Every five years, this town built on oil throws a party like no other.
It’s called Oildorado, and, over the course of 10 days, it celebrates the oil and gas that flow from the pumps that pockmark the hills and plains in this corner of Southern California. Organizers consider it an homage to the pioneers of the past and to the men and women who work in the industry today.
Oildorado features oil-field workers competing for prizes for pipe welding and crane operating. Motorcycle riders roar around a dirt 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.
Why We Wrote This
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is making headlines this week promoting clean energy at COP30, the United Nations’ climate gathering. But even the Golden State is reconsidering its oil reserves – and policies – as President Donald Trump doubles down on fossil fuels.
During the festival’s Grand Parade, the sheriff’s posse wages a mock gun battle with outlaws. “Cover your kids’ ears,” they warn families.
But not everyone is feeling so festive. On a shaded corner, Travis Longley scans the parade through wraparound shades. He grew up in Taft and spent six years working on oil rigs, making $20 an hour, until he was laid off last year.
Since then, he’s applied for more than 30 jobs in the industry. Some of his friends have moved to North Dakota or Texas to find jobs. “It’s hard to find work out here in the oil field,” he says.
Taft, with a population of less than 9,000, has also not had much to celebrate, despite Oildorado’s staging. Dozens of brick-fronted stores are boarded up, and there’s only one drugstore left. Shrinking investment in oil and natural gas has meant fewer jobs for residents who used to finish high school and then walk into an oil-field job.
But there has been some hope recently. “We’re fighting to bring it back so that our kids can stay here,” says Mr. Longley’s older brother Chris, standing next to him.
Taft has powerful allies in this fight. Above all, it has President Donald Trump, a firm believer in fossil fuels as a source of American strength. On his first day in office in January, he declared a national energy emergency. In May, he told a joint session of Congress, “We have more liquid gold under our feet than any nation on Earth and by far.”
And he wants the United States to prioritize getting it. “It’s called drill, baby, drill,” the president said.
At the same time, Mr. Trump slashed federal support for renewable energy, which many experts say is essential to reducing the heat-trapping greenhouse gases produced by oil consumption.
It’s a hard pivot from President Joe Biden’s green-energy agenda, even harder than many expected. It puts the U.S., already the world’s largest oil and gas producer, on a path divergent from other major economies – including China’s, which is rapidly electrifying at home and is seeking to dominate green-tech markets.
In oil country, President Trump is hailed as a savior. One of the trucks in the Oildorado parade hoists a “Make Oil Great Again” banner. Another sign, on a truck carrying beauty contestants dressed in black-and-white dresses and called the “Maids of Petroleum,” reads: “This float is covered in 100% petroleum based products.”
California has made its own pivot under Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and a foil to Mr. Trump.
In September, Mr. Newsom, a climate hawk who had previously urged California to “move beyond oil,” signed a Democratic-written bill to allow more oil and gas drilling in Kern County, where Taft sits. “He did a 180-degree turn in short order,” says Dave Noerr, the mayor of Taft.
Behind this about-face is a stubborn reality: Even as tech-first California embraces electric cars, solar panels, and other green alternatives, it can’t kick its oil habit. For every electric or hybrid car driving its freeways, there are 10 that run on gas or diesel.
Nationwide, that ratio is roughly 1 in 20. All those cars mean oil consumption isn’t going down.
Around the world, a similar dynamic is playing out. Most new electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind and solar. But existing energy systems, including for transportation, still run on fossil fuels – and voters are more focused on energy costs than on carbon emissions.
The global adoption of renewable energy is “going very fast,” says Atul Arya, a former BP executive who is the chief energy strategist at S&P Global Commodity Insights. “But the emissions are not going down. We are in this dual reality.” (Emissions in the U.S. have trended downward, however, since peaking in 2004.)
Democrats such as Mr. Newsom, expected to run for president in 2028, still insist that a swift transition to renewable energy is essential to slow global warming. But they also talk about affordability, which in California means tackling high gas and electricity prices.
