Gavin Newsom shown up by judge for secret order to ban fracking

Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent years making it harder to produce oil in his state, and Californians are picking up the tab in the form of America’s highest gasoline prices.

Now a Kern County judge has delivered a rebuke to one of his administration’s most brazen anti-energy schemes: It secretly imposed a statewide fracking ban, denied its existence for years, then invoked environmental justifications contradicted by its own earlier findings.

In an Oct. 8 tentative ruling, Superior Court Judge Bernard Barmann Jr. invalidated both the administration’s secret prohibition on fracking, imposed in 2021, and the formal regulation adopted in 2024. 

The ruling is a legal embarrassment for Newsom and an indictment of California’s increasingly arbitrary approach to energy policy.

The story begins in 2019, when Newsom told disappointed supporters that he lacked authority to impose a fracking moratorium. “You can’t do that unilaterally,” he said. “Legally, you cannot. The governor of California cannot do that.”

Apparently, he reconsidered. 

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In 2021, after legislation to ban fracking failed in a Democrat-controlled Senate committee, Newsom’s office quietly directed the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, to stop approving well-stimulation permits.

But getting his regulators to carry out his order was another matter. 

In 2019, Newsom fired state oil and gas supervisor Ken Harris amid complaints that his agency had approved too many fracking permits.

Harris’ replacement, Uduak-Joe Ntuk, continued evaluating applications, approving 83 well-stimulation permits in 2020 while denying 57. Even after Newsom announced plans to ban fracking, Ntuk’s agency approved another 12 permits in 2021.

That changed in July 2021, when CalGEM began categorically denying applications rather than evaluating each on its merits. 

Ntuk departed in 2023 and alleged that the Newsom administration had forced him out. In his whistleblower lawsuit, he said he would have approved most of the fracking applications but for direction originating with the governor’s office.

He claimed the administration had forced him out for resisting the governor’s order on fracking and other state regulations limiting oil recovery. His lawsuit was dismissed, and he has appealed.

Chevron and Aera Energy filed suit in Kern County Superior Court in March 2022, challenging CalGEM’s rejection of their well-stimulation applications. 

According to Chevron and Aera Energy’s suit, the agency had stopped making the legally mandated review of individual applications, instead relying on an unlawful blanket protection. This was imposed without the public rulemaking process demanded by the state’s Administrative Procedure Act.

For two years, the administration denied the existence of any such prohibition. Its lawyers asserted that allegations of a ban were “hyperbole and speculation.”

An extraordinary admission followed. In October 2024, CalGEM admitted that it had imposed a shadow ban to avoid the legally required rulemaking process.

Judge Barmann found that the explanations given to applicants weren’t the actual basis for rejecting their permits.

As grounds for denying individual applications, the administration had invoked climate change and public health. At the same time, the decision was to deny all applications, regardless of their merits.

As Barmann concluded, the permit denials were “arbitrary and unsupported” because they rested on a climate-change rationale that wasn’t the actual basis for the ban.

The administration’s subsequent attempt to legalize its prohibition proved little more defensible. In 2024, CalGEM formally banned well stimulation, claiming the measure was necessary to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

The agency, however, had a problem: Its own 2015 environmental-impact report had already examined the consequences of a California fracking ban.

For Newsom, its conclusions would prove inconvenient. A statewide moratorium would reduce oil production in California, the agency determined, but it wouldn’t eliminate Californians’ need for petroleum in the first place.

Instead, the state would need to buy more oil from foreign producers and out-of-state suppliers — and many of these imported oil came from countries or states that much less stringent environmental controls.

One scenario modeled by the report suggested that roughly 57 million barrels would have to be replaced every year. Much of that oil would have to be transported by tankers or rail, adding further costs and environmental impacts to those associated with extraction elsewhere.

This was a massive problem for the governor’s office.

Unlike an oil-industry study that Newsom’s regulators could dismiss, this was the state government’s own environmental analysis.

As Judge Barmann put it, CalGEM’s determination that a categorical ban was reasonably necessary to reduce greenhouse gases “is not supported by substantial evidence and lacks a rational connection to that purpose.” He therefore vacated the regulation.

The timing could scarcely be worse for Newsom. Toward the end of September, as gasoline prices skyrocketed, Newsom temporarily suspended California’s summer-blend gas requirement, allowing the cheaper winter blend to enter the market early. His administration touted the decision as relief — a welcome reprieve from President Trump’s gasoline-price crisis.

The governor who spent most of his tenure restricting California’s oil industry was suddenly discovering that relaxing state fuel regulations might actually help consumers.

Despite that, Newsom likes to champion California as a model for the world’s energy future. 

Judge Barmann has provided an instructive account of how that model operates in reality. First, one decides the policy, then one invents the justification. Finally, one must deny everything — that is, until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.

Will Swaim is CEO of the California Policy Center and cohost of National Review’s Radio Free California podcast. A version of this column originally appeared in National Review.