Published on March 13, 2026
Before the sun clears the hills, before the pumps cast long shadows across the Midway-Sunset, before the morning commute begins and the day gets underway, Mayor Dave Noerr is already there. Most mornings, before 5 a.m., you’ll find him walking into Artz’s Liquor & Deli in Taft—a name that sounds ordinary until you understand what it really is: a gathering place, a send-off, a ritual. The counter is stacked with biscuits and gravy. The coffee is hot. And coming through the door, one by one, are the men and women about to head out to the oil fields and the agricultural rows that hold this valley together.
Noerr knows them. He knows their names, their families, their hopes. He greets them the way a mayor greets his people—not with a campaign smile, but with the genuine warmth of a man who has stood where they stand, worn what they wear, and done what they do.
This is Taft, California. Population just over 9,000. Situated at the heart of the Midway-Sunset Oil Field—the largest oil-producing field in the contiguous United States by cumulative production. For 22 years, Noerr has served on Taft’s City Council, including 12 years as mayor. Over that time, he is among one of the state’s most respected voices advocating for the oil industry, the families it supports, and California’s energy future.
Thus, if we want to talk about Kern County oil, who better to have a sit-down interview with?
From the Rig to the Dais
Noerr didn’t arrive in Taft by way of a political science degree or a family legacy in public office. He arrived in January of 1981, a young man from the construction world, following a lead from his grandfather—a Sun Oil Company man from Texas who recognized that hard work translates across industries.
“I was hired on as a roustabout—the lowest paid, bottom of the totem pole worker in the oil fields,” Noerr says. “Hot, heavy, backbreaking. I’ve done it.”
From that beginning, he worked his way through Sun Oil that became Oryx Energy, which was then purchased by Arco, and then Aera Energy—attending frontline supervisor training schools funded by those companies, earning his expertise not in a classroom but in the field. He eventually went into business with his brother-in-law, building Huddleston Crane Service into a thriving operation that would, in a moment of beautiful symmetry, be the very company contracted to assemble Taft’s magnificent Oilworker Monument.
Dave Noerr with his son D.J., lifting marble slabs for the The Kern County World War II Veterans Memorial located in Jastro Park, Bakersfield, CA | Photos Courtesy of Dave Noerr
When Noerr decided to enter local politics, his yard signs said nothing about promises or platforms.
They said: “Put Dave Noerr to work for you.” He has been the lead vote-getter in every election since 2004—and he has never spent a nickel on a real re-election campaign.
Noerr is the longest-serving council member and the longest-serving mayor in the history of the city of Taft.
That record is not an accident. It is the product of a man who shows up—at the monument, at the biscuits-and-gravy counter, at the microphone—over and over again, for the people who built this place.
Standing Beneath the Bronze
The Taft Oilworker Monument, crafted by acclaimed sculptor Benjamin Victor—a Taft local who became the youngest artist ever to have a sculpture placed in the National Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol and, in 2024, the only living artist with four sculptures in that collection—and dedicated during the city’s centennial, is not a relic tucked into a museum corner. It stands in the open air, monumental and unflinching: seven-foot bronze figures—a roustabout, a driller, a bit dresser—rendered with such precision that you can see the worn expressions on their faces, the period-correct boots, the gloves on their hands.
With funds left over after the primary installation, the city commissioned a second scene: a mother bringing lunch to her husband at the rig, their young son beside her, a damp cloth draped over the food to keep it cool on the long walk to the jobsite. The bow in her hair is exact. The details are exact. Because there were so many real moments like this.
Standing beneath that 1910 cable-tool rig replica, the importance of the oil industry to Taft and wider Kern County is unmistakable. But so is the tension surrounding its future, as regulations and shifting policies continue to threaten the jobs and livelihoods that have sustained local families for generations.
“The city of Taft was incorporated in 1910,” Noerr says, “and since 1910, we have produced oil—which is the virtual foundation for quality of life.”
He pauses, then continues with the cadence of a man who has said this and meant it for decades.
“Everything about you right now: what you’re wearing, your glasses, your makeup, the fertilizer used to create the food you already consumed today. All of it is dependent on hydrocarbons. We have provided that critical need through 21 presidents, 19 governors, two world wars, the Great Depression, the pandemic—all the way through today.”
The World the Green Narrative Ignores
To understand Noerr’s passion, you have to understand the scale of what he is arguing against—not just locally, but globally. He doesn’t traffic in sentiment. He deals in numbers.
