California’s powerful air regulators late Friday night approved mandates for fuel sellers to cut carbon emissions or buy carbon credits, arguing that the move would push people into buying electric vehicles. An outside analysis found the requirements could hike the state’s already high gas prices by as much as 65 cents per gallon in the near term and 85 cents by 2030.
The air regulators themselves have refused to offer their own gas price projections, while claiming that the expected environmental benefits will be worth any increased costs. An agency staffer who presented Friday’s policy changes said modeling out price increases would be “inherently incorrect” and “misleading” because the agency “is not able to predict the future.”
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is a panel of political appointees with broad authority to enact sweeping mandates on residents and businesses. The agency was responsible for the ban on new gas vehicles that will take effect in 2035 and is phasing in other prohibitions on gas and diesel trucks, forklifts, and trains. This latest policy, approved by a 12-2 vote after a nearly 12-hour meeting, updates a longstanding state program called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard by accelerating the push to cut carbon from fuel mixes. The changes aim to keep up with the state’s aggressive mandate to become carbon neutral through a 95 percent reduction in the carbon intensity of fuel by 2045.
Republican state senator Brian Jones called the regulators’ updated policy “a direct assault on hardworking Californians.”
“This unelected group of wealthy bureaucrats, handpicked and directed by Governor Newsom, is shamelessly increasing gas prices so Californians are forced into electric vehicles against their will,” Jones said in a statement. “And conveniently, they pushed this costly regulation through right after the election, hoping no one would notice.”
California voters listed high costs of living as a top concern for the Nov. 5 election.
The update follows Democratic governor Gavin Newsom’s own pre-election pledge to stop oil industry “price gouging” with a law that gives state control of refinery storage—a policy that has already pushed one oil refinery to close and led Valero to announce it could shutter two more. The governors of Arizona and Nevada lobbied against the law, arguing it will raise prices in their states by creating artificial shortages.
President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to end California air regulators’ electric car mandates, loomed over Friday’s vote as officials expressed a sense of urgency to push their decarbonization efforts. Newsom and other Golden State leaders have pledged to invest taxpayer dollars into lawsuits against Trump’s policies.
“The tools in our toolbox may become much more limited moving forward,” CARB chair Liane Randolph said. “We know we must do all we can to use our existing state authority to bring clean fuels to California.”
Randolph shrugged off concerns about gas prices, arguing that “on affordability, we cannot afford to continue with the status quo.’”
“The climate crisis is accelerating,” she said. “We must continue to chart a path away from fossil fuels to avoid other harms.”
The regulatory board staff member who presented the policy said that projecting costs would be counterproductive because any modeling “would be based on speculation” about the future makeup of alternative fuels and theoretical new climate policies. That would make estimates “not only inherently incorrect but also misleading.”
Hector De La Torre, another CARB appointee and former California state lawmaker, said he expects the policy will shift more people to electric vehicles and claimed that questions from the media and politicians about its implications for gas prices show they’re being influenced by the oil industry.
And CARB member Susan Shaheen further stressed that the new policy will help move people into electric vehicles. “I just wanted to underscore how important this policy is to the ZEV [zero emission vehicle] transition,” she said.
CARB sparked uproar over its Low Carbon Fuel Standard plans last year, when its staff estimated the proposed update could add 47 cents to per-gallon fuel prices in January 2025, and another 52 cents in 2026. News of the projections broke earlier this year, sparking backlash from consumer groups and Republican lawmakers. In response, CARB officials walked back their estimate, telling the Washington Free Beacon at the time that “there is no data showing a correlation between [the low-carbon fuel standard] and fuel prices at the pump.”
The agency refused to give another cost projection ahead of their vote—instead offering commodities market data putting the program’s current price effect at 10 cents per gallon.
Days before the Nov. 5 election, CARB’s executive officer Steven Cliff told reporters he didn’t believe the update would hike gas prices, even as he admitted it would cause “additional impacts to costs to refiners.” CARB staff’s initial cost projections assumed that refineries would pass their extra costs on to drivers.
“I don’t expect them to,” he said. “There will be additional impacts to costs to refiners.”
Danny Cullenward, an economist with the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, released his own analysis predicting a per gallon price increase of up to 65 cents in the “near term” that could climb to 85 cents per gallon by 2030 and nearly $1.50 per gallon by 2035.
California has the highest gas prices in the continental United States at $4.51 as of Monday, according to AAA.
While California officials try to move more people into electric vehicles, their policies have also hit EV owners with high charging costs, which for some EVs have almost doubled since 2022. In response, utility regulators have added an income-based premium to electricity bills to try to subsidize charging costs.
