Fred Holmes watches with satisfaction as pumps pull oil from deep under his California farm, tapping a supply he thinks could last another century. But he knows the state’s ambitious environmental policies will put an end to the practice much sooner than that. Oil extraction “could continue for another 100 years,” he told AFP. But it won’t. “Twelve to 14 years” for his company at the rate things are changing, he says. California produces 311,000 barrels of crude oil every day, around 2.4 percent of all US production, making it the seventh-largest-producing state in the union. But it is also at the leading edge of environmentalism in the United States and is determined to shrink its dependency. In September Governor Gavin Newsom announced California was joining other states in taking legal action against oil companies, saying they knew decades ago their product was damaging the planet, but hid the truth. For the people of Taft, a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles, the move is somewhere between a stunt and an insult to a town whose historic prosperity was built on black gold. “The governor does something like this almost daily,” said Holmes. “It’s like a circus.” By 2045 the state — whose economy is bigger than that of all but four countries — plans to be carbon neutral, and to have ended drilling for fossil fuel. Already, drilling permits are hard to come by. “Our town is essentially boarded up and it’s almost a ghost town,” said Holmes. Thousands of wells dot the desert around Taft, whose proud museum to oil is watched over by a wooden drilling rig. It’s a similar story in much of rural Kern County, which produces 70 percent of California’s oil. Arguments over the damage that fossil fuels are doing to the environment — the changes in weather patterns that have left the state at the mercy of extreme climate swings — get short shrift. “I’m not worried about climate change. You know, we’ll go with the flow,” 75-year-old Mickey Stoner told AFP. “This town will die if we don’t have oil,” she says. Taft is the site of the five-yearly “Oildorado” — a 10-day celebration of the town and its drilling heritage due to be held again in October 2025. The festival celebrates what made Taft possible, and, according to Mayor David Noerr, the industry that keeps it going. “Oil is the lifeblood of this city, and of Kern County for that matter,” the one-time roustabout said. The sector “pays huge sums of taxes to the counties and the cities, it funds schools, it funds law enforcement and funds programs for veterans and youth athletics, you name it.”