Noerr explains that there are eight billion people on this planet. By 2050, there will be ten billion. Right now, only one billion of those people live with the kind of reliable, abundant, affordable energy that Americans take for granted. Seven billion people have not had that opportunity. And yet the prevailing political message from Sacramento—and from much of the national media—is that the world simply needs to transition to wind, solar, and batteries.
“India is going to create the largest middle class in the history of mankind,” Noerr says.
“They’ve told us in no uncertain terms: we’re going to use whatever we can afford. And that’s coal. China right now is consuming more coal than they ever have in their history, in spite of the fact that they’re investing heavily in renewables. They know you’ve got to have base load power. You’ve got to have industrial power.”
On the subject of electric vehicles—perhaps the most emotionally charged symbol of the green transition—Noerr is equally concrete. He points to a fact that very few people in the EV debate ever mention: by bulk, 52 percent of a Tesla is made from hydrocarbons. The CEO of Tesla knows this.
“Elon Musk is far too smart a businessman to pretend otherwise,” Noerr says.
And when those Teslas roll off the production line and get shipped across the country, they are not being hauled by battery-powered semis. They are being pulled by diesel-powered Freightliners and Kenworths and Peterbilts.
Photo Credit: A trailer transporting Mercedes and Tesla electric cars, photographed by BogdanV
What about the heavy battery-powered pickup trucks and SUVs that California was counting on to anchor the EV adoption curve?
“People aren’t buying them,” Noerr says.
“If you look at the ten fastest depreciating vehicles right now, 90 percent of them are large, heavy, battery-powered vehicles. People simply can’t afford it. We don’t have the infrastructure. It can’t happen at the pace Sacramento promised.”
And then there is the fuel that actually runs California’s economy—not gasoline, which Noerr dismisses with a wave as “for soccer moms and Uber drivers”—but middle distillates. Diesel for the trucks and trains and vessels that move every product in the state. Jet fuel.
“We burn more jet fuel every single day in the state of California than any other state in the union,” he says. “We are totally dependent on it.”
What Sacramento Did
When California Governor Gavin Newsom took office in 2018, something shifted in the relationship between California’s state government and its oil industry. What had been a complicated coexistence became, in Noerr’s telling, an active campaign of vilification.
According to Noerr, Newsom directed the California Energy Commission (CEC) to investigate whether oil companies were “gouging” consumers. The CEC found no evidence of price fixing, no evidence of collusion. He ordered the same investigation multiple times. Same result every time. Meanwhile, the state of California—through its fees and taxes—was collecting $1.21 for every gallon of gasoline sold in the state, while refiners were tracking margins of approximately nine cents per gallon.
“Who’s fleecing the customer?” Noerr asks…
… and the question hangs in the air.
Newsom then passed legislation effectively capping refinery profits.
Photo Credit: California State Capitol by Greg Thames
“Think about that in the United States of America—capitalism,” Noerr says. “I’ll let you go into business, take all the risk, invest your capital, but if you’re successful, I’ll only let you make this much money.”
The consequences were swift and severe. When Valero announced the closure of its Benicia refinery, combined refining capacity in California dropped by close to 20 percent. Nonpartisan analysts began forecasting that by the end of 2026, gas and diesel in California could hit $8 per gallon.
But perhaps the most consequential act was quieter. Newsom directed The California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM)—the state oil and gas regulator—not to issue new drilling permits, even as applications continued to arrive.
The former head of California’s oil and gas regulator, CalGEM, later filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging he was pressured by the Newsom administration to halt drilling permits without legal authority. The complaint includes claims of wrongful termination, retaliation, and violations of California’s whistleblower protections after he says he was forced to step down.
“If you’re in the housing business and you build houses, but the governor says don’t let anybody pour a foundation—what’s going to happen? That’s exactly what happened to the oil industry here.”
Where Does the Majority of Our Oil Here in California Come From?
Here is the fact that Sacramento does not want Californians to think about too carefully: the state’s in-state oil production peaked around 1985 and 1986, at approximately 1.1 million barrels per day. At that point, California was importing roughly 4.5 percent of its oil needs from foreign countries. Today, that number is approximately 70 percent.
Photo Credit: Oil Tankers at Sunset in Long Beach California – by Soly Moses
And who, for the past two years, has been California’s largest supplier of imported oil? Iraq. But Noerr goes further, laying out the data behind that reality. The Iraqi oil flowing into California is not simply Iraqi oil. Sitting along the Iraq-Iran border are enormous shared reservoirs, and Iran, which controls the refining and electricity infrastructure that Iraq depends on, has quietly leveraged that relationship.
