Taft, Calif.
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14 min learn
Each 5 years, this city constructed on oil throws a celebration like no different.
It’s referred to as Oildorado, and, over the course of 10 days, it celebrates the oil and fuel that move from the pumps that pockmark the hills and plains on this nook of Southern California. Organizers take into account it an homage to the pioneers of the previous and to the women and men who work within the business right now.
Oildorado options oil-field staff competing for prizes for pipe welding and crane working. Bike riders roar round a mud racetrack, vying to win the Black Gold Shoot Out. A sheriff’s posse, sporting cowboy hats and black waistcoats, cruises the streets in an open-sided truck with a jail cell.
In the course of the competition’s Grand Parade, the sheriff’s posse wages a mock gun battle with outlaws. “Cowl your children’ ears,” they warn households.
However not everyone seems to be feeling so festive. On a shaded nook, Travis Longley scans the parade by wraparound shades. He grew up in Taft and spent six years engaged on oil rigs, making $20 an hour, till he was laid off final yr.
Since then, he’s utilized for greater than 30 jobs within the business. A few of his buddies have moved to North Dakota or Texas to seek out jobs. “It’s onerous to seek out work out right here within the oil discipline,” he says.
College students march down the road throughout the Oildorado Grand Parade in Taft, California, Oct. 18, 2025.
Taft, with a inhabitants of lower than 9,000, has additionally not had a lot to rejoice, regardless of Oildorado’s staging. Dozens of brick-fronted shops are boarded up, and there’s just one drugstore left. Shrinking funding in oil and pure fuel has meant fewer jobs for residents who used to complete highschool after which stroll into an oil-field job.
However there was some hope just lately. “We’re combating to convey it again in order that our children can keep right here,” says Mr. Longley’s older brother Chris, standing subsequent to him.
Taft has highly effective allies on this combat. Above all, it has President Donald Trump, a agency believer in fossil fuels as a supply of American power. On his first day in workplace in January, he declared a nationwide vitality emergency. In Could, he informed a joint session of Congress, “We’ve got extra liquid gold underneath our toes than any nation on Earth and by far.”
And he needs the USA to prioritize getting it. “It’s referred to as drill, child, drill,” the president mentioned.
On the identical time, Mr. Trump slashed federal assist for renewable vitality, which many specialists say is important to decreasing the heat-trapping greenhouse gases produced by oil consumption.
It’s a tough pivot from President Joe Biden’s green-energy agenda, even tougher than many anticipated. It places the U.S., already the world’s largest oil and fuel producer, on a path divergent from different main economies – together with China’s, which is quickly electrifying at dwelling and is searching for to dominate green-tech markets.
In oil nation, President Trump is hailed as a savior. One of many vehicles within the Oildorado parade hoists a “Make Oil Nice Once more” banner. One other signal, on a truck carrying magnificence contestants wearing black-and-white clothes and referred to as the “Maids of Petroleum,” reads: “This float is roofed in 100% petroleum based mostly merchandise.”
California has made its personal pivot underneath Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and a foil to Mr. Trump.
In September, Mr. Newsom, a local weather hawk who had beforehand urged California to “transfer past oil,” signed a Democratic-written invoice to permit extra oil and fuel drilling in Kern County, the place Taft sits. “He did a 180-degree flip in brief order,” says Dave Noerr, the mayor of Taft.
A view of a refinery in Bakersfield, California. The state at present has 9 main oil refineries, however two are scheduled to shut within the subsequent six months.
Behind this about-face is a cussed actuality: At the same time as tech-first California embraces electrical automobiles, photo voltaic panels, and different inexperienced options, it could actually’t kick its oil behavior. For each electrical or hybrid automotive driving its freeways, there are 10 that run on fuel or diesel.
Nationwide, that ratio is roughly 1 in 20. All these automobiles imply oil consumption isn’t taking place.
All over the world, an identical dynamic is taking part in out. Most new electrical energy comes from renewable sources reminiscent of wind and photo voltaic. However current vitality techniques, together with for transportation, nonetheless run on fossil fuels – and voters are extra targeted on vitality prices than on carbon emissions.
The worldwide adoption of renewable vitality is “going very quick,” says Atul Arya, a former BP government who’s the chief vitality strategist at S&P World Commodity Insights. “However the emissions will not be taking place. We’re on this twin actuality.” (Emissions within the U.S. have trended downward, nevertheless, since peaking in 2004.)
Democrats reminiscent of Mr. Newsom, anticipated to run for president in 2028, nonetheless insist {that a} swift transition to renewable vitality is important to sluggish international warming. However in addition they discuss affordability, which in California means tackling excessive fuel and electrical energy costs.
