The Brief

What is Lunar New Year?

Saturday, Feb. 10, marks the Lunar New Year, welcoming the Chinese zodiac Year of the Dragon. This celebration is observed by millions worldwide, including China, Vietnam, Korea, and, of course, connected communities in Los Angeles.

Each community celebrates the festival differently, with different food traditions. We’ve pulled together some culinary offerings around L.A. this year.

Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year activities typically start with some thorough house cleaning before the new year itself. Homes are decorated in red for good luck. The foods traditionally eaten for Chinese New Year are symbolic of longevity and prosperity in some way, usually because of the shape or because the names of the dishes are homophones for related words.

Here are some of the foods typically eaten on Chinese New Year:

Whole fish

The word for fish in Mandarin, yú, is a homophone for another word that means “abundance” or “surplus” — hence, eating fish on Chinese New Year is considered lucky and will bring abundance in the new year. The fish is usually served whole and reflects completion from the beginning to the end, but this is not always the case, especially for smaller households.

Bistro Na's in Temple City provides an array of dishes to help you ring in the Lunar New Year in style.

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Some of the fish specials you can find around town this year include:

• Bistro Na’s is offering different Lunar New Year sets that serve 6-10 people, and all of them include at least one fish dish.
• Crustacean Beverly Hills is offering a $188 eight-course (because eight is an auspicious number) dinner extravaganza with crispy dover sole, black truffle turnip cakes, and more. The dining room will be decked out in Lunar New Year decorations and there will be live entertainers throughout the night. 
• Paradise Dynasty is offering some special dishes like Singapore-style black pepper lobster. There will also be a steamed Chilean sea bass and eight treasure sticky rice for dessert, another popular Lunar New Year treat. The special dishes are available now through March 31, 2024. 
• Steep will have a collaboration dinner with Chef Anthony Wang on Feb. 9-10. There will be an eight-course menu featuring steamed rockfish, radish cake with XO sauce, braised pork belly with abalone, and more.

Poon choi

Poon choi from Collette in Pasadena, a traditional Cantonese festival dish featuring layers of different ingredients and is consumed communally.

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This traditional Cantonese meal translates to “basin vegetables” and is served in a large basin. It’s not all vegetables, though — the Lunar New Year poon choi usually also contains several luxurious ingredients like abalone, sea cucumber, BBQ and more.

Poon choi has become a popular Lunar New Year dish in Los Angeles over the past couple of years, with many restaurants offering it at this time of year.

Order the dish from Hop Woo BBQ & Seafood Restaurant, Capital Seafood, Ho Kee Cafe, Sea Harbour, and many others. Colette in Pasadena will also offer poon choi by pre-order this year, and there are two sizes available: one that feeds six and a larger one for ten people.

Tray of togetherness

The tray of togetherness is a tray filled with sweets with symbolic meanings that are served to guests. The tray usually has six or eight compartments with various sweets including candied lotus roots, which symbolize abundance, candied coconut, which symbolizes togetherness, and candied lotus seeds for fertility.

Different versions of the tray can be found at Asian grocery stores such as 99 Ranch Market and 168 Market.

Nián gāo

This dense, glutinous rice cake is another traditional symbolic food. The name, nián gāo, sounds similar to words that mean “getting higher every year” and thus symbolizes growth and progress. While there is both a sweet and savory version, the sweet version is more popular, made with glutinous rice flour and sweetened with brown sugar (some versions may also use chestnuts or red beans). In L.A., you can get them at:

• Kee Wah Bakery. In addition to the rice cake, the bakery also has an assortment of gift sets in Chinese New Year packaging.  
• Woon, which is serving Chinese New Year specials from Feb. 7-11, including savory, stir-fried nián gāo. Woon will also turn up the festivities with red envelope roulette with prizes like t-shirts and free noodles. 

Jiaozi

Jiaozi is the crescent-shaped dumplings that you may know as potstickers. Although dumplings in general are commonly found at celebrations, jiaozi is typically eaten during Chinese New Year as an auspicious food, since the shape of the dumplings resemble the gold ingots or sycee used as currency in imperial China.

Dumplings galore including jiaozi, the crescent-shaped dumpling, at Din Tai Fung for Lunar New Year.

