As Gov. Gavin Newsom wages a high-profile campaign to prevent sudden spikes in gasoline prices, California air regulators are quietly pushing through a policy change of their own that could raise pump prices by almost a half-dollar a gallon or more.

Newsom recently called a special legislative session to consider controversial new controls on state oil refineries, and the California Air Resources Board — the state agency tasked with regulating planet-warming emissions — soon will consider stricter limits on the carbon intensity of fuels.

In September of last year, CARB estimated that the change could lift gasoline prices 47 cents a gallon, or $6.4 billion a year.

Other analysts put the price even higher — 65 cents a gallon, or $8.8 million a year.

Now, as CARB nears a November vote on its low carbon fuel standard, or LCFS, the agency is backing away from its price hike forecast. Recently, an air board official told legislators that the 47-cents-a-gallon estimate was just a “snapshot” based on a forecasting model that “can never capture real world conditions.” However, the agency has refused to offer a revised estimate to the public.

Legislators from both parties are now voicing frustration over what they say is CARB’s troubling lack of transparency.

Some legislators are questioning whether the air board has become too powerful and requires more oversight from elected officials.

“For me, this special session has been about ensuring that gas prices are going down,” said Assemblymember Corey Jackson (D-Perris). “And certainly, if CARB is creating regulations that will increase gas prices, we’re going to have to take a look at that and see if we have to rein in their authority.”

What concerns him most, Jackson said, is the board’s resistance to acknowledging the consumer costs of its forthcoming policies. “The increased quality of our air may be worth higher prices,” he said, but he doesn’t understand how keeping forecasts under wraps encourages public debate over government policy.

Assemblymember Joe Patterson (R-Rocklin) shares Jackson’s concern. “Maybe the cost is worth it because we’ll have cleaner air,” he said. “But how do you make informed decisions if you don’t want to know about all the possible outcomes?”

He also questioned the timing of the special session. “It just feels like the governor is more concerned about sticking it to the oil companies than he is about the actual costs of gasoline.”

Assemblymember Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) was traveling and unavailable for an interview, but emailed the following: “While the Legislature is currently working to address petroleum price spikes through the public process, it is unfortunate CARB is unwilling to provide an estimate of the monetary impacts amendments to the LCFS will have. This process is intended to be public and collaborative, but the Legislature will struggle to make significant positive impacts to fuel prices if CARB is unwilling to address the role their regulations play in determining prices.”

The air board’s November vote centers on amendments to the LCFS, a carbon market program that took effect in 2011. The program penalizes refineries that make high carbon fuel, such as diesel and gasoline, and benefits makers of lower carbon fuels such as renewable diesel.

The amendents would impose far stricter limits on the carbon intensity of fuels, leading to far higher costs for refineries to buy credits to comply with the law. Extra costs are passed through to consumers at the pump. But the air board won’t will talk about how much that might be.

CARB’s chief, Steven Cliff, told The Times that no new numbers will be forthcoming because “what we are not equipped to do is analyze what the effect would be on retail gasoline prices.” Instead, “we look at all the economic impacts” including economic growth, job creation and public health.

On that basis, Cliff said, the amendments are a net positive for Californians.

Asked whether estimating fuel costs and releasing the figures might help inform public policy, Cliff said: “We put out the analysis that is mandated by law.”

CARB critics believe fuel price transparency is required so lawmakers can weigh climate policy trade-offs and ultimately answer to their constituents.

It’s not only legislators who are concerned about CARB’s approach, however.

Danny Cullenward is a carbon markets expert and vice chair of California’s Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee. He’s the analyst that used data also available to the air board to come up with his estimate of per-gallon costs up to 65 cents in the near term and possibly much higher in the long term for policies under the air board’s consideration.

Cullenward said CARB needs to release more information, and that the air board in November will be making an “opaque regulatory decision that will take place three days after the election,” when media attention will be elsewhere.

On Monday, Cullenward released a paper written for the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania on the fuel standards issue. “Rather than discuss these implications openly, the regulator has distanced itself from its own initial assessment of costs,” he wrote.

Cullenward is considered a champion of carbon reduction, but sometimes takes flak when he questions the efficacy of some carbon market programs. The air board’s fuel standards policies, he believes, favor lower-carbon biofuels over far cleaner electrification of transportation.

He’s not surprised that the Legislature is suddenly paying more attention to CARB. Although the fuels program “is regularly reviewed and updated every few years, it has not been guided by specific legislation since implementation — despite its evolution into a multi-billion-dollar market with substantial environmental and economic consequences,” he wrote in his paper.

That could change.

“I think you’re going to start seeing a greater discussion about our willingness to give our authority to CARB’s executives, and even rein in the powers we’ve given away in the past,” said Jackson, the assembly member.

LOS ANGELES — Republican former baseball star Steve Garvey is making a late-hour push for Latino support in his longshot U.S. Senate campaign against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff for the California seat long held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The low-key contest has been largely overlooked nationally in a year when control of the Senate will turn on a handful of competitive races, including in Ohio, Michigan and Nevada. Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats in California by a staggering margin – nearly 2-to-1 statewide – and a GOP candidate hasn’t won a Senate race in the state since 1988.