Mr. Trump, nevertheless, rejects your entire premise of decarbonization. His administration is betting that fossil fuels aren’t useless. That they’re not even previous. And, as an vitality superpower, that the U.S. can leverage commerce with different international locations whereas powering its personal economic system, together with with electricity-guzzling AI knowledge facilities.
For the Trump administration, hydrocarbons are nonetheless king.
Kern County: The vitality capital of California
5 miles from Taft, a concrete marker by the highway marks the location of the Lakeview Gusher. In 1910, Union Oil struck oil right here, sending up an enormous geyser that destroyed the drilling rig. Ponds had been dug to gather the roughly 9 million barrels of oil that flowed unabated for 544 days.
The gusher was the largest-ever oil discovery in California – and the biggest spill. Greater than half of the oil wasn’t recovered.
By then, California was already a number one producer. Farther south, in Los Angeles, oil pumps proliferated on suburban tracts as speculators chased new finds. In 1923, about 1 in 4 barrels of oil produced on this planet got here from California, and by 1930, the inhabitants of Los Angeles had greater than doubled to 1.2 million.
Pumpjacks fill the panorama on the Kern River oil discipline in Bakersfield. The primary properly on this space of the San Joaquin Valley was dug in 1899.
Because the birthplace of American automotive tradition and suburban sprawl, California would additionally give rise to the fashionable environmental motion within the Seventies. Mr. Newsom, who was sworn in as governor in 2019, has made this legacy his personal.
He has banned fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, of oil wells. In 2020, California grew to become the primary state to mandate a phaseout by 2035 of gross sales of recent gas-powered automobiles. In Could, nevertheless, Congress voted to dam its implementation.
Mr. Newsom’s aggressive drive to decarbonize California’s economic system and regulate its fossil-fuel firms has made him few buddies within the state’s oil patch. “He did a rattling good job of destroying the oil and fuel business and the vitality market in California. He did an unbelievable job,” deadpans Chad Hathaway, a third-generation oil producer in Bakersfield, the seat of Kern County.
A lot of the vitality produced in California, from oil and fuel to photo voltaic and wind, originates in Kern County. “We’re the vitality capital of California,” says Vincent Fong, a Republican from Bakersfield whose Home seat was beforehand held by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “There isn’t a vitality objective that may be met in California with out us.”
California refines about 1.6 million barrels of oil a day into gasoline and jet gas, an quantity that has fallen in current many years. (The U.S. consumes round 20 million barrels a day.) California continues to be the nation’s largest producer of jet gas, the truth is, and about 35% of the state’s electrical energy comes from pure fuel.
As a frontier of technological innovation, California straddles the long run and the previous, including green-energy sources whereas nonetheless counting on older, dirtier fuels to maintain its outsize economic system.
This matches the sample of vitality transitions, from the burning of wooden to coal after which to nuclear vitality, says Sarah Elkind, an professor emeritus of historical past at San Diego State College. “We’ve by no means changed one [form of] vitality with one other. What we did was add extra vitality to the combination,” she says.
Even now, Los Angeles County has tons of of oil wells. “The factor that California lets us do in eager about vitality is we will take a look at the impression of oil extraction and manufacturing. It’s proper there. It’s not hidden,” she says.
Approving new drilling permits
Mr. Hathaway pulls up in his white pickup and makes use of a shovel to uproot a tumbleweed from the grime beside a black pumpjack, considered one of two he operates on this web site in Kern County.
The pumpjack surfaces oil and fuel from 3,800 toes underground. It’s considered one of tons of in and round Bakersfield. Bigger in land space than New Jersey, however with solely one-tenth of the inhabitants, at 900,000, Kern County has 1000’s of comparable rigs, also referred to as “nodding donkeys.”
Chad Hathaway, a third-generation oil producer in Bakersfield, stands close to considered one of his wells in Kern County.
Mr. Hathaway grew up within the enterprise. His father and grandfather labored in California’s oil fields, and he left faculty to do the identical, earlier than organising his personal firm in 2006 with a $5,000 mortgage from his mom, a schoolteacher. “That is 100% organically grown,” he says of his enterprise.
At the moment, he has 27 staff who function 200 wells in Kern County, which produce round 500 barrels of oil and 700 million cubic toes of pure fuel every day. He has mineral rights on different websites, however California’s environmental laws have prevented him from drilling new wells.
All states set guidelines on how shut oil rigs could be to houses and companies. California’s are the strictest: no nearer than 3,200 toes. On the wall in Mr. Hathaway’s workplace are black-and-white aerial maps of websites with light-blue circles drawn to delineate prohibited areas often known as setbacks. “All that half that’s within the circle is off-limits. You possibly can’t drill in it,” he says.
In 2024, California authorized solely 47 new drilling permits in Kern County. Different websites in rural areas, the place the setback requirement may not apply, nonetheless want permits. However these have been held up for years by environmental litigation and, since 2019, by Governor Newsom’s opposition to grease and fuel.
