Incredible: few places on the planet have more hydrocarbon energy resources, yet California is running out of energy as prices soar.

An average gallon of gas now costs $4.65, while the national average is $3.

In October, Phillips 66 closed its Los Angeles refinery and Valero Energy announced it would close its Benicia facility.

The energy shortage in California is so severe that California is now importing 12% of its gasoline from that famous oil nation of the Bahamas.

Well, actually the source of this “imported” gasoline is Texas. But to get from Houston to California, it is first unloaded in the Bahamas to dodge the Jones Act, a protectionist 1920 federal law that mandates any goods shipped between U.S. ports must travel on U.S.-built, owned and operated vessels. There are only 55 Jones Act-compliant oil tankers worldwide, compared with 7,000 oil tankers in the world’s fleet. Routing oil shipments through the Bahamas avoids higher shipping costs.

Matt Smith, the lead oil analyst at Kpler, says increasing imports are inevitable given the state’s refinery retirements and outages. California was the nation’s 3rd largest producer of oil until the early 1990s. That it’s now dependent on imports via this absurd route is a travesty.