“Iraq has to get their electricity and their refined natural gas from Iran, because they don’t have the facilities to do it,” Noerr says. “So they’re beholden to Iran. Well, they don’t have money in Iraq. So what Iran said was—you know our cross-border reservoir right there? We’re gonna let you overproduce. You’re gonna brand that as Iraqi oil, and then you can sell it to the state of California.”
California, waving its green flag, has been quietly funding Iran through a back-channel oil arrangement—all while shutting down its own clean, heavily regulated domestic production.
Before Iraq, the largest supplier was Ecuador—where China came in, built the infrastructure, and took the oil as repayment for its loans. California imported 60 percent of all the oil extracted from the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.
“Waving our green flag, enriching China, encouraging human rights violations, and destroying the largest carbon sink on the face of the planet—and we were doing it.”
Photo Credit: Atelopus, “Discharge pond at a petroleum production station in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Formation water, which is separated from the crude oil is highly saline and toxic when discharged into rivers. Oil extraction site along Napo River, Yasuni national park, Amazon rainforest, Ecuador.”
Photo Credit: SL Photography “Oil extraction site along Napo River, Yasuni national park, Amazon rainforest, Ecuador.”
The irony is not lost on him. The oil fields of Kern County operate under the watchful oversight of more than 25 government agencies. They produce energy more cleanly, more safely, and with greater environmental accountability than virtually anywhere else on earth.
“And yet Gavin says shut it down and import it from Iraq, where they flare so much it’s some of the dirtiest oil on the planet.”
California is not cleaner for this policy. It is simply exporting its emissions—and its dollars—overseas.
The Families Behind the Numbers
Statistics are one thing. But Noerr is most powerful when he brings the conversation back to the human scale—to the faces he sees during the morning at the Artz’s Liquor & Deli counter, heading out to do work that the rest of the state has decided to be ashamed of.
“You’re talking about families that bought a nice house, were going to send the kids to college,” he says. “We’re talking about people earning six figures with good benefits—and I don’t mean people who needed a doctorate. Some of these workers are second-chancers, barely got a GED, maybe did a little time. But they’re earning a hundred, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year in the oil fields. First-time homebuyers in their family. First in their family going to college.”
When those jobs disappear, the consequences radiate outward through the community in ways that economists can measure but that no spreadsheet fully captures.
“One job paying a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in a small town like Taft has an economic impact over half a million dollars as that money turns over through the local economy. Lose that job, and half a million dollars just left. Two income family—both working in oil—you’re talking a million dollars gone.”
They pull their kids from youth sports. They stop going to restaurants. They can’t replace the refrigerator. They fall behind on utility bills—and in California, with the second-highest utility costs in the nation, falling behind is dangerous. Right now, 1.9 million families in California are behind on utility bills. Fifty thousand are facing shutoffs today. One in five families in the state.
And this, Noerr insists, is not a story about oil companies. It is a story about people.
“Huddleston Crane Service—the company I went into business with my brother-in-law—was owned before that by his father. He retired, we bought it, built it up. When I sold my stock to my son, my nephew stepped in.
Three generations. A family business born from the same oil fields that built Taft.
“It pains me,” he says, “to think that the opportunity we took advantage of—we didn’t ask anybody for a handout, we just said give us the opportunity to earn—that opportunity is disappearing for the next generation. The companies that used to be out there are gone. Mergers and acquisitions. Driven out of California by legislation. If you look at all those plaques at the oilworker’s monument, there are all these different companies that were a part of it. And they’re not anymore.”
Teaching the Next Generation to Question the Narrative
It would be easy for a man in Noerr’s position to grow bitter, to retreat into grievance. He has chosen a different path. He mentors high school students through the Taft Oil Technology Academy, not by lecturing, but by putting the information in their hands and letting them draw their own conclusions.
After the last presidential election, he played his students a video of Governor Newsom standing before cameras at a solar field dedication, telling Californians they enjoy the cheapest electricity in the country—cheaper than Texas, cheaper than Florida. Then he said: question the narrative. Go.
“The first answer came back in 90 seconds—’Mr. Noerr, that’s a lie.’—Within three minutes, all eight students, independently, using just their phones, had confirmed it was false.”
He ran the same exercise with 50 seniors in Delano. Five student researchers, 95 seconds. Five for five: not true.
“I don’t give them my opinion,” he says. “I let them formulate their own. You want to know what we can do as a community? That. Question the narrative. Understand the issue. Understand its effect on you. And vote like your livelihood depends on it—because for a lot of families in this valley, it does.”
The Sacramento Surcharge: A Tale of Two Gas Stations
Noerr has a habit of making the abstract concrete. When politicians debate energy policy in Sacramento, it can feel remote—a faraway argument between people in suits. So he offers a number that cuts right through it.
