As Florida Governor pledges to unleash ‘American energy dominance’ and slash gas prices to $2 by 2025, California hits out at fossil fuels industry

With most of the Democratic Party pushing for green energy and almost declaring war on fossil fuels while the Republican Party seeks to bring forth more oil and gas, the incoming presidential race in the U.S. is shaping up to be, among other things, a referendum on the future of the energy sector and America’s net-zero aspirations. This was hammered home further by the almost insurmountable gap between the latest energy policies being advocated by Florida Governor and Republican presidential contender, Ron DeSantis, and the current governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who is a member of the Democratic Party, albeit with no declared presidential aspirations for 2024.

While Newsom already made it clear that he will not be making a 2024 presidential run, as he intends to support President Joe Biden in this race, DeSantis is hoping to beat Donald Trump and other contenders to become the Republican presidential nominee in the incoming elections. On a quest to drum up more support for his candidacy and fill his campaign coffers by attracting more financial backers, DeSantis unveiled his energy plan in a speech in Midland, Texas, on Wednesday, September 20, 2023.

The destiny of those who make it to the White House seems to be intricately woven with blame for any changes in prices at the pump, which are, for the most part, beyond their control, as such changes are influenced by international twists and turns that drive oil and gas prices. However, Florida’s current governor tied his new energy pledges to the shift in oil and gas prices by vowing to bring gas prices down to $2 by 2025, thanks to a major ramp-up in production.

Even if he wins this presidential race, the ability to exert that much power over energy prices at the pump is debatable and not entirely feasible, especially when considering that the U.S. has not had gas prices at $2 since 2004. The production has more than doubled since that time, thanks to the shale boom, leading to all-time high prices in 2008, which was followed by a crash in 2014 that wreaked havoc on profit margins and hit investors hard. However, consumers did benefit from this crash.

In more recent years, the production is on the rise again but not even close to the levels seen before, as investors have learned their lesson from 2014, when oil prices dropped, as supply exceeded demand. Therefore, lessons learned from the past seem to indicate that DeSantis’ plan to cut prices at the pump by increasing U.S. production to the level needed to make it possible is doomed to fail, as investors bankrolling the rise would need to do so knowing they would not get the bang for their buck in the long run, if DeSantis and anyone else with similar ideas were to get their way and lower prices to such an extent.

These lower prices would also adversely affect U.S. production growth in the long term, as projects would no longer be economically viable, leading to potentially high job losses in the industry and negatively impacting the overall economy. Bolstering higher output requires a very important piece to fall into place, which is higher oil prices in a bid to make new greenfield projects profitable for investors.

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DeSantis’ energy plan, in essence, represents a doubling down on fossil fuels production while limiting federal regulations, slowing the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) to a crawl, and undoing Biden’s clean energy agenda by withdrawing from global agreements to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in a fight against climate change.

This means that the American energy transition journey would get very bumpy, as the energy landscape with slashed and removed regulations concerning environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards would not just be very difficult to manage for renewable and other clean energy players, but also inhospitable, as evidenced by DeSantis’ pledge to step up production of crude oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium while also replacing “climate change” with “energy dominance“ in foreign policy and national security documents, if he were to win the presidential elections.

Florida Governor’s new energy plan has not only dismissed Biden’s ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change but also threats from intensifying weather events as “fear tactics,” as he deems these to be part of “a concerted effort to ramp up the fear when it comes to things like global warming and climate change.” While accusing Biden and other Democrats of pushing forth an “ideological agenda” when it comes to their clean energy program and climate action, DeSantis claims that “human beings are safer than ever from climate disasters.”

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From DeSantis’ point of view, access to “reliable energy” enabled Florida to respond to several powerful hurricanes, otherwise, there would be “way more loss of life,” thus, he is adamant that “the more abundant and affordable our energy is, the more resilient we are gonna be in the face of these natural disasters.”

Aside from the vow to unleash “American energy dominance as a way to stop inflation and achieve $2 gas in 2025,” DeSantis’ energy plans also entail preventing “California and faceless bureaucrats from setting America’s environmental standards” along with his pledge to make sure plaintiffs will be required to pay compensation when they bring “spurious” litigation against energy projects.

California Governor’s remarks, which were delivered at the UN Climate Ambition Summit, hosted by the UN Secretary-General, on the same day when DeSantis made his speech, paint a very different picture while calling out the oil and gas industry for their role in causing the current climate crisis.

During his speech, Governor Newsom, highlighted: “This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. This climate crisis persists. It’s not complicated. It’s not complicated. It’s the burning of oil. It’s the burning of gas. It’s the burning of coal. And we need to call that out. For decades and decades, the oil industry has been playing each and every one of us in this room for fools. They’ve been buying off politicians. They’ve been denying and delaying science and fundamental information that they were privy to that they didn’t share or they manipulated. Their deceit and denial, going back decades, has created the conditions that persist here today.”

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Governor Newsom highlighted California’s climate action at the UN summit only days after throwing his support behind a lawsuit that was filled in San Francisco County Superior Court against ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute (API) for their alleged role in minimizing and giving little weight to the potential threats the development and extraction of fossil fuels pose for climate and the environment, resulting in “statewide climate change-related harms in California.”

If California’s lawsuit is successful, it is expected to create a fund for climate disaster recovery and safeguard communities. Climate leaders and activists have welcomed the lawsuit with open arms in a bid to lay all the blame for the worst consequences of climate change at Big Oil’s door, as illustrated by Richard Wiles, President of the Center for Climate Integrity, who described the lawsuit as “the most significant, decisive, and powerful climate action directed against the oil and gas industry in U.S. history.”

