California

California Progressives Want 'Big Oil' To Fix an Insurance Crisis Created by the State's Price Controls

Instead of confronting the problems with the state's heavily regulated insurance market, lawmakers are looking for a scapegoat.

Steven Greenhut | 4.17.2026 10:40 AM

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The Orange County Register Editorial Board once interviewed state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) about his bill to decriminalize the use of some psychedelics. We questioned the obvious inconsistency between his anti-prohibition stance on mushrooms and his prohibitionist stance on vaping and flavored-tobacco products. He reminded us that he's a San Francisco progressive and not a libertarian. Fair point.

I recall that encounter as I mulled Wiener's Senate Bill 982, which mainly encourages the state attorney general to sue oil companies "for climate-attributable damage to recover costs and losses suffered by the California FAIR Plan." The Fair Access to Insurance Requirement Plan is the state-created, insurance-industry-funded, barebones insurer of last resort. It has been teetering on the fiscal brink since property insurers began exiting the state or reducing their underwriting, thus overloading the plan with customers.

This legislation wants Big Oil to pay for an insurance crisis caused by the state's price controls. This is non-serious lawmaking—a transparent virtue-signal rather than an effort at problem-solving. Wiener is a thoughtful........

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