He owns a home in Bullhead City, Arizona, right on the Colorado River—four and a half hours from Taft. Same Fastrip gas station brand on both sides. And at the pump in Arizona, he pays 40% less for diesel than he does surrounded by ten thousand oil wells in the city of Taft.
Taft, California
“I pay $5.00 a gallon in Taft, the same diesel from the same California refinery is sold for $3.20 in Arizona. Same Fastrip. 155% as much in the City of Taft, surrounded by 10,000 oil wells, as in Arizona, which, by the way, has no commercial production and no refining. And they get most of their refined product from the state of California.”
Let that land for a moment. The state that produces the oil, refines the fuel, and pumps it out of the ground charges its own residents dramatically more at the pump than a neighboring desert state that produces nothing and imports the product from California.
But the fuel prices are only half the story. Noerr also pays utility bills at both addresses—and the gap is staggering.
In Taft, electricity starts at about 42 cents per kilowatt hour, with a second tier around 52 cents. In Arizona, it starts at 8 cents.
“My utilities, right here, are between 450 and 500 percent of what they are there,” he says.
“That difference is what I call the Sacramento Surcharge. That’s Gavin’s Gap. That’s the cost of California. It is policy driven. It has nothing to do with reality. It can change.”
He is quick to point out that this isn’t an abstract problem for wealthy homeowners with second properties. It is the lived reality of every family in the San Joaquin Valley. Every grocery store. Every school. Every small business running a commercial refrigerator or an air conditioner through a Central Valley summer.
“If 36% of the population of the state of California lives near or below the poverty level and they’re paying 160% as much for fuel and 400 to 500% as much for utilities as people just across the Colorado River—how many of those people would come out of poverty if they just paid the same rate?”
The Man Who Stepped Up to the Mic
For years, the major oil companies operating in California followed the advice of their lawyers: don’t talk to the media. Stay quiet. Stay out of sight.
“They operated in the shadows, thinking: if we stay quiet, they’ll leave us alone,” Noerr says. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
At one point, the small-town mayor in blue jeans and a white T-shirt stepped into the middle of the debate.
When Greenpeace flew a blimp over the Taft oil fields—bearing the message “Governor Brown, Say No to Oil and Gas,” Noerr drove to the airport, walked up to a young Greenpeace activist named Mary, and had a 12-minute conversation. No yelling. No profanity. No spectacle. Just two adults on opposite sides of a real issue, talking.
“I helped straighten Mary out a little on the facts. The next day, they packed up their blimp and left town.”
He forgot about the exchange until his phone exploded. The video of that conversation traveled around the world, gathering hundreds of thousands of views. The presidents and CEOs of major oil companies across the United States called to thank him.
Their biggest observation: two people, completely opposite sides, and nobody was screaming.
Since then, Noerr has spoken to the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the Christian Science Monitor.
“I’m a small-town mayor, but I speak to whoever wants to listen.”
In fifteen years of stepping up to that microphone, he has not stopped. But Noerr is quick to point out that he hasn’t stood alone.
“From the beginning two people in particular stand out. The first of those stand outs is most certainly current Senator Shannon Grove. She supported our industry, our county, our people in the face of overwhelming resistance in Sacramento. Her commitment to the truth never wavered. She’s a warrior.
Left to Right: Former Texas Governor and Former United States Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Taft Mayor Dave Noerr, and California State Senator Shannon Grove | Photo courtesy of Mayor Dave Noerr
Left to Right: Mayor Dave Noerr’s wife Tammy, California State Senator Shannon Grove, Taft Mayor Dave Noerr, and Virgie Beard on the Senate floor| Photo courtesy of Mayor Dave Noerr
“The second would be an independent producer, Fred Holmes. The selfless contribution of Fred and his wife Barbara Holmes to Taft’s quality of life, especially to the youth, is immeasurable. The Holmes Family Education and Training Foundation has provided scholarships to over 400 kids to go to college, right here.
When all the other producers shied away from the cameras and the microphones because their lawyer said their interviews could be twisted to tell a different story, Fred Holmes did not run and hide. I have long said God hates a coward and so do I. Neither of those two people ever exhibited any cowardice when it came to disseminating the facts.”
Photo courtesy of Mayor Dave Noerr
The Road Ahead
Noerr is not without hope. Kern County still holds enormous reserves. Enhanced oil recovery and tertiary production methods are unlocking resources that older techniques left behind. The county has moved to allow up to 2,000 new wells per year for a decade through a revised Environmental Impact Report—a measure Newsom quietly signed, not out of any change of heart, but because he was, in Noerr’s words, “staring down the barrel of an eight-dollar gallon of gas and a presidential campaign.”
