(DCNF)—Even as U.S. gasoline prices rise again amid ongoing Strait of Hormuz tensions, American drivers are still paying less than half what many Europeans and Asians endure at the pump. The reason is simple: America chose lower taxes and genuine energy security. Europe and California deliberately chose the opposite — and are now reaping the painful, predictable consequences.
Taxes explain most of the gap, as the Wall Street Journal detailed on April 22. European governments routinely pile on $3–$4 per gallon in excise duties, VAT and “green” levies. In Germany, prices recently hit the equivalent of $8.75 a gallon, with taxes comprising over half the total. Most U.S. states charge roughly 20 cents.
This isn’t an accident of geography or culture. Americans built a sprawling, car-dependent economy after World War II and have repeatedly rejected European-style punishment at the pump. Europeans tolerated it, and their politicians weaponized fuel taxes as an easy money grab, and to force behaviors preferred by their central planners.
The result is embedded inflation across every sector: Higher costs for trucking food, shipping goods and powering industry. Europeans don’t just pay more to fill their tanks — they pay more for everything that moves on petroleum. Their living standards suffer accordingly.
Energy security delivers America’s second big advantage. The U.S. produces more than two-thirds of its own oil and imports the rest mostly from Canada and other friendly Western Hemisphere sources. We are largely insulated from Middle East chaos.
Europe, by contrast, lectures the world about “energy transition” while remaining dangerously dependent on imports even as it sits atop known, undeveloped reserves. The same nations that demonize oil and gas refuse to produce their own, choosing instead to outsource vulnerability first to Russia, then to OPEC, and now to U.S. LNG. This is not prudent policy. It is willful self-sabotage clothed in false virtue.
Nowhere is this failure more glaring than California, which has imported Germany’s disastrous model wholesale and turned itself into America’s premier energy basket case. With an 81-cent state gas tax, 60–70 cent cap-and-trade penalty, boutique “California blend” fuel mandates, and layers of environmental rules explicitly designed to punish gasoline and driving, the Golden State routinely posts pump prices $2 above the national average.
In-state production has been strangled. Refineries are closing or idling. The state now imports gasoline from South Korea, the Bahamas, and the Middle East, exposing its residents to global shocks while preaching climate alarm orthodoxy.
Gavin Newsom and his bureaucrats want voters to believe it’s all President Donald Trump’s fault, but it isn’t. It is the entirely foreseeable outcome of using tax and regulatory warfare to force a premature energy transition. Instead of transitioning, California is de-industrializing and making its citizens poorer in the process.
The broader lesson is damning. High-tax, high-regulation, import-dependent energy policies do not deliver utopia or planetary salvation. They deliver chronic vulnerability, inflated living costs, and economic drag. Europe’s drivers pay double or triple because politicians prioritized revenue and ideology over abundance. California followed suit and became a cautionary tale for the rest of America.
But most U.S. states reap the rewards of the opposite approach: Reasonable taxation that doesn’t treat fuel as a sin, aggressive domestic production that delivers record output, and supply chains resilient enough to weather global crises without collapse. Prices rise during supply shocks, but there are no lines at the pump and no systemic shortages. That is the fruit of policy grounded in reality rather than fantasy.
America’s advantage at the pump is neither accident nor mystery: It is the direct result of rejecting the punitive European model that California eagerly embraced. Policymakers who ignore this lesson are not visionaries: They are ideologues imposing measurable harm on the people they claim to serve.
The current global turmoil should serve as a wake-up call. Punitive taxation and regulatory strangulation of conventional energy produce scarcity, insecurity and higher costs borne by working families.
America’s formula of lower taxes and energy dominance delivers affordability, resilience and genuine energy security.
Europe — and California — stand as expensive warnings of what happens when nations choose ideology over reality. Americans outside of the Golden State should reject that failing path with zero apology.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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