Not to mention natural gas and oil will always need to be shipped around. Whereas when you have enough renewables and a grid that can supply enough electricity, shipping panels and batteries drops by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite dogmatic about renewables (we have 2 EVs, pay more for various renewable options, aggressively recycle, avoid single-use plastics, etc). I'm just pragmatic in my outlook.
However, you do pay the market price.
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
Also my e-bike needs more maintenance than my EV. Go figure.
tow a trailer where? see above.
Pick up a load of dirt or lumber-- how did those materials get to the pick-up point?
And the road you are driving on, where did it come from?
Curious about your maintenance needs. I have a guy that comes out once a year for service and tunes it up for me. After 3 years, I replaced the chain. I've upgraded to hydraulic brakes by the same guy. Other than that, it's been smooth riding. Or are you saying your EV needs so little maintenance that even the low maintenance on a bike seem high?
I'm due for a cabin air filter change in another couple years.
So yes the bike is costing me more in maintenance! It is hard to compete with 0.
I think the propaganda would be whatever said we're all against it, that's untrue. We just want both, no gas bans.
Nevermind that solar is why Texas has such cheap electricity prices.
> no gas bans.
I'm all for the free market.
Price into gas the expected increase in healthcare costs due to air and ground water pollution. Stop subsidizing it for non-critical uses.
Same for extra tire dust from EVs (that shit is toxic AF).
Right now I see astroturfing that EVs are why our electricity infrastructure is overloaded (rather than blaming 50 years of neglect), or that the cars burst into flame (no more than other cars and newer battery tech not any more).
Subsidizing EVs is interesting because it is obvious that EVs are the future (battery tech gets ~6% better year over year, compounding, ICE designs haven't seen improvements in decades), but recent removal of government support caused American car companies to basically give up on anything except the domestic car market, which spells their long term doom (which the Ford CEO has pretty much come out and admitted.)
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.
"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."
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.
[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2026-01/california-surpasses-...
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.
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.
Quotes for a new 240V line are often >$1K which is affordable in the context of a household improvement but not exactly pocket change.
Meanwhile $3k to get 5 feet of 240 ran in a conduit and an outlet installed in the US.
For many apartment and condo complexes, it just isn't doable as a reasonable retrofit.
The 240V requirement has been overplayed, in my opinion. I still have a gas car. But my driving needs would easily be covered with 110V.
The difference is other countries have 240 running everywhere. So apartment garages can have cars charging (slower than the max possible speed but faster than if they were on 120v), without tens of thousands of dollars in retrofits.
I just got an estimate of 3k for running basically 6ft of conduit for a new 240v line in my own garage (my breaker is right next to my door, super short run!)
Now thinking about my last condo I lived in, retrofitting even a small condo parking garage for EV chargers for, say, 20 spaces. Let's estimate 30 feet on average line run per space. Assuming a discount on price, maybe 12k per parking space to install a 240 plug, with lines split to cover multiple spaces.
The price is just absurd. That's 1/3rd the cost of a reasonably priced car.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/10/13/california-reaches-29-1...
The $7.5k EV subsidy ended in Q3 2025. Everyone considering buying an EV, bought one right before Q4 2025. The percentage for Q3 2025 is 29.1%: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/13/record-breaking-quarter-ca...
It may rebound back to these levels due to the gas price increase, and many car manufacturers slashing their prices to compensate for the subsidy ending.
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.
Whatever they're doing seems to be working nicely.
That ended a long time ago. A modern Honda generates something like 1% as much pollution as a car from the eighties.
The improvement in air quality is due to the clean air act, catalytic converters, and the shuttering of industry, the gas blend plays a minor part. Even then, with gas so much higher it will materially make peoples lives worse, at some point society would be better off getting rid of the blend.
A big one is a lack of pipelines.
As I understand it, California sits on so much oil, nobody has built a pipeline.
Building an energy pipeline in California is like bringing sand to the beach. The energy is already there.
For example crude oil is produced mid state in the San Joaquin valley and pumped by pipeline to the Bay Area and LA refineries.
Refined product from LA is delivered by pipeline from LA refineries as far east as Phoenix and up to Las Vegas.
Building new pipelines in California though is…challenging.
https://timesofsandiego.com/state-region/2026/04/23/prices-c...
