Bill Clinton is Misleading Californians on Prop. 87

Bill Clinton has been appearing in ads for Prop. 87, the ballot proposition that will add $4 billion in taxes to oil drilled in California. Clinton's ads suggest that Prop. 87 and its billions in taxes will generate all sorts of alternative fuels and will help California become free from imported oil, because as the ad suggests, Brazil did it.

Maybe Bill needs to check the facts about what really went on in Brazil:

Bill Clinton's back, now touting tax hikes for ethanol to California voters. "If Brazil can do it, so can we," he said, claiming an ethanol switch ended Brazil's need for foreign oil. Once again, he's telling whoppers.

Brazil did achieve independence from foreign oil all right. It happened this past April. But Clinton, true to form, doesn't quite recall the critical point showing how it was done.

Here's a clue for the semi-retired former president and policy wonk: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva didn't celebrate the oil independence milestone out in an Amazon sugar field.

No, he smashed a champagne bottle on the spaceship-like deck of Brazil's vast P-50 oil rig in the Albacora Leste field in the deep blue Atlantic. Why? Brazil's oil independence had virtually nothing to do with its ethanol development. It came from drilling oil.


Which is the very thing Clinton, in his Proposition 87 television ads, seeks to pile taxes on...

"Imagine if we stop being dependent on foreign oil. Brazil did it. They made a simple switch to their cars. Switched to ethanol, grown from their own crops. And it's 33% cheaper than gas," Clinton said, neglecting one key detail: cars must use three times as much ethanol as gas.

"With Proposition 87, we can switch to cleaner fuels, wind and solar power," he says in a political ad, "and free ourselves from foreign oil. If Brazil can do it, so can California."

But as a matter of fact, that's not what Brazil did.

It launched a crash program of offshore oil drilling in the late 1990s, working with a Manhattan Project-like determination to develop its own natural resources.

In 1997, Brazil opened its oil sector to foreign competition, encouraging companies like Royal Dutch Shell to explore and drill for oil in its offshore waters for the first time. It offered incentives — like tax cuts. It also turned its inefficient state oil company, Petrobras, into a for-profit company run like a real business instead of a government cash cow, forcing it to compete on an international-standard level. In short, it got out of the way.

Net result, lots more oil for Brazil — enough to enable the once-oil-dependent country to actually export some, all from fewer energy reserves than the U.S.

I haven't seen any polls on Prop. 87, but the Clinton ads are running almost nonstop. They've even knocked the Al Gore ads out of rotation.

Let's hope that Clinton's history of "flexibility" when it comes to the truth will keep the voters from believing his rhetoric.