Gasoline prices are running at their lowest level in years, a great boost for embattled consumers with the holiday season approaching. Unfortunately, the ruling class isn’t about to let that continue. The ruling class operates on the superstition that the world is getting hotter, that this is entirely due to human activity, and that regulatory zealotry in a single state is capable of stopping it. That comes through measures such as “cap and trade,” which supposedly burden only the captains of industry, but which as Dale Kasler shows in the Sacramento Bee, really means a punishing new tax on everybody who drives.

California’s two-year-old regulatory mechanism “puts a price on carbon spewed into the atmosphere,” and “the result will be higher gasoline and diesel prices.” California Air Resources Board (CARB) boss Mary Nichols explains that “the increase is likely to be less than 10 cents a gallon,” and consumers will probably barely notice the difference.” She says “the amount is small,” and “It does get hidden in the noise, in the other changes that are constantly taking place in the pricing of gasoline.” Nichols said “gasoline is cheap relative to other things you can buy and relative to overall inflation in the economy.” This bureaucratic boilerplate deserves a translation.

The increase is going to be not small, but significant, and everybody will notice, particularly those Californians who drive to work, such as the working poor. The increase does not “get hidden.” Rather, an axis of legislators and unelected regulatory zealots chose to delay the imposition on drivers, hoping to blunt the punishment, in the style of Obamacare, also sold with lies.

Jon Costantino, a former CARB climate-change planner, told the Bee that “the cost of the carbon allowance has to get passed through. That’s the whole point. The consumer feels the impact.” So listen up all drivers, especially those making a 60-plus-mile round trip to earn minimum wage. Politicians and unelected, highly paid regulatory zealots like Mary Nichols want you to feel the pain. But the problems do not stop there.

Mary Nichols also kept on CARB staff Hien Tran, who bought his statistics PhD in a New York City diploma mill and fudged air pollution figures. Trofim Lysenko truly lives on in the Golden State.