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You can find jiaozi or potstickers at many restaurants around L.A., including:

• Din Tai Fung, which also serves crescent shaped dumplings in addition to their famous xiao long bao. From Feb. 8-12, Din Tai Fung will be giving guests a red envelope containing a certificate for a free soy noodle appetizer (to be used for a future visit). One lucky guest will get a Golden Ticket, allowing access to the restaurant’s VIP reservation service, which pretty much guarantees you can always get a reservation. 

Lo hei or yusheng

Yee Sang from Sam Tan's Kitchen, a Cantonese-style raw fish salad, consisting of strips of raw fish, mixed with shredded vegetables and a variety of sauces and condiments.

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Even within Chinese New Year celebrations, there are quite a few regional variations. For example, the Cantonese lo hei — also called yusheng, or “prosperity toss” — is a raw fish salad that is “tossed” on Chinese New Year and symbolizes abundance. Yusheng is popular among the Chinese communities in Singapore and Malaysia.

Here in L.A., you can pre-order it at:

• Malaysianfoodloversla, which sells them via Instagram for pickup in Arcadia. They’re offering three different seafood toppings: fried shrimp, cocktail shrimp or arctic surf clam. 
• Ms. Chi Cafe, in Culver City, will be offering a special six-course Lunar New Year menu that includes a yusheng salad, followed by golden chicken jiaozi symbolizing wealth, longevity noodles with spicy garlic prawns, Chilean sea bass and more. The $69 menu will be served at dinner from Feb. 9-25.
• Home chef Sam Tan’s Kitchen will have lo hei available for pick up from Feb. 3-24.

Seollal

In Korean, Lunar New Year is called seollal and it’s typically celebrated over three days. Some traditions are similar to those of Chinese New Year, where people travel to their family homes, perform an ancestral ritual, and young ones bow to the elders to show respect and receive money in a red (or white) packet.

Tteokguk

The main dish eaten for seollal is tteokguk, a rice cake soup traditionally made with beef bone broth. The dish is believed to grant good luck and it’s said that people don’t gain another year of age until they’ve had their bowl of tteokguk. The white of the rice cakes also symbolize purity and a bright new beginning.

• Find tteokguk at Hangari Kalguksu, Ma Dang Gook Soo, Sun Nong Dan and other places in Koreatown. 
• Baekjeong KBBQ and Ahgassi Gopchang will both be serving a complimentary bowl of tteokguk for all guests during lunch and dinner service on February 10. 
• Instead of tteokguk, Yangban Society will be gungjung tteokbokki, or “royal rice cake”. In this royal court version, the rice cakes will be served with braised oxtail, hobak squash, shiitake and preserved black truffles. The gungjung tteokbokki will be available Feb. 9-11.

Jeon

The savory pancakes, jeon, aren’t necessarily a seollal-specific dish, but they make an appearance at all celebrations in Korea, including seollal. Jeon can be made from various vegetables and sometimes also incorporate meat or seafood.

• HanEuem in Koreatown serves a platter of different varieties of jeon.
• Baroo is serving a special seven-course dinner on Feb. 10 which will include a seafood jeon with shrimp and sea cucumber as well as maesaengi tteokguk (rice cake soup with seaweed oyster broth). Book it here.

Tết Nguyên Đán

The Lunar New Year celebration in Vietnam is called Tết Nguyên Đán, or Tết for short, and it means “feast for the first morning” — so you know this new year celebration is all about the food.

Bánh tét or bánh chưng

A must-have for a Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration is bánh tét or bánh chưng. They are glutinous rice cakes wrapped in a banana leaf and typically filled with mung beans and marinated pork. While bánh tét is cylindrical in shape and popular in South Vietnam, bánh chưng is square in shape and eaten more in the northern parts of Vietnam.

The dish is time-consuming to make, and that’s part of its importance, as families spend time together and bond while making it. Around Lunar New Year every year, Bánh Chưng Collective holds a bánh chưng making class. This year’s class will be on Feb. 17, 2024 and attendees will get enough ingredients to make four bánh chưng and everyone will enjoy lunch together (the bánh chưng are taken home to be cooked later).