Mr. Trump, however, rejects the entire premise of decarbonization. His administration is betting that fossil fuels aren’t dead. That they’re not even past. And, as an energy superpower, that the U.S. can leverage trade with other countries while powering its own economy, including with electricity-guzzling AI data centers.
For the Trump administration, hydrocarbons are still king.
Kern County: The energy capital of California
Five miles from Taft, a concrete marker by the road marks the site of the Lakeview Gusher. In 1910, Union Oil struck oil here, sending up a giant geyser that destroyed the drilling rig. Ponds were dug to collect 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 largest spill. More than half of the oil wasn’t recovered.
By then, California was already a leading 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 in the world came from California, and by 1930, the population of Los Angeles had more than doubled to 1.2 million.
As the birthplace of American car culture and suburban sprawl, California would also give rise to the modern environmental movement in the 1970s. Mr. Newsom, who was sworn in as governor in 2019, has made this legacy his own.
He has banned fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, of oil wells. In 2020, California became the first state to mandate a phaseout by 2035 of sales of new gas-powered vehicles. In May, however, Congress voted to block its implementation.
Mr. Newsom’s aggressive drive to decarbonize California’s economy and regulate its fossil-fuel companies has made him few friends in the state’s oil patch. “He did a damn good job of destroying the oil and gas industry and the energy market in California. He did an incredible job,” deadpans Chad Hathaway, a third-generation oil producer in Bakersfield, the seat of Kern County.
Most of the energy produced in California, from oil and gas to solar and wind, originates in Kern County. “We’re the energy capital of California,” says Vincent Fong, a Republican from Bakersfield whose House seat was previously held by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “There is no energy goal that can be met in California without us.”
California refines about 1.6 million barrels of oil a day into gasoline and jet fuel, an amount that has fallen in recent decades. (The U.S. consumes around 20 million barrels a day.) California continues to be the nation’s largest producer of jet fuel, in fact, and about 35% of the state’s electricity comes from natural gas.
As a frontier of technological innovation, California straddles the future and the past, adding green-energy sources while still relying on older, dirtier fuels to sustain its outsize economy.
This fits the pattern of energy transitions, from the burning of wood to coal and then to nuclear energy, says Sarah Elkind, an professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. “We’ve never replaced one [form of] energy with another. What we did was add more energy to the mix,” she says.
Even now, Los Angeles County has hundreds of oil wells. “The thing that California lets us do in thinking about energy is we can look at the impact of oil extraction and production. It’s right there. It’s not hidden,” she says.
Approving new drilling permits
Mr. Hathaway pulls up in his white pickup and uses a shovel to uproot a tumbleweed from the dirt beside a black pumpjack, one of two he operates on this site in Kern County.
The pumpjack surfaces oil and gas from 3,800 feet underground. It’s one of hundreds in and around Bakersfield. Larger in land area than New Jersey, but with only one-tenth of the population, at 900,000, Kern County has thousands of similar rigs, also known as “nodding donkeys.”
Mr. Hathaway grew up in the business. His father and grandfather worked in California’s oil fields, and he left school to do the same, before setting up his own company in 2006 with a $5,000 loan from his mother, a schoolteacher. “This is 100% organically grown,” he says of his business.
Today, he has 27 employees who operate 200 wells in Kern County, which produce around 500 barrels of oil and 700 million cubic feet of natural gas each day. He has mineral rights on other sites, but California’s environmental regulations have prevented him from drilling new wells.
All states set rules on how close oil rigs can be to homes and businesses. California’s are the strictest: no closer than 3,200 feet. On the wall in Mr. Hathaway’s office are black-and-white aerial maps of sites with light-blue circles drawn to delineate prohibited areas known as setbacks. “All that part that’s in the circle is off-limits. You can’t drill in it,” he says.
In 2024, California approved only 47 new drilling permits in Kern County. Other sites in rural areas, where the setback requirement might not apply, still need permits. But these have been held up for years by environmental litigation and, since 2019, by Governor Newsom’s opposition to oil and gas.
