On the top level: OPEC (a coalition of mostly totalitarian states) can decide to restrict sale of petroleum to only be purchased by states, not private companies. Where that decision could be forced by just a few other states, at gunpoint.

Let me put it this way: why do you think there isn't an OPEC-like private marketplace for uranium? Because states don't want there to be such a thing. States make themselves an oligopsony for the purchase of uranium, and then regulate its distribution to only parties they want to have it. And people generally like it that way.

(Also, the president of the United States is a bad example of what a country's executive's powers generally are, because federalism. Most other heads of states can just make a decree like that.)

But state action is a less-likely scenario, and also not the one I was really imagining. The more likely scenario is local action — i.e. a mayor enacting a bylaw for their municipality such that gas stations that don't regulate sale of gasoline would be blocked from operating within city limits. (And sure, you could drive outside the city limits to get gas... but presuming the metropolitan area is large enough, you might burn the whole tank just getting back home after doing that.)

A mayor does have that power. They need no referendum, no legislature, to pass such a bylaw. They merely need the people to be okay-enough with the action to not impeach them in response. (In fact, technically, you don't even need the bylaw. Businesses only operate on physical commercially-zoned properties in cities at the city's sufferance; a city government is free to revoke a given business's ability to operate on such property at any time, for no reason. A city can un-make the zone a business is operating under, and replace it with a new zone that has different rules, that then exclude that business. This happens all the time!)

From there, it spreads not by coordinated action, but just by other city governments seeing the idea and copying it.

People are ok with Uranium being controlled because they know that in a concentrated form it is hazardous and they have no use for it in their daily lives. Oil and gas are the complete opposite, they're safe enough for anyone to handle and they are incredibly useful for just about everything you do in your life. If you just tear those away from people without replacing them with something better then at best those people will vote you out or just leave the area you govern for somewhere else. If you make it so they can't do either of those then congratulations you've just created a totalitarian police state with unelected leaders and guards at the borders that shoot you if you try to leave.

> That the government decides it. But in a democracy, that takes coordinated action too. The president does not have the constitutional authority to decree "no more sales of gasoline for passenger vehicles".

California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington are going for it: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/states-banning-new-gas-po...

That's very different from "stop letting them buy gas" - It doesn't punish people for continuing their current standard of living nor forcibly reduce it and it doesn't immediately destroy the value of gasoline passenger vehicles, in fact it may increase them unless charging infrastructure catches up in those places.

No they aren't (or at least that's not what your link says). They are banning sales of new gas-powered passenger vehicles but for the foreseeable future you will still be able to buy gas for your old beater, '67 Mustang, or red Barchetta.