Much less drilling means much less work for contractors and fewer motive for oil firms to take a position right here. Final yr, Chevron, which started as Pacific Coast Oil in San Francisco in 1879, moved its headquarters from the Bay Space to Houston.
“You may get a drilling allow in two days for Texas,” says Shannon Grove, a state senator from Kern County. “You don’t bought to fret about carbon emissions; you don’t bought to fret about setbacks; you don’t bought to fret about all these necessities that we’ve.”
Ms. Grove, a Republican, has spent years making an attempt to steer the Democrats who management California’s Legislature to ease the regulatory burden on oil firms. Her pleas had been ignored till earlier this yr when two of California’s 9 largest oil refineries introduced closures.
Republican state Sen. Shannon Grove rides a big crane throughout the Oildorado Grand Parade, in Taft, California, Oct. 18, 2025.
When Michael Mische, a enterprise professor on the College of Southern California, ran the numbers, he estimated that the discount in refining capability may push gasoline costs, already the nation’s highest, from roughly $4 a gallon to $7 to $8 a gallon by the top of 2026. He additionally famous California’s rising dependency on international imports attributable to declining in-state output.
“We’re sending about $60 million a day to international international locations,” he says. “We’ve bought numerous oil. The quantity of oil within the LA basin alone is astronomical.”
His self-published report added to the political strain on Mr. Newsom, who then labored with Democrats to cross a bundle of vitality payments in September. One invoice permits Kern County to drill as much as 2,000 new wells a yr over the following decade. That received’t convey again the refineries, however it may entice new investments to the realm.
“It’s a lifeline,” says Mr. Hathaway. Nonetheless, it would take time to organize wells and to exchange the contractors who packed up and left throughout a decade of decline. “We are able to’t simply flip a faucet on.”
“We nonetheless want oil.”
In California’s oil patch, speak of an vitality transition as inexorable progress towards local weather salvation is unwelcome. “We want to say ‘evolution,’” says Lorelei Oviatt, who just lately retired as Kern County’s director of planning and pure assets.
That evolution is properly underway: Kern County provides nearly all of California’s photo voltaic and wind energy and is creating carbon seize and storage, in addition to low-carbon metal and different green-tech industries. “We embraced [renewables] due to the roles and the revenues, not the politics of local weather change,” says Ms. Oviatt.
One catch is that the financial advantages don’t match what oil gives: Photo voltaic farms are exempt from native property taxes not less than by 2026 and, like wind generators, don’t require a lot labor after development. Oil and fuel amenities pay property taxes and assist 1000’s of middle-class jobs. The business additionally has a philanthropic presence, funding scholarships and sport facilities, for instance. Ms. Oviatt nonetheless sees renewables as a necessary arrow in Kern’s quiver, however she needs California to acknowledge that its demand for fossil fuels hasn’t abated. “We nonetheless want oil,” she says.
In vitality coverage circles, this is named an “all the above” strategy. Beneath the Biden administration, this was framed because the pragmatic path to sort out local weather change.
A freight practice with oil tanker automobiles sits on the tracks on close to Bakersfield, California, Oct. 19, 2025.
Then got here the second Trump administration. As he did in 2017, Mr. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Settlement on local weather motion. However his administration has gone a lot additional this time in placing a thumb on the size for oil, fuel, and coal, together with nuclear energy.
Mr. Trump has opened federal lands and waters for oil drilling, suspended offshore wind farms, and canceled contracts for onshore wind and photo voltaic tasks. Federal subsidies for renewable vitality have largely ended, slowing the speed of its growth. In consequence, development in photo voltaic, wind, and battery storage is anticipated to be 23% much less in 2030.
“Every thing will go extra slowly. We’ve moved the curve out 5 years,” says David Goldwyn, a former State Division official for worldwide vitality affairs.
Then there’s transportation, the biggest single supply of U.S. carbon emissions. For many years, California has had a federal waiver to set strict requirements for tailpipe emissions. The Trump administration has rescinded that waiver and ended fines for automakers that fail to satisfy fuel-efficiency requirements. U.S. producers have responded by scaling again electric-vehicle manufacturing.
However doubtlessly essentially the most far-reaching coverage is the administration’s try to preempt any federal curbs on greenhouse gases. Since 2009, the Environmental Safety Company has regulated emissions from energy crops, automobiles, and different sources as a result of it decided that local weather change endangers human well being.
Beneath Mr. Trump, the EPA has proposed a rescission of this landmark discovering, which gives the authorized foundation for federal local weather coverage.
An awesome majority of scientists within the U.S. and different international locations say that emissions of heat-trapping gases are warming the planet and are contributing to disasters – such because the Pacific Palisades fireplace within the Los Angeles space in January, the most expensive wildfire in U.S. historical past. Final yr was the warmest ever recorded.
