SAN FRANCISCO – Residents of highly populated areas in California are being urged to exercise caution around fire sources as several factors combine to dramatically increase the risk of blazes Monday – and even more so later in the week.

More than 25 million of the state’s 39 million people will be under red flag warnings or fire weather watches this week because of warm temperatures, low humidity and powerful winds, as high as 80 mph in some elevations, strong enough to qualify for a hurricane.

“Gusty easterly winds and low relative humidity will support elevated to critical fire weather over coastal portions of California today into Thursday,’’ the National Weather Service said Monday.

The offshore air currents, known as Santa Ana winds in Southern California and Diablo winds in the San Francisco Bay Area, have been blamed in the past for knocking down power lines and igniting wildfires, then quickly spreading them amid dry vegetation.

In a warning for Los Angeles and Ventura counties that applied to Sunday night and all of Monday, the NWS office in Los Angeles said wind gusts in the mountains – typically the hardest areas for firefighters to reach – could fluctuate from 55 to 80 mph.

“Stronger and more widespread Santa Ana winds Wednesday and Thursday,’’ the posting said.

San Francisco Chronicle meteorologist Anthony Edwards said this week’s offshore winds – which defy the usual pattern by blowing from inland west toward the ocean – represent the strongest such event in the state in several years.

Edwards added that winds atop the Bay Area’s highest mountains could reach 70 mph, which will likely prompt preemptive power shutoffs from utility company PG&E, and may go even higher in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The Bay Area’s red flag warning runs from 11 a.m. Tuesday until early Thursday, and it includes a warning to “have an emergency plan in case a fire starts near you.’’

WorldAtlas recently ranked the “most adorable” small towns in Northern California, a list that includes coastal charmers, wine country towns and a Gold Rush-era burg.

On Nov. 8, three days after Election Day, the California Air Resources Board, a notionally independent agency whose appointees are controlled by the Democratic Party, is set to vote on stringent new fuel standards and apply them next year. CARB estimated this year that regulations similar to the ones being voted on Friday would raise the price of gas by 47 cents a gallon in 2025. The University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy did its own analysis of CARB’s new regulations and found that a price hike of 65 cents per gallon was more likely.

The backlash against these estimates earlier in the year was so strong that CARB said it would reconsider the new standard, which it did, before rereleasing basically the same regulation. This time, instead of estimating how much the new regulations would raise prices for consumers, CARB claimed it had simply lost the ability to determine how much its regulations would affect prices.

“I don’t expect them to,” CARB Executive Officer Steven Cliff told reporters. “There will be additional impacts to costs to refiners,” but he said he doesn’t “think” those costs will be passed on to consumers. 

If only that were true.

Keep in mind that the new CARB standards are on top of new costs inflicted on refineries by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) anti-price gouging legislation, which forces refineries in the state to build new storage facilities to hold reserve gasoline in case refinery maintenance disrupts supplies.

The problem is that higher costs are prompting oil companies to shut down refineries. Phillips 66 is closing its Carson refinery, and since no sensible person would build a new oil refinery in California, it means California will have to import gasoline instead.

Most states pipe in extra gasoline whenever there is a temporary shortage. But not California. Its draconian environmental laws mean there are no gas pipelines into the state nor any pipelines connecting the northern and southern gas markets.

With gas refineries in California down to eight from 11 five years ago, imports from overseas are set to more than double from 8% of the total used to 17% next year.

California Democrats may pat themselves on the back for reducing carbon emissions by getting rid of refineries, but California drivers are not abandoning their gas-powered cars as fast as Democrats would like. There are still more than 25 million such vehicles registered in the state, 17 times the number of electric vehicles.

The oil must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately for environmentalists, the tankers shipping oil from the Middle East to California use a heavy fuel oil that emits lots of carbon. When California Democrats calculated carbon emissions cut by ridding the state of refineries, they did not add the emissions from oil tankers.

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California could scrap its oppressive refinery regulations and keep more of them open. It could also reform its permitting process and build gas pipelines into the state. But California is also just sitting on the nation’s sixth-largest oil reserves. It does not need to import oil from Saudi Arabia. It just needs to pump it out from under Bakersfield. It would cut carbon emissions from oil tankers and avoid oil tanker spills.

But such commonsense solutions would never be allowed while the state is controlled by the Democratic Party.