Arizona’s skyrocketing gas prices once again reached record highs Tuesday, as the state’s average price per gallon nears $5.00.
According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), the average price for a gallon of gas in the Grand Canyon State was $4.95. One year ago, it was $3.12 per gallon.
Maricopa County, home to the cities of Phoenix and Scottsdale, has the highest average gas price in the state, at $5.26 per gallon. Scottsdale is averaging the highest gas prices of any city in Arizona, at $5.33 per gallon.
Less than two weeks ago, The Arizona Sun Times reported that gas prices in Phoenix had reached $5.00 per gallon for the first time in the city’s history. Tuesday, that price was $5.23 per gallon.
The Gas Misery Index tracks how much more money the average American family will spend on gas annually as prices rise. As of May 25, the index estimates that the average Arizonan family will spend a whopping $917 more for gas in 2022 than it did in 2021.
Arizona keeps pace with the rest of the nation.
Nationally, the average price for a gallon of gas has hit a record high every day for the past two weeks.
While the price of gas has increased steadily throughout President Joe Biden’s tenure in office, it has spiked since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Biden has attempted to blame Russia, and specifically Russian President Vladimir Putin, for price hikes.
“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has driven up gas prices and food prices all over the world,” Biden said in April. “So everything is going up. We saw it in today’s inflation data. Seventy percent of the increase in prices in March came from Putin’s price hike in gasoline.”
But his administration has exacerbated the issue by banning imports on oil from Russia, which accounted for about three percent of total oil imports, and cancelled new American oil leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “Gas Prices in California” by Amit Patel. CC BY-SA 2.0.
