Crude reality: One U.S. state consumes half the oil from the Amazon rainforest

This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.

Over the past 50 years, oil companies have extracted immense amounts of crude from the Amazon, causing the destruction of rainforest crucial to slowing climate change and jeopardizing the Indigenous tribes who rely on it.Carlos Noriega for NBC News “This is no longer one of those things where we’re supposed to have sympathy for a crisis that’s happening somewhere else,” said Angeline Robertson, a senior researcher at Stand.earth and the lead author of the report. “It’s occurring in California, and it’s linked to Amazon destruction.”Oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon began in the 1960s with the promise of bringing prosperity to the coastal South American nation.

Oil exploration began here in the 1970s, but in 2007 then-President Rafael Correa proposed a novel plan to protect the rainforest from drilling. He called on the international community to donate about $3.5 billion — roughly half of the revenue Ecuador estimated it would have earned from mining the oil under Yasuní. But the plan was abandoned six years later, after Ecuador raised less than 10 percent of the target figure.

“It’s a recipe for climate disaster to be looking for new oil and felling standing forest to get at it,” Koenig said. “It’s sort of a double whammy that everybody should be really worried about.” “The contamination can reach a circumference of 300 meters [330 yards], and this affects the groundwater and rivers used by nearby communities,” Solis said.

Ecuador has sold oil exploration rights in and around Yasuní National Park to a consortium of Chinese state-owned oil companies despite fierce opposition from Indigenous groups and environmentalists. Last year alone some 70 million barrels of oil from the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador flowed to the U.S., making it the largest global consumer by far. Panama was second followed by Chile and China , according to the report.

The report’s researchers tracked shipments of oil from beneath the Amazon to the U.S. and beyond by combing through records from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United Nations Comtrade database and import/export databases for Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and the U.S.

pulitzercenter I thought the US was energy independent. Making more than enough to even export some.

pulitzercenter Woke CA killing the rain forest. Go figure.

pulitzercenter Lives

pulitzercenter DBChirpy please clarify, is the oil purchased by State of California or via oil companies and then it goes through California refineries the oil companies own?

pulitzercenter California

pulitzercenter 'The report found that on average 1 in every 7 tanks of gas, diesel or jet fuel pumped in southern California last year came from the Amazon rainforest. Among the top 25 largest corporate consumers are companies such as Costco, PepsiCo and Amazon, according to the report.'

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