention is that there are also a record number of empty tankers routed to the US refineries right now, with the intention of shifting still-relatively cheap US oil products to overseas markets where the prices are already much higher and shortages have already hit. The effects of the Iran war on the US economy will really start to kick in over the next several months.
- daedrdev 5mo agoOnce again, its illegal to use that oil in California due to (imo bad) environmental regulations
- flumpmaster 5mo agoIf you are referring to American light crude oil grades such as WTI (West Texas Intermediate) that is not correct. That oil could be refined in California. It would have to come by tanker from the gulf coast through the Panama Canal to get there. Until recently it would have to come on a Jones Act US flagged tanker (expensive, scarce). That requirement has been temporarily waived.
- daedrdev 5mo agoRight I forgot we waived the jones act. Refiners are hard to come by in CA though as they keep shutting down
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pear01 5mo agoIn such a situation - especially heading into the midterms - an export ban may be increasingly probable.
- TheGRS 5mo ago
- mikeweiss 5mo agoWhen you see the U.S Government making near daily public statements with the intended effect of calming markets and the public.... It's time to be worried. A.K.A when the government says "everything is going to be ok, don't worry we got this under control" that's when shit is bad. This is what we have been seeing. It seems we are near a tipping point now.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoWell, things can be bad because they are inherently bad, or things can be bad because people are panicking, and panicking people react in ways that make situations worse. Saying "it's going to be OK" doesn't change any circumstances. But it may reduce the level of panic (depending on how much the people trust the government), and that can in fact change the way the circumstances evolve.
- brightball 5mo agoDidn't California shut down 2 high capacity refineries in the last couple of years?
- cardiffspaceman 5mo agoThe capitalists who own them shut them down.
- jeffbee 5mo agoBut this guy is fixated on the fact that 17% of the refineries were closed in a state where gas sales fell 17%.
- brightball 5mo agoIt’s remarkably appropriate in a article where we are talking about a shortage…
- jeffbee 5mo agoIt's a shortage of refinery inputs, not refinery capacity.
- 0x1ceb00da 5mo agoInteresting. I thought the USA secured cuban oil to prepare for the fallout of the iran war. Was that not enough?
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoVenezuelan, not Cuban. And what they secured (if they secured anything) was basically future. It's going to take years to ramp Venezuelan production back up to what it would be with decent management.
- comrade1234 5mo agoFox News isn't real news and shouldn't be taken seriously.
- silexia 5mo agoSo dumb that California, with a massive wealth of oil underground, imports oil from the opposite side of the planet due to severely misguided environmental regulations.