California would do well to imitate the energy policy of Brazil, whose president Dilma Rousseff is visiting Washington, D.C., this week, says Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR).
California, if it were a country, used to count as the world’s eighth largest economy, he and ATR colleague Patrick Gleason write on
Politico. But now Brazil has surpassed it, according to the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.
“Many factors affect economic growth, but the vast difference in Brazil and California’s energy policy and how they use their natural resources — both have rich oil reserves off their long coastlines — provides the quintessential example of how California’s anti-growth policies have accelerated its slide and Brazil’s ascent in global economic rankings,” the duo maintain.
Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his party’s lawmakers, who control the state legislature, refuse to contemplate drilling for the state’s plentiful offshore oil and natural gas reserves. As a result, the state is passing up more than 86,000 additional jobs by 2020, according to a 2011 Wood MacKenzie study.
While California’s oil production has steadily dropped since the mid-1980s, “Brazil has moved to fully use its recent offshore oil discoveries, the largest found in the Americas in more than 30 years,” Norquist and Gleason write. “In fact, Brazilian oil output has increased tenfold over the last three decades.”
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