Furthermore, Governor Newsom’s remarks at the UN were also welcomed by many including Pacific Environment, an environmental organization, which claims that if shipping were a country, it would be the sixth largest polluter of greenhouse gasses, contributing more than 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. Basing its views on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report from March 2023, the organization urges leaders to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius/2.7 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent total climate and ecological collapse.

Pacific Environment elaborates that shipping emissions surpass heavy-duty trucks and locomotives in California when it comes to diesel particulate matter. The organization, which sees ocean-going vessels as the number one contributor of emissions at the port, underscores that California has already taken steps to address in-port pollution with harbor craft and At Berth regulations, but it needs to address what is said to be the most significant contributor to shipping’s pollution – in transit emissions.

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Teresa Bui, Policy Director, Pacific Environment, commented: “We applaud Gov. Gavin Newsom’s climate leadership to electrify everything, and we hope to see the administration call for zero-emission shipping by 2040 next. Decarbonizing the port and shipping sector is critical for the millions of citizens who breathe in shipping’s toxic air pollution. We have no time to waste. Just last week, a UN report found that the window is ‘rapidly closing’ to reach our climate goals and avoid more record heat waves, fires, droughts, and storms.

“Today, UN Secretary-General Guterres issued a dire warning that ‘humanity has opened the gates to hell.’ We are grateful to Governor Newsom for holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for its deception and damages, and we are proud of California’s leadership to move cars, trucks, and locomotives to zero emissions. Now, we need to put ports and shipping on a mandatory path to zero emissions by 2040.”

Pacific Environment believes that the world needs to tackle the shipping industry’s emissions and mandate a zero-emission transition on a timeline commensurate with the climate emergency, as global climate emissions need to peak before 2025 and be cut in half from 2019 levels by 2030. 

The Golden State is laying the groundwork to reach net-zero carbon emissions and 100% clean electricity by 2045 to achieve its climate goals. To this end, Governor Newsom took several steps to usher in a new era by accelerating – what is perceived to be – critical infrastructure projects, streamlining permitting, cutting red tape, and allowing state agencies to use new project delivery methods while ensuring appropriate environmental review and community engagement to build a clean energy future.

Earlier this year, Governor Newsom announced ‘Building the Electricity Grid of the Future: California’s Clean Energy Transition Plan,’ showing how the state will reach its climate goal while keeping costs affordable and maximizing energy supply through the transition process. This roadmap paves the way for the Golden State to leverage hundreds of new solar, wind, battery storage, and other green energy projects to achieve the 100% clean electricity goal by 2045.

To this end, California is also actively pursuing marine energy, as demonstrated by the passing of a wave and tidal energy bill, which directs the California Energy Commission to evaluate the feasibility, costs, and benefits of using such energy across the state’s 840-mile coastline. Once signed into law by Governor Newsom, this bill will become the first legislation in America focused on the study, assessment, and promotion of wave energy.

Moreover, a bipartisan group of five other states – Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Utah – have now decided to launch a climate corps in each state, partnering with California and its Climate Action Corps, which Governor Newsom created in 2020 as a part of the Golden State’s comprehensive strategy to address the climate crisis.

As the bipartisan group of five states represents more than a fifth of the United States by population, this development is seen as a major milestone in delivering climate action at the community level, boosting the total number of states in the U.S. with a Climate Corps program to ten and complimenting efforts by the Biden-Harris Administration to launch an American Climate Corps.

“We can’t go it alone in tackling the climate crisis. With these five states launching their own climate corps, we’re making climate action a reality in communities representing millions of Americans. Together, we’re mobilizing and organizing citizen climate action at a scale never seen before — and now we’ll begin to see its impact across the nation,” explained Newsom.

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Meanwhile, California is also setting the wheels into motion to bolster global efforts to curb the methane menace by launching a new pledge to cut global methane emissions with seven jurisdictions from across the globe signing on so far, including signatories from Mexico and South Africa. This pledge is aimed at subnational governments and builds on the Global Methane Hub’s Global Methane Pledge which focuses on countries.

“The climate crisis knows no borders. We’re partnering with governments around the world to tackle methane emissions, a dangerous pollutant that has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. By working together on strategies informed by science, like deploying methane detection satellites, we can help address this global threat,” underlined Governor Newsom.

California has already set a goal to reduce 40% of its methane emissions by 2030 compared to 2013. Last year, Newsom initiated new efforts to plug idle oil wells at risk of leaking methane and launch a network of satellites that would provide near real-time data on large-scale methane leaks, leaks from oil and gas infrastructure, landfills, and other sources to track upwards of 40% of global methane emissions.

According to California, tackling methane emissions has the potential to not only dampen the effects of climate change in the short term but is also believed to be the key to putting the world on a path to 1.5°C that scientists estimate would avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

America’s clean energy future is being fueled by President Biden’s economic agenda, also known as Bidenomics, which aims to attract more than $500 billion in private sector manufacturing and clean energy investments, including in the offshore wind industry with a goal of achieving 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030. During one of Offshore Energy’s previous interviews, the U.S. offshore wind sector was flagged for growth.

While oil and gas, especially LNG as a bridge fuel to a low-carbon world, still have their designated spot in the energy mix and are expected to keep it for years to come, most tend to agree that the future lies in the transition to low-carbon and green energy.

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