If you want to enjoy it without making it yourself, though, there are quite a few places to get them in the L.A. area, since bánh tét / bánh chưng are actually eaten year-round. You can find them at various Vietnamese bakeries and delis. Around Tết you can also get some at Sau Can Tho or order them from Kien Gang Bakery while supplies last.

Mut tet

Similar to the Chinese New Year tradition of the tray of togetherness, Vietnamese New Year also has a tray of sweets called mut tet that is used to serve guests during Lunar New Year. Some of the components are also the same, like candied coconut or lotus seeds, but you’d also typically find candied tamarind. You can buy these trays at Vietnamese grocery stores around San Gabriel Valley or Little Saigon.

Splurge-worthy meals

All the auspicious foods listed above are important traditions for many, but really, the most important thing is sharing good food with your loved ones. For many it’s also the time of year to splurge on a dinner too expensive for the day-to-day. There are a number of special dinners happening around town that aren’t about the specific food items, but that are worth looking into:

• Michelin-starred Kato will have their third Lunar New Year dinner series on Feb. 7-9, serving a special menu in collaboration with chefs Daisy Ryan (Bell’s) and Matthew Lightner (okta). The menu hasn’t been finalized yet but reservations can be made here. 
• The high end yakiniku restaurant Niku X will offer a special Lunar New Year tasting menu from Feb. 9-11. The menu costs $250 per person and includes wagyu oxtail potstickers, dry aged sashimi, caviar, and of course, plenty of A5 wagyu for the grill. 
• Merois at The Pendry West Hollywood is also offering a special four-course menu on Feb. 10. The menu costs $165 per person and includes Peking duck, king crab bao and more. There will also be live entertainment throughout the night.
  

Celebrations in Los Angeles

Aside from the food specials we mentioned above, there are also a number of larger community celebrations of Lunar New Year around the Los Angeles area. At these celebrations you’ll find dance performances, cultural showcases, and of course — more food.

Golden Dragon Lunar New Year Parade

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles is hosting the 125th annual Golden Dragon Parade on Saturday, Feb. 17. The parade is one of the oldest cultural celebrations in Los Angeles, and certainly one of the oldest Lunar New Year celebrations in the city as well. There will be dance performances and marching bands. The parade will start at the corner of Hill and Ord streets in Chinatown.

UVSA Tết Festival

The UVSA Tết Festival is the largest Vietnamese Lunar New Year Festival in the country and this year it will be held at the OC Fair & Event Center from Feb. 9-11. It's hosted by the Southern California chapter of UVSA, or Union of Vietnamese Student Associations. During the three-day festival, there will be cultural activities, food vendors, firecracker shows and more. There will also be a replica of a traditional Vietnamese village complete with cultural exhibits and galleries for those who want to learn more about Vietnamese culture.

Lunar New Year at Pacific Asia Museum

The USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena will be throwing a Lunar New Year celebration on Saturday, Feb, 10. There will be a traditional Chinese lion dance performance as well as a Korean dance performance, taiko drumming, calligraphy and more. Those attending the celebration will also get free admission to the museum.

Lunar New Year at South Coast Botanic Garden

South Coast Botanic Garden will be celebrating Lunar New Year every weekend in February. On Saturdays and Sundays there will be two daily live performances of lion dancers, martial arts and more. There will also be various activity stations from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., including lantern making, calligraphy and mahjong.

Chinese New Year Festival at The Huntington

On Feb. 10-11 The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens will have a Chinese New Year Celebration. Not only will there be lion dancers and martial arts performances among other entertainment, the various dining venues here will have special menus, serving steamed buns, Chinese mushroom and tofu soup, black bean catfish, Peking duck and more. Reservations are required and can be made here.

MAUM Market

Lunar New Year seems like the perfect time to shop AAPI-owned businesses, and MAUM Market which is LA’s original Asian makers’ market will be holding a market on Saturday, Feb. 10 at ROW DTLA. There will be over 100 Asian-American makers showcasing everything from pottery to cute stationery to food. The market will be held from 12-4 p.m. and entry is free (there’s a free 2-hour parking at ROW DTLA).

This week, indie musician Mitski is playing a series of sold out shows at an unexpected L.A. venue: Hollywood High School’s auditorium.

For the students, it’s an opportunity to see a beloved artist at “our freaking school.” For the school, it’s a continuation of a “world famous” arts legacy.

