(The Center Square)—Automakers in California and many other states may soon have to restrict sales of gasoline and non-plug-in hybrid vehicles this year if California’s zero-emission vehicle requirement is not overturned, industry leaders say.
California’s Advanced Clean Cars II rule, which phases out the sale of gas-powered cars in 2035, requires that 35% of model year 2026 vehicles be either zero emission — which largely means battery-electric, though hydrogen vehicles exist — or plug-in-hybrids that have both gas engines and battery-powered electric motors.
The ACC II mandate applies to Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington for model year 2026, and Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. for model year 2027.
The California New Car Dealers Association’s report on car sales in the year’s first quarter earlier comments by Toyota that the mandate is “impossible” to meet: ZEV market share fell from 22% in 2024, to 20.8% in the first quarter of 2025.
“If CARB doesn’t pause or adjust the ACCII mandate, we are concerned automakers will restrict shipments of traditional hybrids and affordable gas-powered models to avoid massive fines,” said CNCDA President Brian Maas to The Center Square. “This is occurring in California’s heavy-duty truck marketplace, which has been devastated by similar CARB rules that took effect in January 2024.”
In California, which has the nation’s highest gas prices and second-highest energy prices, and where the state asks EV owners to refrain from charging on hot days to limit grid stress, residents have been flocking to standard hybrid vehicles. Standard hybrid market share 37% in the past year, from 13.1% in the first quarter of 2024 to 17.9% of the market in the first quarter of 2025.
However, standard hybrids don’t count toward the state mandate, so with the 2026 model year vehicles starting to hit showrooms this spring, combined EV and plug-in hybrid sales would need to increase 68% more or less overnight to meet the state’s mandate.
Automakers only earn credits toward their mandate by selling qualifying vehicles, or buying credits from automakers with excess credits, like Tesla. But if EV sales continue to falter and there aren’t enough credits, automakers may have to pay the state $20,000 per vehicle sold for each credit they are short — or start restricting the sale of the regular gas cars and in-demand standard hybrids.
This means automakers may be forced to only offer pricier plug-in-hybrid and all-electric models, which Maas says will push more California buyers into other states, or to the used market, which would push prices for used cars even higher.
“We expect these inventory shortages of traditional hybrid and gas-powered models to become more acute over time,” continued Mass. “We are also concerned that shortages of new vehicles will increase used vehicle prices and will push Californians to purchase new vehicles from neighboring states.”
This wouldn’t be the first time automakers have restricted sales in California to meet its emissions requirements.
In 2023, Stellantis, which owns Jeep, made gasoline-powered non-hybrids available only as special order vehicles in California and other states that have adopted California Air Resources Board Standards. However, Jeep continued to maintain inventory of plug-in hybrids.
The plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler starts at $50,695, while the regular gas-powered Jeep starts at $31,995.
The Biden administration approved the ACC II “gas car ban” in December. Because California’s air regulations pre-date the EPA, the state is allowed to pass its own air regulations more stringent than the national standard, so long as the EPA grants a waiver for each rule.
Congressional Republicans are seeking to overturn the EPA’s granting of the waiver by claiming the power of congressional review, which allows Congress to overturn regulatory actions by executive agencies with a majority vote.
While the Senate parliamentarian quashed one effort, motions to overturn the waivers in the House could make their way back up to the Senate and to the president’s desk.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
