California’s governor tried to outlaw oil production by executive fiat. A state judge has exposed the deception.
California’s governor tried to outlaw oil production by executive fiat. A state judge has exposed the deception.
C alifornia Governor Gavin Newsom has spent years making it harder to produce oil in his state, and Californians are picking up the tab in the form of America’s highest gasoline prices. Now a Kern County judge 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 October 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. The ruling is a legal embarrassment for Newsom and an indictment of California’s increasingly arbitrary approach to energy policy.
The story begins in 2019, when Newsom told disappointed 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. In 2021, after legislation to ban fracking failed in a Democrat-controlled Senate committee, Newsom’s office quietly directed the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, to stop approving well-stimulation permits.
But getting his regulators to carry out his order was another matter. In 2019, Newsom fired state oil and gas supervisor Ken Harris amid complaints that his agency had approved too many fracking permits. Harris’s replacement, Uduak-Joe Ntuk, continued evaluating applications, approving 83 well-stimulation permits in 2020 while denying 57. Even after Newsom announced plans to ban fracking, Ntuk’s agency approved another twelve permits in 2021.
That changed in July 2021, when CalGEM began categorically denying applications rather than evaluating each on its merits. In letters to oil producers, Ntuk cited climate change, public health, and environmental protection to justify rejecting their permit applications.
Ntuk departed in 2023 and subsequently alleged that the Newsom administration had forced him out. In his whistleblower lawsuit, he said he would have approved most of the fracking applications but for direction originating with the governor’s office. He claimed the administration had forced him out for resisting the governor’s order on fracking and other state regulations limiting oil recovery. His lawsuit was dismissed, and he has appealed.
Chevron and Aera Energy filed suit in Kern County Superior Court in March 2022, challenging CalGEM’s rejection of their well-stimulation applications. They argued that the agency had abandoned the legally required review of individual applications in favor of an unlawful blanket prohibition, imposed without the public rulemaking process required by California’s Administrative Procedure Act.
For the next two years, the administration denied that any such prohibition existed. Its lawyers assured the court that allegations of a ban were “hyperbole and speculation.” Then came an extraordinary admission. In October 2024, CalGEM admitted that it had imposed a shadow ban to avoid the legally required rulemaking process.
Judge Barmann found that the explanations given to applicants weren’t the actual basis for rejecting their permits. The administration had invoked climate change and public health as grounds for denying individual applications, while the operative decision was to deny every application, regardless of its merits.
As Barmann concluded, the permit denials were “arbitrary and unsupported” because they rested on a climate-change rationale that wasn’t the actual basis for the ban.
The administration’s subsequent attempt to legalize its prohibition proved little more defensible. In 2024, CalGEM formally banned well stimulation, claiming the measure was necessary to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. But the agency had a problem: Its own 2015 environmental-impact report, prepared under legislation signed by Governor Jerry Brown, had already examined what would happen if California prohibited fracking.
Its conclusions were inconvenient for Newsom. A statewide prohibition would reduce California oil production, the agency found, but it wouldn’t eliminate Californians’ need for petroleum. Instead, the state would have to purchase more oil from foreign producers and other suppliers outside California, some operating under less stringent environmental regulations.
The analysis projected that banning well stimulation could substantially reduce California oil production. One modeled scenario put the replacement requirement at roughly 57 million barrels annually, much of which would have to be transported by oceangoing tankers or rail, adding transportation impacts to those associated with extraction elsewhere.
The question was what economists call “import substitution”: Would prohibiting California production actually reduce worldwide environmental harm, or merely transfer production and its accompanying emissions beyond the state’s borders?
CalGEM’s earlier analysis included a finding that substituting imported oil for California production would increase net global greenhouse-gas emissions. That finding presented a serious problem for an administration now claiming that a categorical fracking ban was necessary to protect the climate.
This wasn’t an oil-industry study that Newsom’s regulators could simply dismiss. It was the state’s own environmental analysis, prepared under California’s infamously demanding environmental-review law and certified by the very agency now claiming that an outright ban would protect the climate.
Judge Barmann considered that contradiction central to his ruling. CalGEM had relied on greenhouse-gas reduction to justify its 2024 ban without adequately addressing its earlier finding that the same policy could increase worldwide emissions. The agency offered no satisfactory explanation of how reducing domestic production would avoid the emissions associated with importing replacement oil.
As Barmann put it, CalGEM’s determination that a categorical ban was reasonably necessary to reduce greenhouse gases “is not supported by substantial evidence and lacks a rational connection to that purpose.” He therefore vacated the regulation.
Barmann didn’t declare that the government could never change its environmental conclusions or adopt stricter controls on oil production. He found that it couldn’t justify a sweeping prohibition by invoking climate science while leaving contrary evidence in its own administrative record unanswered.
Barmann’s ruling doesn’t automatically authorize drilling. Previously rejected applications must receive genuine individual review, and the state can appeal. The judge also declined to decide whether the executive branch possesses the power to ban fracking categorically. That question of governmental authority remains unsettled.
Newsom may find other ways to obstruct production. Regulators can delay applications, environmental organizations can sue, and legislators can attempt another statutory prohibition. None of this would surprise California’s oil producers, who have spent years contending with a government determined to put them out of business.
The timing could scarcely be worse for Newsom, who has spent much of this year blaming President Trump and the war in Iran for soaring gasoline prices. In September, Newsom demanded to know why the Trump administration had failed to protect Americans from the “predictable consequences of the war.”
The Iran war has indeed disrupted global petroleum markets and raised prices across the country. But California entered that crisis with vulnerabilities of its own making. For years, Newsom has worked to suppress domestic production while increasing the state’s reliance on the same international oil markets now rattled by war.
What makes this especially remarkable is that his own regulators had warned about the consequences of restricting production. CalGEM’s 2015 analysis projected that banning fracking would increase California’s dependence on imported petroleum. Newsom nevertheless pressed ahead, even after acknowledging that he lacked the authority to impose a ban himself.
In late September, as gasoline prices climbed, Newsom temporarily suspended California’s summer-blend gasoline requirement, allowing the less expensive winter blend to enter the market early. His administration touted the decision as relief from Trump’s gasoline-price crisis. The governor who spent years restricting California’s oil industry was suddenly discovering that relaxing state fuel regulations might help consumers.
To be sure, California’s unusually high gasoline prices have multiple causes, including taxes, refinery constraints and the state’s specialized fuel requirements. And overturning a fracking ban won’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But reducing domestic oil production doesn’t make California less vulnerable to international supply disruptions. It makes the state more dependent on producers and transportation routes over which its government has no control.
Trump bears responsibility for the consequences of his decisions in Iran. Newsom ought to be held to the same standard for his decisions in California.
Newsom likes to describe California as a model for the world’s energy future. Judge Barmann has provided an instructive account of how that model actually operates: First decide the policy, then invent the justification, and deny everything until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.