GUEST COMMENTARY: Regional climate policies are fueling a Northwest crisis

GUEST COMMENTARY: Regional climate policies are fueling a Northwest crisis

Published 9:00 am Sunday, September 6, 2026

The irony was hard to miss at a quiet gas station in Eastern Oregon, just a stone’s throw from the Washington state line. A driver filled up their tank, hopped back into their vehicle, and headed back toward Washington. Plastered on their bumper was a sticker reading: “Bring back $2 gas.”

That scene is playing out with increasing frequency along the state line. It is a quiet, daily migration of drivers chasing a few cents of relief — and it is a direct consequence of a well-intentioned but economically punishing regulatory experiment.

The hard truth is that $2 gas is dead in the Pacific Northwest, and it wasn’t killed by global crude oil markets. It was killed by state policy.

The math at the pump

For Washingtonians, the price of a gallon of fuel is heavily weighted before it even leaves the refinery. Between a 56.5 cent state gas tax, federal taxes, the Clean Fuels Program, and the state’s flagship Climate Commitment Act (.43 cents), consumers are paying well over $1 in government-mandated fees per gallon before factoring in the actual cost of oil, refining, transportation, or retail margins.

When Washington voters chose not to repeal the CCA, they locked in this high-cost baseline. Across the river, Oregon is fast constructing its own regulatory fortress. Between low carbon fuel fees — which add roughly $0.20 to $0.21 per gallon depending on where the fuel is delivered — and the newly restarted Climate Protection Program, Oregon is piling on its own compliance costs.

Under the CPP, fuel suppliers face an aggressively declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions. If a supplier exceeds that cap, they must purchase compliance credits estimated at $130 per metric ton. With a single metric ton of carbon dioxide generated by burning roughly 98 gallons of diesel, a supplier who goes over their cap by a mere 1,000 metric tons faces a potential $130,000 penalty. Each metric ton is equivalent to cents per gallon, based on the cost of the credit.

Naturally, those costs will be passed down to the consumer. But the greater danger isn’t just higher prices, it’s the looming threat of scarcity.

The scarcity bottleneck

What happens when a fuel supplier physically cannot obtain enough credits to cover their sales? Their only viable business decision to avoid financial ruin will be to stop selling fuel in Oregon entirely.

This is not a hypothetical scenario; it is a mathematical inevitability of rigid caps. During a severe Pacific Northwest winter storm or an extended power outage, when regional demand for heating oil, diesel and gasoline spikes, a hard cap on fuel sales directly threatens emergency services, food transport, and home heating. A rigid carbon cap cannot adapt to a natural disaster.

The irony is that the fuel logistics and retail industry is not the enemy of the environment. The people who deliver and sell fuel in the Northwest are locals who camp, boat, golf, and fish in the very wilderness these policies aim to protect. The industry has proactively embraced the transition, investing millions to bring 5% biodiesel, 20% biodiesel, and renewable diesel to the market to lower emissions.

But transition takes time. You cannot overhaul a physical, highly volatile energy supply chain overnight. Upgrading underground storage tanks, testing fuel performance in freezing temperatures, changing station signage, and securing reliable supply lines require years of capital planning. Pushing compliance timelines faster than the physical infrastructure can adapt does not speed up the transition — it simply breaks the system and punishes the consumer.

The engine of human progress

There is a reason fossil fuels have driven global development for over a century. As energy historian Daniel Yergin famously detailed, hydrocarbons lifted humanity out of subsistence poverty. They gave us the ability to work and study past sunset, transport goods rapidly over vast distances, dramatically increase food production and power life-saving emergency services.

While wind, solar and biofuels are vital, growing components of a diversifying energy grid, they are partners to fossil fuels, not immediate replacements. If we wish to maintain our current standard of living, reliable, high-density liquid fuels must remain the backbone of our transportation and logistics networks for the foreseeable future.

It is time for policymakers in Olympia and Salem to bridge the gap between aggressive climate ideology and physical reality. We all want clean skies, but starving the energy supply chain of time and raising costs on working-class families is a reckless way to get there. Until policy matches reality, those Washington license plates will continue to line up at Oregon pumps, chasing the ghost of $2 gas.

Mitch Byrnes is the president of Byrnes Oil Co., which has operated out of Pendleton since 1963 and delivers petroleum products throughout Northeastern Oregon and Southeastern Washington.