The Center for American Institutions examines issue confronting the state of Arizona. Our goal is to go behind the headlines to better inform the citizens of our state.
Thanks, California! Why Gas Prices in Arizona and the West Are Pushed Up by California Policies
Arizona relies heavily on California for its gasoline supply. California provides a third of our state’s gasoline, mostly in Maricopa County. The high price of California gasoline directly affects our state. What happens in California lands in Arizona.
California has the highest prices at the pump, nearly $2 more per gallon than the national average.
California’s high energy prices are a policy choice. In 2000, 23 refineries operated in the state. At the end of 2026, only 11refineries will be left, with only 5 of them producing large quantities of transportation fuels.
Source: Stillwater Associates
If the California Air Resources Board has its way, more refineries may be forced to close. Under the state’s Cap-and-Invest program, CARB has proposed reducing the carbon emissions limits refineries operate under. They would be required to either reduce emissions or purchase expensive offsets.
Marathon and Chevron warn that the proposed rules call into question whether “operations in California remain viable."
If more refineries close, California can’t simply import gas from other states without connecting pipelines. Furthermore, California requires specific “boutique” blends.
California could exploit its own copious oil resources (its proven reserve of heavy oil, an important component of gas, diesel, jet fuel, and numerous other products is second to Venezuela’s) and refine under its characteristically strict labor and environmental oversight. Instead, the state has made the environmentally-dubious decision to import fuel produced without such oversight over thousands of miles, sending more carbon into the atmosphere.
As a result, California imports gas from as far away as South Korea and India to make up shortfalls.
With the apparent goal of attacking climate change through policies that target fossil fuels, California is poised to add to its carbon footprint by ruining its domestic industry.
We might shrug this off as just desserts: Californians are getting what they voted for.
But no one in Arizona or Nevada voted for these policies. Yet we are paying the price for California green mania to supposedly save the planet.
While California pays the most for gas, Arizona remains in the top ten in gasoline prices. This is despite Arizona’s fourth-from-the bottom state gas tax.
Arizona has negligible oil reserves and no refineries. Thirty-three percent of Arizona’s gas travels by pipeline from California, terminating in Phoenix. The state is also served by a pipeline originating in Texas that terminates in Tucson.
Source: Stillwater Associates
States that depend on California supply are naturally worried about further environmental policies that will drive up prices in their states. In 2024, Republican Governor Joe Lombardo of Nevada and Governor Katie Hobbs of Arizona sent a joint letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom urging him to delay a plan requiring gas companies to hold stockpiles. Nevada and Arizona argued that California’s plan will further drive up prices and hurt economic growth in their states.
Is Help on the Way?
Arizona’s energy access and prices can improve. Here are a few changes on the horizon:
California could pull back, at least a little, from its suicidal policies. There have been small steps in this direction. Governor Newsom has delayed new oversight measures for refineries and signed a bill increasing oil production in Kern County. Meanwhile, opposition to the new CARB regulations persists in California as well as in neighboring states.
To alleviate price spikes and supply issues (California imports crude oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq among other sources), the Trump Administration has ordered the restart of offshore drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara. Governor Newsom has vowed to sue to stop the project.
For Arizona and Nevada, being held hostage by Sacramento is not the best course in energy policy in the long run. Promising plans to diversify supply have been proposed:
A pipeline connecting new Texas supply to Arizona has a projected completion date of 2029. While drawing criticism from environmental nonprofits, the permitting process is going forward.
The Western Gateway Pipeline can be expanded further. A joint project of Phillips 66 and Kinder-Morgan, it can connect Midwestern refineries to California. Originating in Illinois, the gas, diesel, and jet fuel would travel through parts of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada, with the possibility of using existing pipelines in reverse to ship fuel to California.
With the Trump Administration’s enthusiasm for energy projects and apparent buy-in from the Apache Nation, which owns the land required for one section of new pipeline in New Mexico, the Western Gateway might avoid being stuck in legal purgatory of endless permitting fights and litigation that has stymied energy projects in the past.