But Noerr is careful to temper that optimism with honesty.
“You can’t just flip a switch back on,” he warns. “The companies that used to provide the equipment, the trained hands, the institutional knowledge—a lot of them dried up and disappeared. You can’t call a college and say ‘send me experienced hands.’ That expertise takes years to rebuild.”
California is currently about 15 days away from fuel rationing if a serious supply disruption occurred. The Benicia refinery has already undergone nitrogen purging—it is done, permanently. Current U.S. oil storage sits below the five-year average. The Middle East remains dangerously unstable.
“We’re counting on refined product coming from the Bahamas or India. If something disrupts those supply chains, we can’t just call someone.”
When he was in high school, Californians could only buy gasoline on alternating days depending on their license plate number. That was the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. He is not being dramatic when he says we could be set to learn that lesson again.
“What we need is for Sacramento to get out of the way and let us do what we’ve been doing, cleanly and responsibly, for 120 years.”
On the morning we spoke, the sky was as blue as could be with beautiful clouds. The pumps were moving, as they have moved every day for over a century. And Dave Noerr—roustabout turned mayor, crane businessman turned community patriarch, small-town voice heard around the world—was right where he belongs: in the middle of it all, telling the truth, standing his ground.
The oil that runs beneath these hills is, as Noerr says, a naturally occurring organic substance. It built this community. It heated homes, funded educations, and gave second chances to people the rest of the economy forgot. And as long as the world needs it—and it does, desperately, right now—Kern County stands ready to produce it with more care, more oversight, and more pride than anywhere else on earth.
That story deserves to be told. That work deserves to be defended. And in Taft, California, there is a man who has spent his entire adult life making sure of both.
Q&A with Mayor Noerr on Kern Magazine’s Signature Questions
What do you love about your community?
I love the size of it. The city of Taft is like a little island—a little island of Americana. We love our country. We fly our flag. We never kneel for the Star-Spangled Banner. We say yes sir, yes ma’am, and we automatically open doors for women and older people. We’re surrounded by the lunacy of California—that’s the ocean of craziness we have to survive in—but Taft is a walkable community. When you walk around here, you cannot go anywhere without seeing somebody shaking hands, getting hugs, ‘How you doing?’ I’ve worked in the oil fields for 40 years, right next to the wellhead, and I’m 67 years old and still doing 50 push-ups and working out on a rowing machine. We don’t fold just because something isn’t politically correct this week. Reality and facts mean far more to us here in our little community.
Where do you eat when you eat local?
I get up every single morning before 5 a.m. and I go to Artz’s Deli in town, where they’re making lunches and breakfasts for the people going out into the oil fields and into ag. I sit there and drink coffee, greet the people coming in, talk about what’s going on. The biscuits and gravy are out of this world. We also have Asian Experience — wonderful Thai food, and I know the owners, great people. Some really good pizza. And we have four really good Mexican food restaurants throughout our little community.
Photos shot at Artz’s Liquor & Deli, courtesy of Mayor Dave Noerr
And when you need to get out of town, where do you go?
I play golf, and there’s some great golf in Paso Robles—Monarch Dunes, Cypress Ridge, Black Lake. If it’s hot here and I want the coast, that’s where I head. I also have a house in Bullhead City, Arizona, right on the Colorado River, which is probably my favorite escape.
Any additional thoughts you’d like to share about the Taft community?
Taft’s gone through tough times before. We have the ups and downs, the boom and bust, but we will weather, and we will stand tall. No different than the patina on that Oilworker’s Monument. It changes with the sun and the rain and the wind and the effects, but they’ll stay strong. Taft will stay strong.
ABOUT MAYOR DAVE NOERR
Dave Noerr has served the City of Taft since 2004 and is the longest-serving mayor and council member in the city’s history. He entered the oil fields in 1981 as a roustabout and worked his way through Sun Oil, Pennzoil, and Oryx Energy before co-founding Huddleston Crane Service—the company that assembled Taft’s Oilworker Monument. A mentor to local youth through Taft’s oil technology program and a fixture at the community’s early-morning gatherings before the ag and oil workers head to the fields, Noerr has spoken to media from the Washington Post to Al Jazeera. He is a consistent and passionate advocate for Kern County energy, local workers, and the families whose futures depend on responsible domestic oil production. Taft, California sits at the heart of the Midway-Sunset Oil Field—the largest oil field in the contiguous United States by cumulative production.
Want to learn more about our Kern County oil culture? Visit West Kern Oil Museum!
