Big Tech's AI keeps getting caught delivering false, ideological, and defamatory information, notes @wynton_hall in his bestselling new book, Code Red. The reason is pervasive partisan bias and "Effective Altruism" dogma, which is detached from the West's moral foundations.

President Donald Trump is responsible for California’s high gasoline prices, says Governor Gavin Newsom. “Americans will pay $1.5 BILLION MORE at the gas pump just this week because of Donald Trump’s war with Iran,” he wrote. When the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act to restart the Sable Offshore pipeline near Santa Barbara, Newsom condemned the move as a cynical attempt to exploit a crisis of the president’s own making.

“Donald Trump started a war, admitted it would spike gas prices nationwide, and told Americans it was a small price to pay,” Newsom said. “Now he’s using this crisis of his own making to attempt what he’s wanted to do for years: open California’s coast for his oil industry friends so they can poison our beaches.”

But California’s $5.86-per-gallon gasoline price exceeds the national average of $3.95 by nearly two dollars because Newsom has systematically dismantled the state’s energy supply infrastructure. Washington and Hawaii, the next most expensive, trail California by more than a dollar. Texas drivers pay $2.70. while leaving demand largely intact.

California imports roughly 63% of its crude oil from foreign countries, despite having at least 1.7 billion barrels of proven reserves. Its oil production fell by more than 75%, from over 1 million barrels per day in the 1980s to 246,000 barrels per day at the end of 2025.

California made itself into an energy island, isolated from the continent’s abundant oil and natural gas resources by regulatory choice rather than geographic necessity. Where California used to be one of America’s largest oil producers, most of the state’s crude now arrives by sea.

“Because Gulf Coast refiners can access domestic crude through pipelines,” notes Robert Rapier, “Persian Gulf barrels are not evenly spread across the country. A disproportionate share of those Saudi and Iraqi imports ends up in PADD 5, the West Coast refining district, precisely because California lacks pipeline access to Permian supply.” And California’s refineries aren’t set up to refine domestic crude but rather foreign imports.

California thus resembles Asian nations that lack domestic hydrocarbons and depend on seaborne imports through chokepoints, except that California sits atop a continent with the world’s largest combined oil and natural gas production. It has no major refined product pipeline connecting it to Texas or Louisiana. And it has been routing imported gasoline through the Bahamas to avoid the Jones Act’s requirement that goods shipped between U.S. ports travel on expensive American-flagged vessels...

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Gavin Newsom says Trump is to blame for California’s $5.86/gallon gasoline, but that’s nearly $2 higher than the national average. And it was mostly Newsom’s destruction of the state’s oil production and refining capacity that explains the difference.

5 billion to $8 billion during years of environmental litigation before Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled it in July 2020. The Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York died the same year.

The PennEast Pipeline won its case at the United States Supreme Court in 2021 and still could not get built because New Jersey refused to issue state permits. In Canada, TransCanada abandoned the $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline in 2017 after the National Energy Board required an unprecedented review of upstream and downstream emissions...

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5 billion to $8 billion during years of environmental litigation before Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled it in July 2020. The Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York died the same year.

The PennEast Pipeline won its case at the United States Supreme Court in 2021 and still could not get built because New Jersey refused to issue state permits. In Canada, TransCanada abandoned the $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline in 2017 after the National Energy Board required an unprecedented review of upstream and downstream emissions...

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The Iran conflict is a reminder that we must accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, say many in the media. Iran’s disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz means the world is now losing 13 million barrels per day of oil and refined products, which is over 10% of global consumption.

After QatarEnergy, the world’s largest LNG exporter, declared force majeure on all exports after Iranian drone strikes, Asian buyers scrambled to redirect orders to Australia. But then, last week, a cyclone slammed into Australia’s LNG corridor, forcing shutdowns at three of the country’s largest facilities.

David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times noted, “No one has ever started a war over solar panels.”

But nobody goes to war over solar panels for the same reason nobody goes to war over candles: they cannot power the things that economies, civilizations, and wars run on. A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds.

That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations, not superiority.

Many respond by claiming that fossil fuels persist because of government subsidies and political favoritism. The IMF says global fossil fuel subsidies total $7 trillion. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited that number when he called for eliminating “fossil fuel subsidies that distort markets and lock us into the past.”

But the $7 trillion figure is almost entirely fictional. The IMF’s own data show that only 18% of its subsidy estimate reflects actual government spending or undercharging for supply costs. The remaining 82% consists of what the IMF calls “implicit subsidies,” a theoretical construct that assigns a dollar value to the environmental and social costs of burning fossil fuels and then treats the failure to tax those costs as a subsidy.

By that logic, any product whose price does not reflect the full externalized cost of its production is “subsidized.”

The real problem is that the world overinvested in green energy and underinvested in oil and gas. Globally, the IEA’s World Energy Investment 2025 report documented that $2.2 trillion flowed to clean energy in 2025, exactly double the $1.1 trillion invested in oil, natural gas, and coal combined. In the U.S., federal tax expenditures for green energy end users in fiscal year 2025 alone totaled $57.9 billion.