Less drilling means less work for contractors and less reason for oil companies to invest here. Last year, Chevron, which began as Pacific Coast Oil in San Francisco in 1879, moved its headquarters from the Bay Area to Houston.
“You can get a drilling permit in two days for Texas,” says Shannon Grove, a state senator from Kern County. “You don’t got to worry about carbon emissions; you don’t got to worry about setbacks; you don’t got to worry about all these requirements that we have.”
Ms. Grove, a Republican, has spent years trying to persuade the Democrats who control California’s Legislature to ease the regulatory burden on oil companies. Her pleas were ignored until earlier this year when two of California’s nine largest oil refineries announced closures.
When Michael Mische, a business professor at the University of Southern California, ran the numbers, he estimated that the reduction in refining capacity could push gasoline prices, already the nation’s highest, from roughly $4 a gallon to $7 to $8 a gallon by the end of 2026. He also noted California’s growing dependency on foreign imports due to declining in-state output.
“We’re sending about $60 million a day to foreign countries,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of oil. The amount of oil in the LA basin alone is astronomical.”
His self-published report added to the political pressure on Mr. Newsom, who then worked with Democrats to pass a package of energy bills in September. One bill allows Kern County to drill up to 2,000 new wells a year over the next decade. That won’t bring back the refineries, but it could attract new investments to the area.
“It’s a lifeline,” says Mr. Hathaway. Still, it will take time to prepare wells and to replace the contractors who packed up and left during a decade of decline. “We can’t just turn a tap on.”
“We still need oil.”
In California’s oil patch, talk of an energy transition as inexorable progress toward climate salvation is unwelcome. “We prefer to say ‘evolution,’” says Lorelei Oviatt, who recently retired as Kern County’s director of planning and natural resources.
That evolution is well underway: Kern County supplies the majority of California’s solar and wind power and is developing carbon capture and storage, as well as low-carbon steel and other green-tech industries. “We embraced [renewables] because of the jobs and the revenues, not the politics of climate change,” says Ms. Oviatt.
One catch is that the economic benefits don’t match what oil offers: Solar farms are exempt from local property taxes at least through 2026 and, like wind turbines, don’t require much labor after construction. Oil and gas facilities pay property taxes and support thousands of middle-class jobs. The industry also has a philanthropic presence, funding scholarships and sport centers, for example. Ms. Oviatt still sees renewables as an essential arrow in Kern’s quiver, but she wants California to recognize that its demand for fossil fuels hasn’t abated. “We still need oil,” she says.
In energy policy circles, this is known as an “all of the above” approach. Under the Biden administration, this was framed as the pragmatic path to tackle climate change.
Then came the second Trump administration. As he did in 2017, Mr. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate action. But his administration has gone much further this time in putting a thumb on the scale for oil, gas, and coal, along with nuclear power.
Mr. Trump has opened federal lands and waters for oil drilling, suspended offshore wind farms, and canceled contracts for onshore wind and solar projects. Federal subsidies for renewable energy have largely ended, slowing the rate of its expansion. As a result, growth in solar, wind, and battery storage is expected to be 23% less in 2030.
“Everything will go more slowly. We’ve moved the curve out five years,” says David Goldwyn, a former State Department official for international energy affairs.
Then there’s transportation, the largest single source of U.S. carbon emissions. For decades, California has had a federal waiver to set strict standards for tailpipe emissions. The Trump administration has rescinded that waiver and ended fines for automakers that fail to meet fuel-efficiency standards. U.S. manufacturers have responded by scaling back electric-vehicle production.
But potentially the most far-reaching policy is the administration’s attempt to preempt any federal curbs on greenhouse gases. Since 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency has regulated emissions from power plants, vehicles, and other sources because it determined that climate change endangers human health.
Under Mr. Trump, the EPA has proposed a rescission of this landmark finding, which provides the legal basis for federal climate policy.
An overwhelming majority of scientists in the U.S. and other countries say that emissions of heat-trapping gases are warming the planet and are contributing to disasters – such as the Pacific Palisades fire in the Los Angeles area in January, the costliest wildfire in U.S. history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded.
