By Wes Venteicher, Politico California Climate
PRESSURE AT THE PUMP: A group of environmental and consumer groups is pressuring the California Energy Commission to hurry up and impose a profit cap on oil refiners ahead of the usual summer surge in gas prices.
Twenty-three groups including Consumer Watchdog, The Climate Center and the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment plan to tell the CEC in a letter Monday that it needs to “take decisive action and implement a price gouging penalty by this summer in order to protect Californians from the outrageous profits that come with California gasoline price spikes.”
The letter coincides with a Monday workshop where the CEC will give an overview of some of its next steps under a law Newsom signed early last year in an effort to address gas price spikes. The law tasked the agency with analyzing vast troves of new oil market data and deciding whether to impose a profit cap on refiners.
Monday’s workshop focuses on that first part, and will cover some proposed changes to the way oil companies must report data. It’ll also touch on rules for refinery maintenance outages, which have been blamed for some past price spikes.
The groups that signed onto the letter say last year’s data for refiners’ gross margins demonstrate the need for a profit cap. Net profits the companies reported are much lower, and negative for some months. Monday’s agenda suggests the difference between those numbers could be discussed.
The oil industry has said California’s high gas prices aren’t a product of “greed” or “gouging” as Newsom has said, but are rather the result of stringent environmental regulations, a lack of pipelines that restrict supply and limitations on in-state extraction. — WV