“It makes me look at the school with so much pride,” said Lotus Rosby, a junior. “I'm like, ‘Wow, they have a huge artist coming to our school.’”

Music for a ‘good cry’

Mitski has built a dedicated following since she self-released her first album in 2012.

Senior Angel Cueto found the singer in middle school during “a very like, angsty teen part of my life."

“There's so many times where I've just bawled my eyes out in the shower to her music, and she's always like the crying artist that I go to when I just want a good cry,” she said.

For sophomore London James, hearing 2014’s “I don’t smoke” was a canon event in her life.

“Mitski speaks to me,” James said. “I understand her, like she's me and I'm her.”

James searched for tickets as soon as she saw the announcement of the Hollywood High shows.

“I didn't even have time to check the prices because every date was already sold out,” she said.

James, who’s in the school’s theatre program, wondered if there’d be a chance for students to volunteer to work backstage.

“But deep down I knew that was not gonna happen,” James said.

A 1920s era view of the Hollywood High School campus looking northwest from Highland Ave. The school opened in 1903 when the surrounding area was largely farmland.

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Then the school announced a contest. If students attended school every class period, every day for two weeks, they’d be entered into a raffle to win a pair of tickets donated by Mitski’s team.

Attendance is tied to school funding and students’ academic success, both of which are priorities for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Michael Reagan, an attendance counselor at the school, said the 168 students who entered the contest had a 96% attendance rate compared to 89% for those who did not.

“ It's definitely my most effective attendance challenge that I've done all year… probably in my three years in the district,” Reagan said.

Hollywood High School's auditorium, pictured here in 1939, and the library were the only two surviving buildings after the the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake.

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Students James, Cueto and Rosby were among the 46 students who won a pair of tickets.

“I think I've said I'm excited 25 million times and I don't think it's enough,” James said.

For Cueto, who’s a senior, it’s another opportunity to reflect on the arts as a viable career path — not just as an artist, but all the roles it takes to put together a show.

“It’s not just us watching a(n) artist that we like so much,” Cueto said. “But us also maybe getting a peak into our future.”

Why Hollywood High?

Hollywood High School is one of two U.S. stops for Mitski’s tour to support her new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me.

“I wanted it to feel special,” Mitski told the show World Cafe earlier this year. “  I wanted it to feel like an experience, I wanted to recreate even the feeling that I had going to shows, going to DIY shows, punk shows.”

The artist is also donating $2 of each ticket sale to nonprofit L.A. afterschool music program In The Band.

There are more than a thousand wooden seats between Hollywood High School's first floor and mezzanine and a pipe organ embedded in the walls. "”We rival some of the playhouses on Hollywood Boulevard," Dovlatian said.

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Cueto, a senior at the school, has a different take on the space. “It's like a, in my head, a janky auditorium that I spent like four years in," she said. "Sometimes it hurts my butt sitting in there for too long."

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Mitski isn’t the first musician to play the auditorium. Former Smiths frontman Morrissey played at the school in 2013 and Hollywood High School’s connection to the arts goes back decades.

Principal Samuel Dovlatian calls the school “world famous” because of the long roster of alumni working in arts and entertainment.

They include:

• Carol Burnett, actress, comedian, singer and writer
• Brandy, singer, songwriter and actress
• Sarah Jessica Parker, actress and producer
• Laurence Fishburne, actor, producer and director

Their names line the school's hallways in red stars. Actress Judy Garland also attended the school, but according to Dovlatian, skipped graduation to finish filming The Wizard of Oz.

Ken Handler, the inspiration for Mattel's Ken doll graduated from Hollywood High School in 1961.

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Principal Samuel Dovlatian in Hollywood High School's museum.

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There’s also a collection of memorabilia in a “museum” attached to the school's library with includes:

• The hammer from The Shawshank Redemption, a film written by alum Frank Darabont, who went on to create "The Walking Dead."
• An original Ken doll modeled after alumni Ken Handler. 
• A pair of rhinestone heels owned by Marge Champion, a dancer and the inspiration for Disney’s Snow White. 

The arts are also a core part of the school’s present.

Dovlatian said even if students don’t go into the entertainment industry, they’ll take away valuable skills about working in teams and communicating.