In September, Mr. Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in New York that climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetuated on the world.” He cited dire predictions by U.N. officials in the 1980s. “They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes,” he said.
Some allies of Mr. Trump concede that emissions from fossil fuels are warming the planet. But they argue that nations still need to use these fuels, which are proven and abundant, to provide energy for their people and to grow their economies, particularly in the Global South. Around 3 billion people in developing economies each use less electricity a year on average than a standard American refrigerator.
Of course, a world powered by fossil fuels plays to the strengths of the U.S., the world’s largest producer and exporter.
In striking trade deals, the Trump administration has used this strength as leverage. It has required trading partners such as Japan and the European Union to buy U.S. oil and gas in return for preferential tariffs – part of a diplomatic effort to promote these fuels over green alternatives.
Most U.S. energy is generated in
Republican-run states, such as Texas and North Dakota. Voters in red states typically spend more of their income on gas than people from blue states. This shapes their politics, Kevin Book, an energy analyst, told a recent podcast hosted by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
“You have essentially people driving longer distances in bigger cars on smaller wallets,” he said. “They think differently about energy.”
Oil-field workers show off their skills
In Taft, displays of oil machinery are everywhere: drill bits, hammers, pipes, and cable tools. The most impressive is the Taft Oilworker Monument, a 40-foot bronze sculpture of an oil derrick with a life-size laborer standing guard. At the base of the sculpture, which was completed in 2010, are engraved bricks and plaques with the names of oil companies and of their workforce.
One brick belongs to Diane Boylston, who retired from her last job in 2020. It reads: “Making Energy for America Since 1980.” She didn’t have space to list the different companies she worked for.
Ms. Boylston isn’t opposed to environmental regulations. She has solar panels on her roof. But she thinks Democrats in Los Angeles who reflexively oppose fossil fuels are hypocrites. “They don’t realize that everything they use has some kind of petroleum in it,” she says.
It’s not just the gasoline in our cars. Petrochemical plants convert hydrocarbons into materials that go into a welter of consumer goods – from plastics, clothing, and beauty products to digital devices and detergents. So much is downstream of the oil industry that an all-EV fleet would still depend on it.
Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. Trump’s call for America to “Drill, baby, drill” has not led to a surge in output. The main reason is supply and demand, the industry’s lodestar. While the administration has taken credit for lowering pump prices, which is politically popular, low oil prices are a disincentive to drill new wells in Taft and other oil towns.
U.S. companies also face higher costs from tariffs on steel and aluminum, says Mr. Goldwyn, the former energy official who served in the Obama administration. Mr. Trump “has raised the cost and lowered the price,” he says.
The rollout of low-emissions technologies won’t end because the U.S. takes a different path. Even if adaptation slows here, global investment in renewables and related technologies is still forecast to outpace fossil fuels, says Mr. Goldwyn, whose clients include green-energy firms. “The trend is irreversible,” he says.
After the parade, Oildorado’s festivities move to a fenced-off dirt lot where oil-field workers show off their skills. As a crowd watches under a broiling sun, welders wearing face shields cut and weld pipes alongside a row of pickup trucks. A judge inspects the pipes and notes their times.
At the back of the lot, a crane mounted on a truck holds a barrel filled with sand. The challenge is to steer the barrel through an obstacle course of traffic posts topped with tennis balls. Six crane operators, all men, wait in the shade cast by a backhoe to take their turn.
Tyler Weeks steps up to the crane. He’s been in the industry since 2007 and works for a local contractor. He deftly steers the barrel past the posts without toppling one, but crushes a cone that divides the lanes. After he brings the barrel to a stop and returns to the shade, his fellow crane operators rib him about the cone.
“You crushed it,” one of them puns. Mr. Weeks smiles, knowing he’s aced the contest. “I’m taking that cone home.”
Like Mr. Longley, the laid-off oil worker, Mr. Weeks has seen friends quit the oil fields and find jobs elsewhere, but he’s staying in Taft and is hopeful that production will pick up.
“We can produce more oil – if they let us,” he says.
