'Lying and gouging': Newsom unveils plan to cap oil refiners' profits

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

51% : Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday unveiled his plan to punish oil companies for reaping massive profits in California while drivers emptied their wallets at gas stations in recent months.
47% : But Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at UC Berkeley, has identified a bedeviling gap in the cost of California's gasoline compared to the national price, which is not accounted for by the state's higher fees and environmental regulations.
41% : Oil industry and consumer advocates are already waging a war of words over whether the state's oil refiners are "price gouging" drivers or are actually suffering under California's transition to renewable energies and whether a profit cap will save drivers money or make gas supply shortages increasingly common.
41% : Experts backing the oil industry say high profits are necessary to sustain an industry that saw its margins collapse during the COVID-19 pandemic.
37% : All sides agree that environmental fees, taxes, isolated fuel markets and special fuel blends are at least partly to blame for California's highest-in-the-nation gasoline costs.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.