Can Oil Industry Lawsuits Compel Rational Energy Policy?
When asked in a recent interview why California has the highest gasoline prices in the nation, Jodie Muller, the President of the Western States Petroleum Association, began by stating the following:
“You can’t point a finger at one particular person, because, unfortunately, it is decades of policies layered on top of one another. You have local air districts, you have our State of California Air Resources Board, you have legislative action that has taken place, you also have taxes; a lot of regulatory programs that have led us to this point.”
Muller went on to describe in more detail why California went from producing over 400 million barrels of crude oil per year in the 1980s to barely more than 100 million barrels per year in 2025. It wasn’t because of declining reserves, because according to multiple reports, California is sitting on over 30 billion barrels of recoverable crude. It’s also not due to declining demand. California’s appetite for crude oil in 2025 was 484 million barrels, and 77 percent of that had to be imported.
Layer upon layer of legislation and regulations have reduced California’s oil industry to a quarter of its former production. But litigation has also been a factor. In September 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips for allegedly “engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception and creating statewide climate change-related harms in California.” As Bonta said, “California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for billions of dollars in damages — wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells.”
There is irony in the fact that despite Bonta’s litigious grandstanding, it is regulatory mismanagement of California’s forests and water supplies that has played a far more decisive role in causing wildfire damage and water scarcity. And it is preposterous to claim oil companies knowingly deceived the public, when even now the consequences of CO2 emissions remain a topic of serious scientific debate. Or, that even if they had believed CO2 emissions were harmful, anyone back then possessed alternative energy technologies that still today are not affordable, scalable, or sustainable.
Litigation, however, can cut both ways. And the oil industry, driven to the brink of elimination in California, has tough choices. They can fight defensively against legislation, never logging more than incremental gains against an unrelenting trend. They can also defend against a barrage of offensive litigation – not only Bonta’s People of the State of California v. ExxonMobil (2023), but City of Oakland v. BP et al, Center for Biological Diversity et al v. Chevron USA Inc. et al, and many others – or they can themselves go on offense. Of these three options, oil companies have turned to offensive litigation as not only a last resort, but one that may hold the highest probability for justice.
The most consequential of the cases filed by oil industry interests are those that challenge Senate Bill 1137, which requires oil wells to be located at least 3,200 feet from any human occupied structure, what they deem to be a “sensitive receptor.” Within these “health protection zones,” no new wells may be drilled, and only minimal work may be done to maintain existing wells. This effectively kills oil production in all but the most remote and uninhabited areas of the state. It is also an exercise in absurdity, since California’s oil wells are strictly regulated and emit negligible quantities of methane and volatile organic compounds, whereas upwelling reserves of underground gas and oil leak naturally to the surface in prodigious quantities thanks to California’s seismically active geology. The only way to stop this leakage is to deplete the reservoirs with drilling and extraction.
Understanding Paylines and Reels: An Online Slots Guide for Beginners
When you first encounter an online slot machine, the spinning symbols and flashing lights can make the underlying mechanics seem more complicated than they actually are. In reality, modern online slots operate according to a small set of structural principles that, once understood, make the entire experience far more transparent. Two of the most fundamental concepts are reels and paylines — the building blocks that determine how symbols are displayed and how winning combinations are formed. Getting a clear grasp of these mechanics before wagering real money is not just useful; it changes the way you interact with every game you play.
What Reels Are and How They Work
A reel is a vertical column that displays a set of symbols after each spin. In the earliest mechanical slot machines, invented in the late 19th century, reels were literal spinning drums with physical stops. Charles Fey’s Liberty Bell machine from 1895 used three physical reels, each containing five symbols. That three-reel format dominated for nearly a century before digital technology changed the industry entirely.
In online slots, reels are simulated by software using a Random Number Generator (RNG). The RNG produces thousands of number sequences per second, and the moment you press spin, the current sequence determines which symbols land on each reel. The physical appearance of spinning is purely visual — the outcome is already determined before the animation completes. This is an important distinction because it means no spin is influenced by the previous one, and there is no pattern to exploit.
Most online slots use either three or five reels, but the format has expanded considerably since the mid-2000s. Six-reel and seven-reel configurations exist, and some developers have moved away from the reel concept entirely, using grid-based layouts instead. NetEnt’s Gonzo’s Quest, released in 2011, was among the first widely successful games to replace traditional spinning reels with an avalanche mechanic, where symbols fall into place rather than spin. This distinction matters because it affects how paylines function and how wins are calculated.
The number of rows visible on screen also interacts with reels. A standard five-reel, three-row slot shows fifteen symbol positions at once. Expanding this to a five-reel, four-row configuration increases visible positions to twenty, which directly expands the number of possible payline paths across the grid.
Paylines: Fixed, Variable, and Beyond
A payline is a predetermined path across the reels along which matching symbols must land for a win to be awarded. On early three-reel machines, there was typically just one payline — a straight horizontal line across the middle row. As reel configurations expanded, so did payline structures. By the early 2000s, five-reel video slots with nine, fifteen, or twenty paylines were standard. Today, games routinely offer 243, 1,024, or even 117,649 ways to win, which are not technically paylines in the traditional sense but function on the same principle of counting symbol combinations across adjacent reels.
