California’s Climate Overreach
By Edward Ring -- May 6, 2026
“The Affordable Insurance and Recovery Act (SB 982) would impose liability on fossil fuel companies for ‘climate-attributable damages,’ expected to be assessed in billions of dollars. It would empower California’s attorney general to sue the state’s oil companies without even needing to prove fault, negligence, or specific causation by an individual company.”
California is strangling its own energy base—then blaming oil companies for the predictable fallout of shortages, wildfires, and policies built on ideology instead of economics.
Even if the most dire climate scenarios are accurate, and humanity must transition away from fossil fuel, it can’t happen overnight. The rational approach is to first develop alternative sources of energy without precipitously destroying the industries that reliably produce oil and natural gas. Once alternatives are available at a competitive price and in sufficient quantities, demand naturally migrates to the alternatives. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry, recognizing that their core business is to provide energy, actually stays healthy by also investing in the transition.
None of that is happening in California. The approach the state’s politicians have chosen is irrational and predatory. For more than twenty years, they have legislated and litigated the state’s oil and gas companies down to a fraction of their former size, making up most of the resulting energy shortage not with alternative energy, but with imports.
https://www.masterresource.org/california-energy-policy/california-climate-overreach/
