Problem Solvers Caucus Demands Answers as California Fuel Warnings Grow Louder

A new letter from members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus should get Sacramento’s attention, if anyone in Sacramento is still in the habit of paying attention to warning lights on the dashboard before the engine seizes.

In an April 22 letter to California Energy Commission Vice Chair Siva Gunda, Senator Suzette Valladares and Assembly Members David Alvarez, Anamarie Ávila Farías, and Juan Alanis demanded answers about California’s increasingly fragile transportation fuel picture. Their letter is not ideological theater. It is a direct request for basic accountability from the state agency charged with helping ensure fuel reliability. The lawmakers point to tightening inventories, price volatility, dependence on imports, exposure to global disruptions, and the very real consequences for California’s economy and military readiness.

The legislators also highlighted something that should trouble every policymaker in the Capitol: reports required by statute have not been produced on time, leaving the Legislature without the information it specifically ordered state agencies to provide. Among the missing or overdue items are the Transportation Fuels Transition Plan and other analyses meant to inform lawmakers as California barrels deeper into an energy transition without a spare tire in the trunk.

That concern tracks closely with the case CIPA has been making all year.

For months, CIPA has been warning that California is treating its in-state oil and gas sector like an unwelcome guest while depending on the products that sector helps make possible. The state continues to squeeze local production, burden existing operators, and make refinery investment harder, all while pretending fuel supply will somehow remain affordable, reliable, and plentiful. It is a policy model built on magical thinking, and magical thinking is no substitute for molecules.

CIPA’s advocacy this year has focused on precisely the issues now surfacing in the Problem Solvers Caucus letter. The association has pushed lawmakers and regulators to recognize that California’s fuel system is not infinitely elastic. Once refining capacity is lost, it is extraordinarily difficult to replace. Once in-state production is forced into decline through regulatory overreach and permitting paralysis, the state becomes more dependent on imported crude and imported finished products. And once California isolates itself with boutique fuel specifications and shrinking infrastructure, every foreign disruption lands harder here than almost anywhere else in the country.

That is why CIPA has spent this year pressing a straightforward message: California needs a serious supply-side strategy, not just a collection of political slogans. CIPA has urged policymakers to confront the consequences of refinery closures, delayed permits, unstable regulatory signals, and policies that increase the cost of producing the very crude oil California refineries still need. The association has also advanced a California-specific federal framework focused on keeping refineries operating, restoring infrastructure, expanding in-state production opportunities, and removing barriers that uniquely punish California producers.

The letter from the Problem Solvers Caucus shows that concern is no longer confined to industry. Lawmakers themselves are now asking whether the state has an emergency plan, whether fuel specifications can be loosened during shortages, whether E15 can be deployed more quickly, whether refinery permitting reform is on the table, and how many days of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel supply California actually has on hand. Those are not abstract policy musings. Those are the questions grown-ups ask when they suspect the cupboard is getting bare.

Assembly Member Anamarie Ávila Farías deserves particular credit here, both for signing onto this fuel-supply letter and for her direct work this year with CIPA as author of AB 2716. Her willingness to engage on the practical consequences of state policy has mattered. At a time when too many lawmakers prefer to posture about the oil industry while ignoring the operational and economic realities of California’s fuel system, Ávila Farías has shown a readiness to deal with facts as they are, not as activists wish them to be. Her work on AB 2716 reflects the same principle that underlies this letter: policy should not make a bad problem worse.

That matters because California does not have the luxury of endless self-inflicted mistakes. The state still consumes enormous volumes of transportation fuel. It still relies on refineries that need stable policy and feedstock. It still depends on producers, workers, pipelines, terminals, and marine logistics to keep the system functioning. And it still has military installations, goods movement corridors, farms, businesses, and families that cannot run on press releases.

The Problem Solvers Caucus letter is useful not only because of the questions it asks, but because of what it implicitly admits: California’s fuel policy has entered dangerous territory. The state cannot regulate, litigate, and moralize its way to fuel security. It cannot declare war on production and then act surprised when supply becomes tighter, prices become more volatile, and imports become more important. It cannot shutter capacity in slow motion and call that resilience.

CIPA welcomes the caucus’s call for answers and encourages the CEC to respond promptly, fully, and honestly. More importantly, the state must stop dodging the larger issue. California needs a transportation fuels strategy grounded in reliability, affordability, infrastructure retention, permitting reform, and continued in-state production, not fantasy. The warning bells are ringing. The only question is whether Sacramento intends to hear them before Californians are left paying even more for the consequences of political vanity masquerading as energy policy.