Voting is already underway — mail-in ballots went out to each of the state’s 22 million voters no later than Oct. 7.

Schiff, 64, has recently displayed outward confidence, traveling to Pennsylvania and Ohio to campaign on behalf of other Democratic Senate candidates. With California considered a secure seat for Democrats, he has plans to campaign for Democratic candidates in battleground states in the next month and also has raised money for national Democrats.

If the race has lacked drama, it nonetheless represents a turning point in California politics, which was long dominated by Feinstein, former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, former Gov. Jerry Brown and a handful of other veteran Democratic politicians. The matchup also means that California won’t have a woman in the Senate for the first time in more than three decades.

Garvey announced last week he planned to spend $5 million on advertising in the run-up to Election Day aimed at the Latino community, including a TV spot in Spanish, the campaign’s first statewide ad. It hits on familiar themes for Garvey, including inflation and gas prices, crime and the state’s notoriously high taxes.

It’s not clear how much good it will do to change the trajectory of a lopsided race in which Schiff has held an edge in polling and campaign finances. The last time a Republican candidate won a statewide race in California was in 2006, nearly two decades ago, underscoring the Democratic advantage.

The race has loosely followed the contours of the national fight for Congress.

Schiff has warned of GOP threats to abortion rights, after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 stripped away women’s constitutional protections for abortion, and the potential return of former President Donald Trump to the White House. Schiff, a longtime Trump foil, calls the former president a threat to democracy.

Garvey, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres and was National League MVP in 1974, has hammered Schiff and Democratic leadership for soaring grocery and housing prices, a long-running homeless crisis and other qualify of life concerns in a state that has seen its once-booming population drop in recent years.

Trump figured prominently at a prickly and probably little-watched debate this week, in which Schiff depicted Garvey as a Trump acolyte cloaked in a baseball uniform, while Garvey suggested Schiff was obsessed with Washington partisan politics while ignoring pressing California problems back home.

One Schiff ad recalls the Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and the Trump impeachment. “When our democracy was in danger, he stood up,” a narrator says.

Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney said Democrats are likely to benefit from an elevated turnout in a presidential election year, with Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California U.S. senator and attorney general, leading the party’s ticket. He noted that state Republicans have struggled for years to enlist viable candidates for marquee offices — voters could choose from only two Democrats for U.S. Senate in the 2016 and 2018 general elections. Garvey, while known to an older generation of baseball fans, would probably be a cypher to many younger voters.

Given California’s political tilt, Garvey’s chances of pulling off a surprise on Election Day “are about equal to my chances of becoming Pope,” Pitney said.

Feinstein, a centrist Democrat who was elected to the Senate in 1992, died at 90 in September 2023. Laphonza Butler, a Democratic insider and former labor leader, was appointed to the seat following Feinstein’s death and decided not to seek a full term this year.

A majority of Californian renters do not support a proposal to allow local authorities to enforce rent control, according to a new poll.

Ahead of the November election, Californians will have a few propositions on the ballot. One of the proposals, Proposition 33, calls for giving local authorities more power to enact rent control ordinances.

A 3,000-person Berkeley IGS Poll discovered that 37 percent of voters would support the initiative, 36 percent said they were against the proposition, and 27 percent were undecided.

However, there wasn’t necessarily stronger support for the law when it came to renters specifically.

While 48 percent of renters said they would vote for the proposal, 26 percent said they were against the idea, and another 26 percent were undecided.

Alan Chang, a title and escrow expert, said this lack of support could be due to the long-term negative impact of rent control on the renter population.

Chang called Proposition 33 a “short-term effort to appear like they are doing something about housing affordability.”

“Ultimately, rent ends up being high when there is more demand than supply,” Chang told Newsweek. “If you improve the supply of rental housing units, the rent goes down. Adding restrictions to the amount of rent a landlord can charge as well as how much they can raise rents will generally dissuade them to build more as they could not predict the costs down the road.”

Many voters are weary of the promise that rent controls would automatically eliminate concerns over higher living costs, said Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin.

“While rental controls in other locations have stabilized the average yearly increases in rent, they’ve had largely negative implications outside of those limits,” Beene told Newsweek.

“Establishing controls not only limits the development of new rental properties because potential landlords now question the economic promise they would normally bring, but they also lead to less mobility, as renters enjoying the controlled pricing are less likely to leave that property and, in the process, open it up to new renters. There’s a lot more to consider here than just saving a few dollars on your rent,” he said.

Some tenants may also be homeowners who rent out a property they can afford while renting a place in a pricier location.

Other renters might generally be against the government intervening in how the market functions, said Kevin Thompson, a finance expert and the founder and CEO of 9i Capital Group.

“I believe many have seen these policies enacted in other states and heard stories of landlords neglecting properties, which can lead to higher crime rates,” Thompson told Newsweek. “The history of rent control is mixed. While it’s helped prevent skyrocketing rents in places like New York, it has also left behind dilapidated buildings.”

The median rent in California is $2,850, according to Zillow, and the state continues to boast some of the most competitive housing markets.