That figure exceeds the aggregate of all federal fossil fuel tax expenditures over the 31-year period from 1994 to 2025, totaling $50.8 billion.

The oil and gas extraction sector generated $1.8 trillion in total U.S. revenues in 2024, meaning that the $3 billion in actual government support represents 0.17% of industry revenue, an economic rounding error.

Renewable energy hardware is overwhelmingly manufactured in China, creating a supply chain dependency that is more precarious than the oil dependency it purports to replace. China’s share of global polysilicon, ingot, and wafer production has reached approximately 95%. China controls 91% of rare earth processing and 94% of the permanent magnet production essential for wind turbines.

China dominates more than 75% of global solar cell and module manufacturing and is projected to control nearly 60% of all critical mineral refining by 2030. In 2025, Beijing weaponized this dominance, and bismuth prices surgednearly 500% overnight.

Had the world spent the past decade building the oil, gas, LNG, pipeline, and fertilizer infrastructure that engineers designed and companies proposed, the Hormuz crisis would still be a serious geopolitical event, but it would not threaten to cause a recession.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile natural gas line from West Virginia to North Carolina, saw its cost double from $4.

We should have spent more on green energy, say the media. No, we shouldn't have. The $2 trillion we spent did nothing to prevent the energy crisis and may even have caused it.

The Iran conflict triggered the energy crisis, but its roots lie in the West's opposition to the production of oil and gas outside the Persian Gulf. The climate movement is, says former radical environmentalist @ziontree, "fundamentally anti-human in its thinking."

UK Energy Secretary @Ed_Miliband called North Sea drilling "climate vandalism." Now he's waffling on new drilling, which he should have approved long ago. What changed? The war exposed the fraudulence of his net-zero, anti-oil-and-gas fantasy. 🧵

2/ In November 2025, Miliband banned new oil and gas exploration licenses in the North Sea. He said Britain needed to "get off the fossil fuel rollercoaster." Five months later, the Strait of Hormuz closed, oil hit $100, and the UK started reviewing fuel rationing plans.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/uk-fuel-rationing-iran-us-war-strait-of-hormuz-5HjdWP5_2/

3/ Miliband's response to the worst energy crisis since 1973? Plug-in solar panels at supermarkets. The UK is receiving its last shipment of jet fuel with nothing behind it, and Miliband wants you to buy a solar panel at Tesco.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/24/iran-war-britain-new-homes-solar-heat-pumps-energy-crisis.html

4/ Now Whitehall sources say Miliband will new drilling, even as his own ministry calls reports of the approval "unfounded." He cannot even commit to the reversal he knows he has to make.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/uk/2026/04/03/uk-set-to-approve-new-gasfield-in-north-sea-amid-fuel-shortage-worry/

5/ This is the pattern everywhere. Greens/Labor/Democrats restrict oil and gas production for years. Then, a crisis hits and they quietly reverse course while pretending nothing changed. They never accept responsibility for the damage.

6/ Upstream oil and gas investment peaked at $869 billion in 2015 and fell to $350 billion by 2020. It recovered to only $570 billion by 2025, still a third below the peak. Meanwhile, governments poured $2.2 trillion into green energy in 2025 alone.

iea.org/reports/world-…

https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025/executive-summary

7/ The world installed 1,600 gigawatts of solar and 1,000 gigawatts of wind. None of it mattered when Hormuz closed. Renewables generate electricity, which is just 21% of final energy consumption. The other 79%, the part that moves ships, flies planes, makes fertilizer, and heats buildings, still runs overwhelmingly on fossil fuels. Oil and gas alone supply 56% of all global energy.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2026-03-25/debates/1A55782D-9726-4276-8EFE-B5922770D6E6/FuelSuppliesWarInIran

8/ Denmark, which banned new oil licenses in 2020, now considers extending North Sea production. Germany, which spent €500 billion on renewables while shutting nuclear plants, depends on LNG that can no longer transit Hormuz. The UK, which banned exploration five months ago, faces fuel rationing.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/03/31/strait-of-hormuz-shutdown-what-implications-for-europe-for-how-long-and-how-high-can-price

9/ The US produces natural gas at $4 per million BTU and delivers it through 3 million miles of pipeline. Europe pays $16 for the same gas because it arrives by tanker. The difference is decades of policy choices. America built pipelines while Europe built dependency.

https://www.regit.cars/car-news/global-fuel-shortages-2026-how-countries-are-reacting-to-the-strait-of-hormuz-crisis

11/ Real energy abundance means piped natural gas at $4, nuclear plants running at 90% capacity for 100 years, and domestic oil production that cannot be disrupted by a drone strike, not solar panels at the supermarket.

Democrats must rebrand their energy agenda around abundance, some say. But doing so is fundamentally dishonest. For decades, the party has fought, blocked, and closed nuclear plants, pipelines, and oil and natural gas production, laying the foundation for today's energy crisis.