Fixed paylines are active on every spin regardless of your bet size. Variable paylines allow players to choose how many lines to activate, though betting on fewer lines reduces coverage and can mean missing wins that land on inactive paths. Neither format is inherently better — they represent different approaches to risk and bet management.
The shift toward “ways to win” systems, pioneered largely by Microgaming and IGT in the mid-2000s, removed the concept of specific line paths altogether. In a 243-ways game, a win is awarded whenever matching symbols appear on consecutive reels starting from the leftmost reel, regardless of their row position. This approach eliminates the possibility of a “near miss” on a deactivated line and tends to produce more frequent, smaller wins. Anyone working through an Online Slots Guide for Beginners will encounter this distinction early, since understanding ways-to-win versus traditional paylines affects how you interpret the paytable and calculate potential returns.
Megaways mechanics, developed by Big Time Gaming and first introduced in 2016 with Dragon Born, take this further by randomizing the number of rows per reel on each spin. With up to seven symbols per reel across six reels, this creates up to 117,649 possible ways to win on a single spin. The number changes dynamically, which means the game’s volatility profile shifts from spin to spin. By 2021, over 200 licensed Megaways titles had been released by various developers, making it one of the most commercially replicated mechanics in the industry.
Reading a Paytable and Understanding Return to Player
Every licensed online slot is required to display a paytable, which lists the value of each symbol combination and explains any special features. Regulators in jurisdictions such as the UK (under the Gambling Commission), Malta (under the MGA), and Gibraltar require paytables to be accurate and accessible. The paytable is not a marketing document — it is a technical specification for the game’s payout structure, and reading it carefully before playing is one of the most practical habits a new player can develop.
Closely related to the paytable is the Return to Player (RTP) percentage. RTP represents the theoretical proportion of total wagered money that a slot is programmed to return to players over a statistically significant number of spins — typically expressed over millions of rounds. A game with a 96% RTP will, in theory, return €96 for every €100 wagered across its lifetime. This does not mean you will receive €96 back on a €100 session; variance means individual sessions can deviate dramatically from the theoretical average. The UK Gambling Commission has required operators to display RTP figures clearly since 2021, following a broader push for consumer transparency.
Volatility, sometimes called variance, describes how a game distributes its wins. Low-volatility slots pay out smaller amounts more frequently, while high-volatility slots pay out larger amounts less often. A game with 96% RTP can be low or high volatility — the RTP alone does not tell you how the wins are distributed. Understanding both figures together gives a more complete picture of what to expect during a session.
Hit frequency is a third metric worth noting. It measures how often a spin results in any payout, expressed as a percentage. A hit frequency of 25% means roughly one in four spins produces a win of some kind, though many of those wins may be smaller than the original bet. Developers do not always publish hit frequency figures, but some jurisdictions are beginning to require greater disclosure as part of responsible gambling frameworks.
Reels and paylines are not arbitrary features — they are the structural foundation on which every other element of an online slot is built. Bonus rounds, multipliers, and special symbols all interact with the base reel and payline configuration in ways that only become clear once you understand the underlying framework. Knowing how RNG-driven reels work, how paylines or ways-to-win determine outcomes, and how to read an RTP alongside volatility gives you the analytical tools to evaluate any game on its actual merits rather than its visual presentation. This kind of informed approach is what separates a player who understands the game from one who is simply reacting to it.
Four active lawsuits challenge SB 1137. They are NOPEC v. California, Monte Beard Sr. et al. v. State of California, Morgan v. Ito, and United States v. California. These lawsuits seek to overturn SB 1137 on various grounds. They challenge the claim that methane and VOCs cause health harm, especially at a distance of 3,200 feet. They assert the economic harm caused by prohibiting wells within the setback radius is an unconstitutional taking without compensation. And the U.S. lawsuit seeks to invalidate SB 1137 because it is preempted by federal law and, where applicable, is an unconstitutional interference with leases of federal land.
In another set of lawsuits the oil industry is challenging the ongoing state ban on well stimulation, or fracking. The ban is enforced despite the fact that California’s geology often requires fracking to extract oil and is structured so the underground impacts of fracking are tightly contained in close proximity to the well. These lawsuits include Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Governor Gavin Newsom, TRC Cypress Group v. DOC and CalGEM, and others.
Also consequential are the lawsuits attempting to reverse the City of Los Angeles’s new Oil and Gas Drilling Ordinance that prohibits new oil and gas extraction and makes existing activities a “nonconforming use” in all zones. Los Angeles County, with an estimated 5 billion barrels of recoverable crude still underground, has the highest density of oil per square mile in the world. And as previously noted, the only way to prevent natural seeps of methane and VOCs is to drill for that oil and deplete those reservoirs. In what ought to be a public service in the interests of improving air quality in the Los Angeles Basin, the following lawsuits are active: Warren E&P Inc, et al v. City of Los Angeles, and Termo Company, Matrix Oil, NOPEC v. LA County.
There’s much more active litigation, both for and against California’s oil industry, but these are some of the most significant cases. It may be in the courtroom, instead of the legislature, where the possibility of California returning to a rational energy policy may find its greatest potential.
Edward Ring is the Director of Water and Energy Policy at the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
