Newsmax75%
Blame Anti-Fossil Fuel Crusade, Not War in Iran for Gas Prices 84%
By Larry Bell0%
4/22/2026, 1:12:37 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Politically Right Leaning Bias, Framing Effect, and Hasty Generalization, with Confirmation Bias as the most egregious example at 42.7% saturation with 382 hits. Analysis detected 1,559 faulty-reasoning hits from 895 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 75.1% and a BS Rank of 84% (3,667 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 83.20% of the article peer group.
Actions by the United States, directed at Iran, have resulted in the temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the Mideast.
The Strait is a chokepoint controlling about 20% of global oil.
The result appears to be, comparatively speaking, a very brief spike in gas prices in exchange for permanently curtailing a radical regime's ability to weaponize vital international shipping channels, or develop nuclear weapons to advance its "Death to America, the Great Satan!"
commitment.
Nevertheless, former Vice President Kamala Harris would like you to believe that a recent surge in gas prices to over $4.00 (a level not seen since the Biden administration while she was in office when they topped $5) are to be blamed on President Trump and his "war of choice" on Iran.
Recall that Biden raided the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to reduce price pain ahead of 2022 midterm elections . . . oil subsequently replaced by the Trump administration last year.
Appearing on a video while standing in front of a sign showing fuel rates at a Charlotte, North Carolina gas station, she states, "We've got a president who is paying more attention to what he thinks is in his best political interests and personal interests, as opposed to what is in the best interest of working people in America."
The former U.S. vice president added, "It's 15 more dollars every time you fill up a tank of gas."
Fellow Californian and potential competing 2028 presidential candidate, Gov.
Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., is pursuing the same blame-Trump-for-the-war narrative for gasoline price hikes while at the same time opposing offshore drilling and pipelines that would reduce his state's reliance on foreign oil and lower those costs.
Newsom and other Golden State officials have blocked reopening of a Sable Offshore Corp. oil and gas project in federal waters off its coast along with a restored pipeline that carries crude to offshore distribution networks, which hasn't operated since a 2015 spill.
After Energy Secretary Chris Wright invoked the Defense Production Act requiring Sable to reopen operations to address supply disruption risks to some 50 military installations in western states, Gov.
Newsom branded the order a "political attempt to point the finger at California to divide and distract the American people from his wartime failures."
Sable reports it has about 540,000 barrels of processed crude oil in storage and plans to begin selling 50,000 barrels a day of oil this month.
California's anti-fossil policies, including its cap-and-tax program, low-carbon fuel standard drilling limitations, and a lack of interstate pipelines, are indeed putting both economic and national security at greater risks.
While U.S. crude production has increased by about 50% over the last decade, California's output has fallen by half.
Rather than produce or use abundant U.S. oil, the state imports about 60% of its crude from overseas, about a third of which comes from the Mideast, with Iran war-disrupted shipping costs contributing about 15 cents per gallon more cost in California than nationally.
California's gasoline prices have spiked to $5.52 a gallon versus an average of $3.72 a gallon nationally.
This scenario has been influenced by about 15% of the state's refined fuels also being imported, much of which again depends on rising costs of Mideast crude.
National record California gas prices aren't a recent phenomenon.
The state has lost roughly half its refining capacity since the 1980s and a quarter since 2019, with no thanks to costly regulations which have made operating and maintaining the facilities uneconomic, causing supply shortfalls and consumer price hikes.
Valero plans to shut down its Bay Area refinery next month at a time when demand for gasoline in Northern California will exceed production by 135,000 barrels a day – equal to about 36% of regional demand.
Editors at The Wall Street Journal have noted the Valero shutdown is a particular cause for national security alarm because a single refinery outage in northern California could create a "fuel emergency in which Coast Guard readiness and Air Force Pacific operations are called into question."
Travis Air Force Base relies on jet fuel from Chevron's refinery, and the Coast Guard Island in San Francisco's Bay area houses Pacific Area Command, the headquarters directing all Coast Guard operations across the Pacific basin.
No, the war in Iran will not have any lasting negative influence on U.S. gasoline consumers.
Unlike our European allies, the U.S. doesn't depend on the Mideast for oil, whereas America's fossil dominance has substantially weakened abilities of governments in Iran and Russia to wage war against them.
As for current gasoline prices, Americans paid more than $3.50 a gallon between 2011 and 2014 amid market disruptions caused by Arab Spring protests during the Obama administration, a period when U.S. oil production was less than half of today's.
Regarding U.S. energy, a more economically impactful war is being waged by the left's climate agenda which for decades has enriched and emboldened a hostile regime threatening to weaponize their oil resources while attacking ours.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program.
His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022).
Read more Larry Bell Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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100%flagged-word coverageKamala Harris
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