Since 1997, Maricopa County and part of Pinal County have required special clean-burning fuels. Changing this, however, requires federal EPA approval.
The need for solutions to the supply of transportation fuels – and natural gas, which can help power the growing data-center industry hogs – is obvious and pressing.
Removing the stranglehold of California on Arizona is a must for our state’s economic growth.
Behind the anti-ICE, pro-Hamas, anti-Iran war, and some No Kings protests in Arizona (and across the nation) rests the pro-Maoist Party of Socialism and Liberation. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a pro-Maoist communist party funded with millions of dollars by Shanghai-based American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham. Singham has close ties with the Chinese Communist Party. PSL lists on its website over a hundred chapters located in nearly every state of the union.
PSL is ready at a moment’s notice to stage a protest as soon as a news story drops. These protests might be about ICE enforcement, the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, abortion restrictions, or American action against the communist governments in Venezuela and Cuba.
To a dedicated core of protesters, the issue doesn’t matter so long as it can be spun as anti-capitalist and anti-Western. While some protesters join because they are motivated by a specific issue, for the PSL, the revolutionary overthrow of American capitalism and political institutions is the ultimate goal.
The PSL runs candidates for office, but the party’s power rests in organizing street protests and disruptive demonstrations. Examples include:
- In February, 2025, the Phoenix chapter of the PSL, led a series of anti-ICE protests across Maricopa County, including a march to the state house. PSL leaders, Lexia Isais, a public-school teacher, and her comrade, Jordan Napier organized the march on the state house “No one is illegal! Viva Mexico!” Napier shouted. Organizers arranged similar marches in Flagstaff. Isais got her start in PSL activism as an Arizona State University (ASU) student. PSL remains active today at ASU. In 2024, it led the construction of an encampment – the “ASU Liberated Zone" – on the Tempe campus in solidarity with Hamas.
Source: The State Press
- Highway shutdowns are a specialty. In 2016, they organized the shutdown of a road to block access to a rally for then-candidate Donald Trump in Fountain Hills. Whether PSL was involved in a road closure and general chaos at an anti-illegal immigration enforcement rally in Glendale in 2025 is unclear from media reports, but it fits the pattern.
- PSL cultivates college campus memberships. The University of Arizona also sported an encampment, while members of the PSL chapter chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” at a rally denouncing Israeli actions in Lebanon, American capitalism, and Western imperialism everywhere.
- PSL strongly continues to support the brutal Maduro regime in Venezuela. Protests against Maduro’s capture to stand trial in the United States drew few if any Venezuelans, who were thrilled to see the dictator removed from power. Protesters also rallied to the defense of the Iranian government at the start of the American Epic Fury campaign. In contrast Iranians turned up as counter-protesters.
- PSL member Dania Duran was one of the organizers of the ICE Out protest at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. At a time of public concern about long security lines because of the government shutdown, the stunt was an airport version of blocking traffic, since their presence could add to delays. The protest was sure to make the local mainstream news, even if travelers were annoyed. In this case and others, the PSL minimized its visibility to the public. The public-facing organizing group – the one more likely to generate quotes in mainstream press – was the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. It is funded through left-wing sources.
- Unlike the Democratic Socialists of America, the PSL does not believe that working within the Democratic Party is a viable strategy to gain power. PSL organized a march at a campaign appearance by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Kept outside of the venue, they shouted about how the ticket was insufficiently opposed to Isreal.
The PSL does not publish membership totals, but mass membership is not its goal. PSI considers itself a vanguard party with a tight cadre of dedicated revolutionaries.
The party follows the Leninist doctrine of a disciplined revolutionary party spelled out in his lengthy pamphlet "What Is to Be Done?” published in 1901. Lenin believed a centralized, disciplined party was necessary for communist revolution. As self-proclaimed vanguard party, PSL is organized as a centralist party in which all members are bound to defend and act on the party’s program. Members who don't follow the party line are expelled.
Why PSL Matters
The PSL’s instant disruptive protests on most any leftist issue is obviously within their First Amendment rights, even if they dismiss the Constitution as a capitalist farce.
Their funding and connections to Chinese Communist Party groups are what should alarm us.