“You have to go beyond the textbook,” Dovlatian said. “Get [students] hands-on learning, get them to struggle with the problem, the concept, the dance routine, the material, the equipment, and let them figure out for themselves what success means.”

The historic library, which includes a mural of entertainment industry history, is one reason junior Dulce Duque chose to attend the school. “ I really like our old Hollywood vibes,” Dueque said.

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Hollywood High converted the former auto-body shop into a studio where students learn video and film production.

Mawuena Akorli uses that space as a junior in the New Media Academy program. She said as a Black girl, she doesn’t often see herself in the media.

“ I wanna make stories and films that people can relate to and makes them feel seen,” Akorli said.

The same auditorium where Mitski will host her residency is also home to the school’s performing arts magnet, which includes theatre, dance and music.

James has an invitation for anyone else in the audience to see Hollywood High’s Spring musical, which starts in mid-April.

“ If you can go see Mitski, you can come see Into the Woods,” James said. “Y'all know where this auditorium is.”

NASA astronauts could be just days away from blasting off towards the moon for the first time since 1972, when Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan took his last steps in the gray lunar dust.

As soon as Wednesday, a four-person crew could launch on a mission to fly around the moon in an Orion capsule that's currently perched at the top of a 322-foot, orange-and-white rocket waiting at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"When those engines light, this thing is moving out," said Reid Wiseman, the NASA mission's commander, during a briefing with reporters on Sunday. He said that it was "surreal" to drive out to the launch pad and see this massive rocket.

The crew's first launch opportunity will come on April 1, at 6:24 p.m EDT. Mission managers have several more launch opportunities through April 6.

"Things are certainly starting to feel real," said NASA astronaut Christina Koch. She and Wiseman are in preflight quarantine, along with their fellow NASA astronaut, pilot Victor Glover, plus astronaut Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.

If their trip goes as planned, it will be the first time that a woman, a person of color, and a non-American will venture out around the moon.

"We are getting very, very close, and we are ready," says Lori Glaze, the acting associate administrator for NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate.

During a briefing, mission managers said that launch preparations were going smoothly and they were not dealing with any technical issues that might threaten a Wednesday attempt.

"The one thing we are watching is the weather," says NASA exploration ground systems manager Shawn Quinn, who says the forecast currently calls for an 80% chance of favorable launch conditions.

No moonwalks, but a flyby

This will be the first launch in NASA's Artemis moon program that includes a crew.

Over three years ago, during the Artemis I test flight in November and December of 2022, NASA put an Orion capsule through its paces without astronauts on board. That capsule went on a looping trip around the moon that lasted over three weeks and covered over a million miles before splashing back down in the Pacific.

This time around, the astronauts will first orbit Earth so that they can check out key systems on their spacecraft, including life support, communication, and navigation.

If everything goes as planned, they'll fire their vehicle's propulsion system to send themselves on a looping figure-eight path around the moon and back, a deep space journey that will take them more than 230,000 miles away from Earth. It will take several days to get out to the moon, and the entire mission is expected to last about ten days.

The closest they'll come to the moon is about 4,000 to 6,000 miles above the lunar surface, as they swing behind the moon and briefly lose contact with mission controllers.

At that distance, according to NASA, the moon will appear to be about the size of a basketball held at arm's length, with the distant blue Earth beyond it.

A lander still to come

This mission is a key step towards an eventual moon landing that will support NASA's goal of establishing a permanent lunar presence, including a moon base, with the help of international partners.

But work on critical hardware — most importantly, the landing vehicle — remains incomplete, although NASA has been pushing to speed up its two lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin.

NASA officials now plan to test out one or both landers in Earth's orbit before trying to press on with a lunar landing attempt. To do so, they added a lander checkout mission next year to the Artemis program's lineup of launches.

Under the current timeline, a landing on the moon could be attempted in 2028.

But long-time NASA veteran Wayne Hale, who spent decades as a flight controller and space shuttle program manager before his retirement, thinks that timeline is going to be challenging.

"I kind of worry about whether it will be before 2030 or not, but hopefully not long after that," says Hale.

He says NASA's new roadmap for the moon, unveiled last week at the agency's headquarters, is ambitious, involving multiple robotic missions, a lunar base, and power station development.

