Be envenitos. That's California for welcome to the Thanksgiving edition of National Review's Radio Free California Podcast. We're thankful for you. I'm Will Swain,

president at the California Policy Center. You can find my colleagues and me at California PolicyCCenter.org. One of those colleagues is Edward Ring. He's one of the

gang of four who founded CPC over 10 years ago, and today, Ed is

inarguably California's leading water and energy policy expert. Just ask me. Ed, welcome to

Radio Free California. Yeah, well, I'm sure I'd have some competition for that title, but thank you

anyway. Well, maybe we can get to that in the show too, because I'd like to know. But last week,

David and I discussed Politico know. But last week, David and I

discussed Politico's really, I think, wonderful account of Gavin Newsom's awkward adventure

during the UN Climate Conference in Brazil. The Politico's story starts this way. It's by a young

reporter named Camille von Canel. He goes, for years, Democrats broadly dismissed as a big oil talking point, the idea that California's consumption of oil from the Amazon drives deforestation.

At this year's UN climate talks, that talking point is sticking.

She goes on to write, even as the conference gave Governor Gavin Newsom and other Californians a largely warm welcome, it also exposed an awkward reality. California's reliance on oil from the Amazon. A flotilla brought indigenous activists protesting oil extraction and agribusiness into the port city of Belém from deep in the Amazon, and a separate group of oil protesters even broke into the

venue and clashed with UN security. Then she goes on to say this, Ed, California refineries get

roughly 30% of their oil from the Amazon region nations of Brazil, Ecuador, and Guyana. Ed,

you've been writing about this for a long time about the kind of the contradiction in California's climate change policy. What's going on there?

Well, she's right about the amount of oil coming from the Amazon, although she's wrong on the percentage. It's 34% of our imported oil, which is an awful lot of our imported oil.

It's actually 21% of all of our oil since we still actually managed to produce some of it right here in state.

And that's still a lot. More than 20% of our oil comes from Ecuador and Brazil.

So, you know, you have to ask yourself, when you look at all these environmentalists that have all of these concerns is, is it possible to extract oil safely from the Amazon?

You know, and that wouldn't be an oil industry talking point unless they, you know, want to acknowledge that it is possible to safely extract oil anywhere,

which is arguable. And then the question simply becomes, well, where could you extract oil

with the least damage to the environment? And that wouldn't be the Amazon. That would be

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