California’s Energy Policies Are Putting Our Military at Risk

Commentary

In my previous article, I analyzed the reasons for the current gas crisis, and gave a detailed breakdown of why Californians are paying so much more at the pump than residents of every other state.

However, the gas crisis is also impacting the military readiness of the 50-plus major and semi-major military facilities and bases in California. Indeed, a recent report by University of Southern California professor Michael Mische, Navy veteran and petroleum industry analyst Michael Ariza, and California State Assemblyman Stan Ellis asserts that California’s current energy policies are a clear and present threat to the force readiness of our military.

Further, as constructed, California’s energy policies clearly favor Beijing’s interests over those of the U.S. military and California at large.

The Golden State’s self-inflicted energy crisis is the direct result of decades of aggressive environmental regulations that have strangled domestic oil production and refining. Since the 1980s, the state has lost more than 30 refineries, dropping operable facilities from 43 in 1982 to just six by mid-February 2026. Refining capacity has fallen by 35 percent overall, from 2.5 million barrels per day in 1982 to about 1.3 million barrels per day today—an absolute drop of 48 percent.

On a per capita basis, the decline is steeper still: from approximately 0.102 barrels per person per day in 1982 (population of about 24.5 million) to approximately 0.033 barrels per person per day in 2026 (population of about 39.9 million), a relative drop of approximately 68 percent. Gasoline production has fallen by 6.2 million to 9.3 million gallons per day, leading to chronic shortages, price volatility ($1 to $2 above national averages), and warnings of spikes of more than $8 per gallon in scenarios that could easily happen.

According to Department of Defense reports, California’s military facilities consume an estimated 370 million gallons of fuel annually under normal peacetime operations—roughly 7 percent to 9 percent of the U.S. military’s total annual petroleum use of 100 million to 130 million barrels (approximately 4.2 billion to 5.5 billion gallons).

Further, California’s military bases are critical for responding quickly to events in the Pacific region. Bases such as Travis Air Force Base—located near Valero’s shuttered Benicia refinery—rely on local sources for 95 percent to 100 percent of their fuel via direct pipelines. Shortages could ground C-5M Galaxy and KC-135 tankers, delaying global airlifts critical for Indo-Pacific response. Edwards Air Force Base, testing next-gen platforms such as the B-21 Raider, needs steady diesel and jet fuel for flight ops: Disruptions could halt research and development, pushing back hypersonic or stealth programs by months. Naval Base San Diego, home to Pacific Fleet carriers, faces immobilization risks for destroyers and submarines, while Camp Pendleton’s Marine training ops depend on diesel for tanks and helicopters; rationing could cut readiness drills by 50 percent.

Hence, California’s fragile and failing fossil fuel infrastructure has the potential to significantly damage the nation’s overall military readiness and effectiveness.

How quickly our military would be impacted is alarming. A major refinery loss (such as an outage at Chevron’s Richmond refinery or Marathon’s Martinez facility) or pipeline failure (such as the San Pablo Bay line’s idling) could cascade within 72 hours. Reserves would last only 14 to 21 days at normal rates of consumption. But a surge situation, such as a Taiwan crisis, could deplete the reserves in a matter of days.

The report further warns of Week 1 degradation that would include reduced training flights and delayed deployments. And by Week 2, collapse would begin with rationing below 40 percent of normal operations, leading to reduced readiness and grounded aircraft.

Exacerbating an already bad situation, unlike other states, California has no interstate pipelines for refined fuels, leaving California and the U.S. military heavily dependent on foreign oil and gas, of which 60 percent to 70 percent of imports transit the Strait of Hormuz, making them vulnerable to Iranian threats or mining. Reliance on Chinese or Indian refiners, both of whom get a significant portion of their crude oil from Russia, could result in critical fuels being lost in a variety of unpleasant scenarios.

Beyond putting the military at risk, California’s unscientific and environmental polices have played a major role in driving manufacturing out of California, with manufacturing employment plummeting from 2 million employees in 1990 to just 1.2 million in 2025, despite a population increase of 32 percent. By imposing unrealistic emissions caps and drilling bans, the state has driven refining and manufacturing offshore—often to China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter (29 percent of global total). An ironic example of this is that California’s energy and regulatory costs played a major role in California losing what was once a thriving solar energy manufacturing base that included solar panels and other solar-related equipment.

By shifting the production of California Air Resources Board (CARB)–compliant gasoline to foreign refineries operating under far weaker pollution controls, California has ensured that millions more tons of pollutants and greenhouse gases will be dumped into the global environment. What’s more, this “carbon leakage” means that any drop in California’s local emissions is more than offset by emissions from countries such as China and India, which depend heavily on dirty coal for power production. For instance, imported jet fuel from China in 2024 has much higher life cycle emissions than in-state refining under California’s standards.

Yet California is looking at converting existing refineries to renewable-fed diesel refineries whose production will be 80 percent to 90 percent less than if they remained petroleum-fed.

Beyond the loss of production, the renewable diesel refineries will require massive state subsidies to stay in operation. Further, these converted refineries, unlike the current refinery configurations, cannot produce the high-performance JP-5/JP-8 aviation fuels that the military needs. Long story short, these renewable diesel refineries cannot meet the needs of California and the U.S. military, and they are not economically viable.

These kinds of uneconomic/unscientific policies favor Beijing’s economic dominance at the expense of U.S. jobs, and all for the sake of dubious, debatable environmental policies.

If California adopted Texas’s regulatory framework, it would allow for superior end-to-end efficiency by refining domestic crude locally using modern U.S. infrastructure. This enables the production of fuels with lower lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than the foreign-refined fuels that California is now forced to import from high-polluting nations such as China and India.

By following Texas’s example, domestic production would rebound, resulting in reduced imports, less pollution globally, and a robust energy infrastructure capable of supporting our military. This is a far better path to pursue than continuing the policies championed by California’s state politicians that have put the state and the country’s military effectiveness at risk.

The evidence is in: California needs to move away from policies that far too often look like mere virtue signaling. It needs to move toward policies that leverage science, industry, and capitalism, to implement policies that actually protect the environment.

A great first step for California would be to rejoin the United States by moving off its fuel island, adopting Tier 3 federal standards, and dropping counterproductive CARB standards.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.