"All of these are good but, to use a cliche — show me the money," Hale noted, adding that he hopes Congress will provide the necessary funds, but he's skeptical.

A new moon race? 

Already, the Artemis program has spent something in the range of $93 billion, according to one recent accounting from the agency's inspector general.

NASA's return to the moon has essentially been in the works since 2004, when President George W. Bush gave a speech announcing that NASA would finish building the international space station, retire its fleet of aging space shuttles, and make its new focus the moon, as a stepping stone to Mars.

"It's really the same program, with a little tweaking along the way, that we are trying to execute 22 years later," notes John Logsdon, a space policy historian and professor emeritus at George Washington University. "It's taken forever."

In the 1960s the space race with the Soviet Union seemed existential, says Logsdon, and this generated an urgency that just doesn't exist for the current moon program. "This is just something that seems the logical next thing to do, but not with any great commitment to getting it done on any kind of reasonable schedule," says Logsdon.

China is also seeking to put people on the moon, and some lawmakers in Congress and officials at NASA have tried to use that as a new space race that could inspire more funding and support.

Most people alive today have no memory of being able to look up at the moon and know that astronauts are there. Recent surveys suggest wide support among Americans for NASA's return to the moon, says Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator for the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

"The Artemis program is actually more popular than the Apollo program was," says Muir-Harmony. "In general, the polls suggest that today, Americans are more supportive of the program than they were in the 1960s."

Copyright 2026 NPR

California has managed a remarkable feat over the past 20 years. Even as its economy has grown to overtake Germany’s as the fourth-largest in the world, the state’s consumption of gasoline has declined by almost 15%, and consumption of petroleum diesel has fallen by around two-thirds. This has happened due to some of the world’s most aggressive climate policies, including a tax on carbon emissions and a strict requirement to adopt clean-burning fuels such as “renewable diesel” made from fats and oils.

During the same period, California’s production of crude oil has also fallen by around half, and many oil wells have shut down. The state now imports almost two-thirds of its crude oil from tanker ships, which is cheaper and more practical because it is separated by steep mountains from oil-producing zones such as Texas. Some of the state’s largest gasoline and diesel refineries are also shutting down amid declining demand, which will make the state dependent on imports of refined gasoline, too.

The state’s diminished fossil-fuel sector has made it especially vulnerable to the oil shock of the Israeli-U.S. war with Iran — and to interventions from the Trump administration that could delay or even reverse California’s trend toward renewable energy. Gas prices in the state have spiked toward $7 a gallon in recent weeks, the highest prices in the country. As other economies clamp down on fuel exports, it’s possible the state could face even higher crude prices or a shortage of gasoline.

Two weeks after the war began, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department issued a legal memorandum arguing that the federal government can use the Defense Production Act to preempt state law in the event of energy emergencies. The Department of Energy then moved to restart a long-defunct California offshore oil pipeline owned by the company Sable Offshore. The order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright cited “California’s reliance on foreign oil vulnerable to geopolitical disruption,” with “a significant share traveling through the Strait of Hormuz.” The pipeline has been shut down since a 2015 oil spill that killed hundreds of animals, and state officials had not given it clearance to reopen. On the very next day, the pipeline reopened. California has sued to shut it back down.

For now, the Sable pipeline is ramping up to process around 50,000 barrels a day, which would provide around 3 percent of the state’s daily oil needs. Chevron has already said it will buy and refine 20,000 barrels of crude from the pipeline starting in April. The addition of new supply from Sable could lower costs for refineries, said Mike Umbro, an energy entrepreneur who runs Californians for Energy and Science, an educational nonprofit that advocates for increased oil production. Beyond Sable, though, there aren’t many good options for increasing crude supplies in the short term.

“Sacramento’s saying, ‘You don’t have a long-term future here,’ so the companies aren’t going to dump a bunch of money in to increase production,” Umbro said.

Nevertheless, the Interior Department said this week it would consider a proposal from another offshore oil company to frack undersea oil wells in order to increase production. The administration has also held oil lease sales on federal land in California, and has sued to block a state law that would limit drilling near homes and schools, both measures that would open up more onshore oil production in the state.