In September, Mr. Trump informed the United Nations Basic Meeting in New York that local weather change was “the best con job ever perpetuated on the world.” He cited dire predictions by U.N. officers within the Nineteen Eighties. “They had been made by silly those that have value their international locations fortunes,” he mentioned.
Some allies of Mr. Trump concede that emissions from fossil fuels are warming the planet. However they argue that nations nonetheless want to make use of these fuels, that are confirmed and ample, to supply vitality for his or her folks and to develop their economies, significantly within the World South. Round 3 billion folks in creating economies every use much less electrical energy a yr on common than an ordinary American fridge.
After all, a world powered by fossil fuels performs to the strengths of the U.S., the world’s largest producer and exporter.
In placing commerce offers, the Trump administration has used this power as leverage. It has required buying and selling companions reminiscent of Japan and the European Union to purchase U.S. oil and fuel in return for preferential tariffs – a part of a diplomatic effort to advertise these fuels over inexperienced options.
Most U.S. vitality is generated in
Republican-run states, reminiscent of Texas and North Dakota. Voters in purple states usually spend extra of their revenue on fuel than folks from blue states. This shapes their politics, Kevin E book, an vitality analyst, informed a current podcast hosted by Columbia College’s Middle on World Power Coverage.
“You have got primarily folks driving longer distances in greater automobiles on smaller wallets,” he mentioned. “They assume otherwise about vitality.”
Oil-field staff showcase their abilities
In Taft, shows of oil equipment are in all places: drill bits, hammers, pipes, and cable instruments. Essentially the most spectacular is the Taft Oilworker Monument, a 40-foot bronze sculpture of an oil derrick with a life-size laborer standing guard. On the base of the sculpture, which was accomplished in 2010, are engraved bricks and plaques with the names of oil firms and of their workforce.
One brick belongs to Diane Boylston, who retired from her final job in 2020. It reads: “Making Power for America Since 1980.” She didn’t have area to listing the completely different firms she labored for.
Ms. Boylston isn’t against environmental laws. She has photo voltaic panels on her roof. However she thinks Democrats in Los Angeles who reflexively oppose fossil fuels are hypocrites. “They don’t notice that all the things they use has some sort of petroleum in it,” she says.
It’s not simply the gasoline in our automobiles. Petrochemical crops convert hydrocarbons into supplies that go right into a welter of client items – from plastics, clothes, and wonder merchandise to digital units and detergents. A lot is downstream of the oil business that an all-EV fleet would nonetheless rely on it.
A employee participates within the oil-field abilities competitors throughout the Oildorado festivities in Taft, California. Oildorado, which takes place each 5 years, is a celebration of the business’s native historical past.
Maybe surprisingly, Mr. Trump’s name for America to “Drill, child, drill” has not led to a surge in output. The primary motive is provide and demand, the business’s lodestar. Whereas the administration has taken credit score for decreasing pump costs, which is politically in style, low oil costs are a disincentive to drill new wells in Taft and different oil cities.
U.S. firms additionally face larger prices from tariffs on metal and aluminum, says Mr. Goldwyn, the previous vitality official who served within the Obama administration. Mr. Trump “has raised the price and lowered the value,” he says.
The rollout of low-emissions applied sciences received’t finish as a result of the U.S. takes a special path. Even when adaptation slows right here, international funding in renewables and associated applied sciences remains to be forecast to outpace fossil fuels, says Mr. Goldwyn, whose shoppers embrace green-energy companies. “The pattern is irreversible,” he says.
After the parade, Oildorado’s festivities transfer to a fenced-off grime lot the place oil-field staff showcase their abilities. As a crowd watches underneath a broiling solar, welders carrying face shields minimize and weld pipes alongside a row of pickup vehicles. A choose inspects the pipes and notes their occasions.
In the back of the lot, a crane mounted on a truck holds a barrel full of sand. The problem is to steer the barrel by an impediment course of site visitors posts topped with tennis balls. Six crane operators, all males, wait within the shade forged by a backhoe to take their flip.
Tyler Weeks steps as much as the crane. He’s been within the business since 2007 and works for a neighborhood contractor. He deftly steers the barrel previous the posts with out toppling one, however crushes a cone that divides the lanes. After he brings the barrel to a cease and returns to the shade, his fellow crane operators rib him in regards to the cone.
“You crushed it,” considered one of them puns. Mr. Weeks smiles, realizing he’s aced the competition. “I’m taking that cone dwelling.”
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Like Mr. Longley, the laid-off oil employee, Mr. Weeks has seen buddies give up the oil fields and discover jobs elsewhere, however he’s staying in Taft and is hopeful that manufacturing will choose up.
“We are able to produce extra oil – in the event that they allow us to,” he says.