Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent years making it more durable to produce oil in his state, and Californians are choosing up the tab in the type of America’s highest gasoline costs.
Now a Kern County decide has delivered a rebuke to one of his administration’s most brazen anti-energy schemes: It secretly imposed a statewide fracking ban, denied its existence for years, then invoked environmental justifications contradicted by its own earlier findings.
In an Oct. 8 tentative ruling, Superior Court Judge Bernard Barmann Jr. invalidated both the administration’s secret prohibition on fracking, imposed in 2021, and the formal regulation adopted in 2024.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent years making it more durable to produce oil in his state, and Californians are choosing up the tab in the type of America’s highest gasoline costs. AP Photo/Reba Saldanha
Now a Kern County decide has delivered a rebuke to one of his administration’s most brazen anti-energy schemes: It secretly imposed a statewide fracking ban, denied its existence for years, then invoked environmental justifications contradicted by its own earlier findings. David Buchan for Ca Post
In an Oct. 8 tentative ruling, Superior Court Judge Bernard Barmann Jr. invalidated both the administration’s secret prohibition on fracking, imposed in 2021, and the formal regulation adopted in 2024. Bernard C. Barmann Jr
The ruling is a authorized embarrassment for Newsom and an indictment of California’s more and more arbitrary method to vitality coverage.
The story begins in 2019, when Newsom informed disillusioned supporters that he lacked authority to impose a fracking moratorium. “You can’t do that unilaterally,” he said. “Legally, you cannot. The governor of California cannot do that.”
Apparently, he reconsidered.
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In 2021, after laws to ban fracking failed in a Democrat-controlled Senate committee, Newsom’s workplace quietly directed the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, to cease approving well-stimulation permits.
But getting his regulators to carry out his order was another matter.
In 2019, Newsom fired state oil and fuel supervisor Ken Harris amid complaints that his company had authorized too many fracking permits.
The ruling is a authorized embarrassment for Newsom and an indictment of California’s more and more arbitrary method to vitality coverage. David Buchan for Ca Post
Harris’ substitute, Uduak-Joe Ntuk, continued evaluating purposes, approving 83 well-stimulation permits in 2020 while denying 57. Even after Newsom announced plans to ban fracking, Ntuk’s company authorized another 12 permits in 2021.
That modified in July 2021, when CalGEM started categorically denying purposes rather than evaluating each on its deserves.
Ntuk departed in 2023 and alleged that the Newsom administration had pressured him out. In his whistleblower lawsuit, he said he would have authorized most of the fracking purposes but for path originating with the governor’s workplace.
He claimed the administration had pressured him out for resisting the governor’s order on fracking and other state rules limiting oil restoration. His lawsuit was dismissed, and he has appealed.
Chevron and Aera Energy filed swimsuit in Kern County Superior Court in March 2022, difficult CalGEM’s rejection of their well-stimulation purposes.
According to Chevron and Aera Energy’s swimsuit, the company had stopped making the legally mandated assessment of particular person purposes, instead relying on an illegal blanket safety. This was imposed with out the public rulemaking course of demanded by the state’s Administrative Procedure Act.
Karen Burdick pumps fuel at a Hele fuel station, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Mengshin Lin for CA Post
For two years, the administration denied the existence of any such prohibition. Its legal professionals asserted that allegations of a ban were “hyperbole and speculation.”
An extraordinary admission adopted. In October 2024, CalGEM admitted that it had imposed a shadow ban to keep away from the legally required rulemaking course of.
Judge Barmann discovered that the explanations given to candidates weren’t the precise foundation for rejecting their permits.
As grounds for denying particular person purposes, the administration had invoked local weather change and public well being. At the same time, the resolution was to deny all purposes, regardless of their deserves.
As Barmann concluded, the allow denials were “arbitrary and unsupported” because they rested on a climate-change rationale that wasn’t the precise foundation for the ban.
The administration’s subsequent try to legalize its prohibition proved little more defensible. In 2024, CalGEM formally banned properly stimulation, claiming the measure was crucial to scale back greenhouse-gas emissions.
Oil fracking takes place in Kern County, Calif. KGET
The company, however, had a downside: Its own 2015 environmental-impact report had already examined the penalties of a California fracking ban.
For Newsom, its conclusions would show inconvenient. A statewide moratorium would scale back oil manufacturing in California, the company decided, but it wouldn’t eradicate Californians’ want for petroleum in the first place.
Instead, the state would want to purchase more oil from overseas producers and out-of-state suppliers — and many of these imported oil came from international locations or states that much less stringent environmental controls.
One situation modeled by the report recommended that roughly 57 million barrels would have to be changed every 12 months. Much of that oil would have to be transported by tankers or rail, including further prices and environmental impacts to these related with extraction elsewhere.
This was a huge downside for the governor’s workplace.
Unlike an oil-industry examine that Newsom’s regulators could dismiss, this was the state authorities’s own environmental evaluation.
For Newsom, its conclusions would show inconvenient. A statewide moratorium would scale back oil manufacturing in California, the company decided, but it wouldn’t eradicate Californians’ want for petroleum in the first place.
As Judge Barmann put it, CalGEM’s dedication that a categorical ban was moderately crucial to scale back greenhouse gases “is not supported by substantial evidence and lacks a rational connection to that purpose.” He therefore vacated the regulation.
The timing could scarcely be worse for Newsom. Toward the finish of September, as gasoline costs skyrocketed, Newsom quickly suspended California’s summer-blend fuel requirement, permitting the cheaper winter mix to enter the market early. His administration touted the resolution as reduction — a welcome reprieve from President Trump’s gasoline-price disaster.
The governor who spent most of his tenure limiting California’s oil {industry} was immediately discovering that stress-free state gasoline rules might really assist shoppers.
Despite that, Newsom likes to champion California as a mannequin for the world’s vitality future.
Judge Barmann has supplied an instructive account of how that mannequin operates in actuality. First, one decides the coverage, then one invents the justification. Finally, one must deny everything — that is, until the proof becomes not possible to ignore.
Will Swaim is CEO of the California Policy Center and cohost of National Review’s Radio Free California podcast. A model of this column initially appeared in National Review.