The PSL collects dues from members, but the real money comes through Neville Roy Singham, a tech billionaire who cashed out his business fortune to focus on his political passions. From his office in Shanghai, he funds left-wing, pro-Chinese groups in the United States as well as India, South America, Great Britain, and Africa.
Singham shares office space with a Chinese media group, with a link so seamless “It can be hard to tell where Maku begins and Mr. Singham’s groups end.” It is a connection that goes back to at least 2019.
How much Singham contributes to the PSL is impossible to track.
In a five-part series that documented the Singham network, Fox News estimated the spending of the total Singham network at $401 million between 2017 and 2025.
Money that has been partially entangled with investment in Chinese companies and until recently passed through an untraceable Goldman Sacks donor-advised fund among other dodges that maximize opacity, makes it way to nonprofits with blandly positive names.
The core group includes The People’s Forum, the Justice and Education Fund, the United Community Fund, The Progress Unity Fund, and BreakThrough Media (BT Media). Some exist only as post office boxes in UPS stores.
Media Matters
In media outreach, for example, Ben Becker, a founder of PSL, started BT Media in 2020. As the Network Contagion Research Institute reports, PSL dominates the key offices and editorial team of BT News. They include:
- Claudia De la Cruz – BT Media’s Secretary and Director, as well as PSL’s candidate for the 2024 Presidential election.
- Karla Reyes – BT Media’s Chair and Director and De la Cruz’s 2024 PSL Presidential campaign running mate.
- Yari Osorio – BT Media’s Treasurer and Director and PSL’s 2012 Vice-Presidential candidate.
“The degree of overlap between BT Media and PSL on their executive and editorial teams is so significant,” the NCRI concludes, “that one can easily conclude that the former is functionally serving as a mouthpiece for the latter.” BT Media is now a multimedia outlet for anti-Western content.
The People's Dispatch published an approving story about No Kings rallies that even included an X post from the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. “Welcome to the party we started 47 years ago, No kings. This is the people of Iran, and we approve this message. #NoKings.” The People’s Dispatch weirdly characterized the 1979 Iranian Revolution as the fruit of class struggle.
Other Singham-funded media connections are much more subtle. The Justice and Education Fund, for example, has supported The Independent Media Institute. Through that grant, writers for such publications as Teen Vogue, Salon, and Food and Wine wind up in the Singham network.
Demonstration Discord
Agitation and maximum public chaos is PSL’s core business, part of Singham’s “transnational protest and media machine.”
With PSL as the networking hub, other groups, some basically hashtags for a temporary cause, demonstrators and pre-printed signs appear as if by magic.
PSL, with its siblings, the ANSWER Coalition, the People’s Forum, and Code Pink (Singham’s wife, Jodie Evans was a co-founder) reliably advance the views and interest of China. Code Pink was once critical of human rights abuses in China. Evans is now the co-author of China Is Not Our Enemy.
At a February 2026 Ways and Means committee hearing on foreign influence in America’s tax-exempt sector, Adam Sohn, Co-founder of Narravance, a social media research and intelligence firm, concluded:
“The ANSWER Coalition and the Party for Socialism and Liberation mobilize the protesters. The People’s Forum trains and coordinates the activists. BreakThrough News handles messaging and media amplification. The impact of this money is ongoing: federal property vandalized at Union Station; American flags burned and police officers assaulted. Airports blocked at JFK and LAX. Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges shut down. Ambulances and commuters disrupted. Wall Street blockaded; holiday commerce halted at Macy’s Herald Square; and immigration and law enforcement facilities targeted. This is not grassroots protest. It is a repeatable system for paralyzing American infrastructure on demand, financed through U.S. tax law, and aligned with a hostile foreign power. It is an active vulnerability we cannot afford to leave intact.”
In multiple decisions, the United States Supreme Court upheld the right for free speech for communist and radical agitators. The Center for American Institutions supports this right for free speech. Citizens though have a right to know that Arizona popup protests are not spontaneous expressions of widespread public discontent. The Arizona mainstream media has an obligation to report the news truthfully.