But more upstream oil production won’t help resolve the current fuel crunch. Even as some oil producers consider pumping more crude, no one has suggested building more refineries. In fact, Chevron and other large refinery owners have warned that California’s “cap-and-invest” program — a carbon tax that gets more expensive as time goes on — could soon drive them out of the state. The California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate regulator, is supposed to debut new rules for the carbon tax later this year, which would reduce the amount of free emissions refineries would be allowed to emit and make refineries less likely to stay in California.

The oil industry’s argument against these regulations follows the same logic as the Trump administration’s. “Continued erosion of California’s refining capacity risks increased reliance on imported fuels that are slower to arrive, more exposed to global supply disruptions, and less reliable during emergencies or periods of heightened geopolitical risk,” Andy Walz, a senior executive at Chevron, wrote in a letter to state leaders.

At the CERAWeek energy conference this week in Texas, Walz said he believes the state could soon have a shortage of gasoline and jet fuel, and that Chevron might close its own refineries within a decade. Those refineries account for 30% of capacity, and losing them could cause huge supply shortages for Bay Area drivers, Central Valley farmers, and even Air Force bases.

Democrats and environmental groups in the state, meanwhile, say that the refiners may be crying wolf about the state’s carbon tax. They see the Iran crisis as more evidence that the state should lean harder into its transition away from oil. Indeed, as Katelyn Roedner Sutter, the California state director for the Environmental Defense Fund, sees it, the current gas spike may only speed up the state’s energy transition by making electric vehicles even more attractive. Governor Gavin Newsom’s latest budget proposed a subsidy for first-time EV buyers, designed to replace the repealed Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, and she said the Iran crisis could strengthen the governor’s case.

“I do think the war actually makes it even more important to move forward with this, because I think it just underscores how vulnerable we are, being so dependent on fossil fuels,” she said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/trump-iran-california-oil-sable/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Tickets to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles will go on sale Thursday.

The much-anticipated drop is the first opportunity to get seats at Olympic events, including the opening and closing ceremonies — and it's for locals only. The sale will be open to those who pre-registered to buy tickets, and not everyone will be chosen. Fans will be randomly selected and given a time slot to buy tickets.

Fans with eligible Southern California or Oklahoma City ZIP codes will be notified via email if they're selected for a slot to buy tickets in the pre-sale, which runs April 2 to 6. After that, fans from around the world will have their first chance to get tickets from April 9 to 19.

Those who are chosen from the draw will be notified 48 hours ahead of their time slot to buy tickets online, and will have two days to select and purchase their tickets. That means people will know as early as Tuesday if they've been selected to buy tickets.

Each fan can snag up to 12 tickets, and an additional 12 tickets to the Olympic soccer tournament. Tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies are limited to four per person.

If you aren't chosen for the first ticket drop, there will be more in the months to come. Plus, come 2027 there will be a re-sale market for tickets.

How the draw works

If you get an email that you've been selected to buy Olympics tickets, it will include the time window you have to purchase tickets and a link to the website where you can buy them.

You'll have 48 hours to buy tickets, but LA28 recommends logging in as soon as you can to get the best ticket options. Once tickets are in your cart, you'll have 30 minutes to buy them.

LA28 warned fans that they could encounter online queues when buying tickets. Some people reported this when registering for tickets, too.

The ticket site will allow fans to search events by sport, venue and location. Once you choose an event, you'll book in a seating category — but actual seat numbers will be assigned later on.

Fans who want to game out their purchases ahead of time can look at the competition schedule here.

If you purchase tickets in the locals pre-sale, the billing address for the card you buy the tickets with will need to have one of the qualifying local ZIP codes. Here in Southern California, that includes people in L.A., Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

Prices

Prices for Olympics tickets will vary widely. The cheapest tickets will be $28 a pop, with the priciest tickets upwards of $1,000, according to Olympic organizers.

The majority of tickets to the Olympic Games will run into triple digits. According to LA28, half the tickets will be more than $200 and around 5% of tickets will be more than $1,000. In total, there will be 14 million tickets available across the Olympics and Paralympics.

What exactly different events will cost — and how expensive tickets might get — isn't clear yet. An example in a Youtube explainer posted by LA28 showed ticket options for Track and Field preliminary competitions at the Coliseum ranging from $28 to $1,035.65.

According to the video, there will also be standing room-only tickets for some events.

Tickets to the Paralympic Games will go on sale next year.