"California’s top foreign refinery supplier of gasoline and blendstocks this decade is Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Jamnagar refinery complex in western India. "
"More than 9 million barrels arrived via this loophole in 2025"
Now, that's a tiny fraction of the 320M barrels of gas used in CA annually, but anything that affects global oil shipments will be felt in California.
Per the article, the type of fuel needed by California standards is produced at refineries in India, South Korea and Washington.
How much below the peak is current sales?
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...
Technically, the refineries can be retooled to take a different blend, but it is expensive to do.
American oil on the other hand (As in extracted out of the ground) is actually too high quality for domestic consumption therefore gets shipped overseas and sold at a premium. The weird economics of this are made possible by globalization. While it’s not fungible on a dime it’s easy to solve and the US really does hold all the cards when it comes to the petroleum industry.
We produce more oil than we use, but we can’t refine it all.
Or from Alberta.
https://sherman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congre...
If you agree with the parent that Americans are going to feel more energy market pain in the coming months I would imagine the pressure for this will only increase.
It could help in the long term by underwritig refinery retooling. The problem is you'd almost certainly need public support for those investments, given they could be undone by the lifting of such a ban. (An export ban would also trash America's reputation with our import partners.)
The real cost to not processing heavy crude oil is that many refinery assets will be sitting idle because they aren't needed to process light crude.
"U.S. crude oil and lease condensate proved reserves decreased 1% from 46.4 billion barrels to 46.0 billion barrels at year-end 2024" [1]. At February's 180 million barrel/month import rate, that's only 21 years of supply in the ground.
Reliance on oil, for America, is a long-term reliance on foreign oil.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/
[2] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
If you’re making six figures on two incomes, it’s plenty tolerable.
If you’re single and working as a street sweeper or make $60K a year outside the cities, it makes you want to burn the system down.
For anyone who isn’t rolling in cash, it’s economically oppressive. I’m not surprised that breeds resentment. I consider this the biggest blind spot of green movements: “It’s not that much more expensive to be green” said by someone who can afford it to people who can’t. A modern “let them eat cake.”
The real "let them eat cake" is the biggest polluters externalizing the costs of that pollution down to the people, all while the state is dismantling the EPA and clean energy.
Imagine if we had real public transportation across the nation. Less pollution AND cheaper for the average person. Wonder why that isn't happening.
Marathon Martinez (2020) converted to renewables. Crude capacity 157 MBD, Renewables capacity 48 MBD
P66 Rodeo (2022) converted to renewables. Crude capacity 120 MBD, Renewables capacity 50 MBD
P66 LA (2025) shutdown. Crude capacity 139 MBD
Valero Bencia (2026) shutdown. Crude capacity 145 MBD
The California Air Resource Board (CARB) has promulgated a revised Cap and Invest rule that threatens the viability of the remaining refineries. All the remaining California refineries have sent CARB, the Governor and the CA legislature letters pointing this out.
California is now a net importer of gasoline following these refinery closures.
https://today.usc.edu/las-environmental-success-story-cleane...
>Would you really want to hurt children for cheaper gas?
Nice appeal to emotion.
I'd rather have clearer skies.
Cars may burn cleaner but they still burn, and there are more of them than ever.
Easing economic pain in exchange for health pain is nonsensical. Breathe from your own tailpipe if its no big deal.
Yes. Most voters would, too. "Cheaper gas" understates how serious even a $20/week increase in living costs can be for a household on the margin.
Gavin Newsom warms to Big Oil in climate reversal: https://calmatters.org/politics/2025/08/oil-compromise-calif...
I think your idea is a great solution to the problem and would give politicians cover with their environmental base and a win for their constituents.
Newsom is not a refinery nor does he own any refineries. He cannot increase any production by definition.
(As a side benefit, he can also blame the need on Trump, if the environmentalists get on his case...)
Also, there's the bigger geopolitical problems that creates. If the US knocks over the global energy supply and then retreats and abandons our trading partners, the knock-on effects would be even worse.
A large part of the reason WWII existed was the breakdown of international trade during the Great Depression. Countries without domestic supplies of their own were forced to grab territory instead of peacefully trading for what they needed.
We’re witnessing “American exceptionalism” transform from a brash claim to a whiny demand in real time.
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.
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.
htx80nerd•1h ago
tialaramex•1h ago
vkou•1h ago
mikeyouse•16m ago
alpha_squared•1h ago
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•1h ago
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.
AtlasBarfed•1h ago
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