Gasoline averages $3.895 per gallon in California today, compared to $3.48 nationally and about $3.24 in Texas.
But, in nine months, gasoline in California will be subject to California’s Global Warming Solutions Act tax (Schwarzenegger signed AB 32 into law in 2006) which will boost the price another $0.12 per gallon. Assuming the price of gasoline remains stable in the meantime, that will take the price to $4.015 per gallon, an increase of 3.1 percent.
Gasoline in California is already taxed by the state at about $0.49 per gallon, among the highest in the nation. A $0.12 per gallon increase would pencil out to a 25 percent increase in state taxes on gasoline, taking total state taxes to about $0.61 per gallon, making California’s gas taxes once again the highest in the nation.
The average American family spent about 4 percent of household income on gasoline in 2012. In California, this would be about $2,456 per year. An increase at the pumps of 3.1 percent would come out to another $76.14 per family in service of a policy that won’t advance its stated goal: cooling the Earth. (One year’s economic growth in China generates more total CO2 emissions than are emitted by the entire California economy every year—presuming, of course, that man-generated CO2 is the primary driver of the Earth’s climate, that the Earth is actually warming, that warming is a bad thing, and that there aren’t more effective ways to spend limited resources than to increase the cost of energy.)
Hawaii has the nation’s highest gas prices, California is second. This new tax would make California #1.