Under President Trump global energy prices are headed downward
Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve Hanke points out that Arab oil producing nations are turning on the spigots at a time when they normally would shut a few down:
OPEC+ announces oil output hike despite weak demand.
— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) June 29, 2025
Since non-OPEC producers can supply all of the 2025 incremental increase in the demand for crude, this means crude prices are set to go down.https://t.co/53Zu363anX
More supply on the market, lower prices. It's a great benefit for consumers. It's also likely to bankrupt Iran just a little harder, which would mesh with Trump's policy goal of mullahs no longer able to threaten anyone on the world stage -- neither the tiny Israelis, who bear the brunt of mullah malevolence, nor the Arab Gulf states, who have also been threatened by Iran and consider it a mortal enemy, too. I have no doubt this is the meaning behind the curiously counterintuitive move.
For U.S. consumers, prices at the pump are already headed downward, and they are going to go further downward with this upstream move.
But then there's California.
Instead of gasoline prices going down, they're set to soar, probably much worse than the expert predictions if recent history is anything to go on.
According to the Los Angeles Times:
Prices at the pump in California will likely jump in July, the result of a state sales tax hike and stricter rules on refineries to encourage them to create lower-carbon fuels. The combined increases could boost gas prices by nearly 70 cents, although industry experts and state officials disagree on how steep the price increase may be.
This, in a state where locals already pay the highest gas prices in the country. That's two crummy taxes, both difficult to understand, and one, involving a loopy, useless carbon-capture exchange, coming into effect in July at the peak of the summer driving season, all to stop global warming, which, even if the idea were true, would hardly be affected by one state's self-destructive action.
Katy Grimes at the California Globe makes a valiant effort to explain both tax hikes, which could drive gas in the state to $10 a gallon, by some estimates, particularly when a third factor -- the exit of two major refineries from the state, one this year and one next year, makes supply even scarcer.
So when everyone else's gas prices go down, California's will go up, up and away.
That will prompt more residents to flee the state, new gas theft rings taking root to prey on the public as cops twiddle their thumbs, union calls for more work-at-home permissions, empty office buildings in big downtown districts as workers stay away, desperate drivers heading into Tijuana for reasonably priced fuel, and a host of other unintended consequences, none of them good.
It's as if the state hasn't been punished enough.
Fuel prices historically have been political bellwethers of changes in the works, and surely something that will upset voters. While many will blame Trump, it won't be as easy an argument as it has been in the past with most other states seeing their fuel prices going down.
Obviously, it's a new Democrat bid to obtain more slush funds from the higher taxes which will be misspent or stolen as it always is. Will it wake up the voters? One can wish. It's good that the yeomen Republicans in the statehouse keep trying to hammer this point home. It's also telling that California's Gov. Gavin Newsom, is doing his level best, media allies in tow, to gaslight voters into believing nothing his happening. That won't work, either.
