Senator, I am circling today on my classroom calendar in red Sharpie. October 6, 2026, the day I agreed with John Hickenlooper.
"Cutting off clean energy projects means YOUR energy bills exploding in cost. It just doesn't make sense."
YES. Thank you. I have been yelling this into the void for months, and you said it in a minute and eleven seconds with better lighting than my classroom has ever had.
Cut off production and prices go up. I teach supply and demand right after Newton's third law because the kids need a breather, and they get it on the first try.
So I assume your next video is aimed straight at Sacramento, since California is the biggest example in the country of cutting off energy projects. The folks running that state have a leak in the think tank, so I'll go slow.
Phillips 66 shut down its Los Angeles refinery at the end of last year, roughly 139,000 barrels a day. Valero stopped making fuel at its Benicia refinery on April 30 of this year, another 145,000 barrels a day. Valero didn't even pretend. They said California has the toughest regulatory and enforcement environment in North America and walked out the door. Add those two up and California padlocked 17 percent of its own refining capacity.
And the bills? They did exactly what you said they would, Senator. California drivers have been paying close to two dollars a gallon more than the national average, and economists at UC Davis and USC warned the closures could push the state toward six and even eight dollar gas. Nobody in Sacramento listened. If common sense were gasoline, that legislature couldn't power a lawnmower.
The part that should bother a "clean energy" guy like you is where the gas comes from now. Californians didn't stop driving to work. The demand didn't evaporate into a cloud of good intentions, it just moved. The state imports more fuel now, a lot of it from Asia, on tankers burning bunker fuel (about the dirtiest stuff we put in an engine) the whole way across the Pacific.
In physics we call that conservation. Matter doesn't disappear because you stopped looking at it. The smokestack just got a passport.
They took refineries held to the strictest air rules on the planet, shut them down, and replaced them with refineries overseas held to... let's be generous and say "fewer" rules. Then they shipped the product across an ocean and called it progress. Somebody out there is muddying the water to make it look deep.
If one of my students turned in a lab report that moved the pollution off the data table and wrote "emissions reduced" at the bottom, I'd hand it back with a red F and "see me after class" in the margin.
Jim Quinn said it years ago: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. Close the clean refinery to save the planet, and you end up with dirtier fuel, more shipping emissions, and higher prices. Quinn had another one that fits even better, that every time a liberal tries to fix something, someone somewhere loses their job. Go ask the roughly 400 people who used to work at Benicia how fixed they feel.
What makes this so painful, Senator, is that YOU KNOW BETTER.
You were a petroleum geologist before you were a brewer, a mayor, a governor, or a senator. As governor you told a Senate committee you drank fracking fluid to prove it was safe. Soldiers get suspicious of water that sat all day in a sun-baked water buffalo, and you chugged frack fluid at a hearing.
You understand refineries better than 99 percent of your caucus, which leaves me three options. I'd genuinely like you to pick one:
o You forgot everything you learned as a geologist the day a D showed up next to your name.
o You know California is doing the exact thing you just warned about, but saying it out loud would get you uninvited from the next fundraiser.
o "Clean energy" only counts when it comes with a federal subsidy check, and a refinery cleaner than anything in Asia doesn't count because nobody gets to cut a ribbon on it.
On September 23 I asked you which you'd support: more American refineries, more offshore drilling, or nuclear plants with Yucca Mountain finally doing its job. The crickets have been deafening. A senator who dodges that question is about as useful as a solar-powered nightlight.
What's next, a Democrat governor bans new gas cars, runs off the refineries, and then begs the oil companies not to leave? Wait... I was just told California already did that, too!
Since you're a busy man, let me save you some time. Instead of posting this on X, you should call the person who actually has the power to stop cutting off energy projects in California.
Let me see if I can find out who that is.
Looking...
Looking...
Oh, here he is. It's the governor who brags about his state's economy while his constituents pay the highest gas prices in the lower 48 and some of the highest electric rates in the country.
His name is...
@CAgovernor. Give him a call. He's the one who can actually DO something about this. Good luck!
Your party loves to talk about the working family's energy bill, right up until a Democrat state is the one choking off supply. Then the lights are on and nobody's home. The outrage only flows one direction, like a diode, which I also teach.
So yes, Senator, I agree with you. Now say it about California, on camera, same lighting. Will you post that video, or will you send the same crickets you sent me on September 23?
Everybody else reading this: name ONE refinery a Democrat senator has fought to keep open. I'll wait in the replies.
But what do I know? I am only a physics teacher who knows that closing a refinery doesn't delete the pollution, it just mails it overseas with a bigger bill attached.
I wrote the full lesson here:
Environmentalists Are Destroying the Environment, One Refinery at a Time
x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2…
Spinning Green Won't Save the Earth: A Republican Platform to Actually Save It
x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2…
How to Fix Schools, Power, Housing, and the $10B Veterans Promise in 10 Years
x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2…
#MAGA #Trump
@TPUSA @JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks