BELÉM, Brazil — 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 U.N. climate talks, that talking point is sticking.

“Awareness has been raised, and I think this trip will raise awareness even more,” said state Sen. Josh Becker, a Bay Area clean-energy advocate who met with Indigenous activists from the Brazilian and Ecuadorian Amazon while at the talks in Brazil last week.

Even as the conference gave Gov. Gavin Newsom and the other Californians a largely warm welcome, it also exposed the awkward reality of 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 U.N. security.

California’s refineries get roughly 30 percent of their oil supplies from the Amazon-region nations of Brazil, Ecuador and Guyana, some of which they go on to sell to neighboring states, according to the California Energy Commission. Brazil alone supplied about 20 percent of the state’s imported foreign crude last year, overtaking Saudi Arabia and trailing only Iraq, according to the data.

Most of Brazil’s production is offshore and Guyana’s is entirely offshore, not in the rainforest itself. But the optics have only sharpened as Brazil pushes to drill at the mouth of the Amazon at the same time as it hosts the climate talks and Ecuador, the main source of Amazonian oil, advances new oil auctions in its rainforest despite opposition from Indigenous groups.

In-state critics have seized on the contrast: Conservative commentator and GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton urged U.N. climate conference organizers last week not to grant Newsom a speaking slot because of California’s oil imports from the region.

Hilton wrote in a letter that “to have Gavin Newsom lecture the world on climate justice while his administration promotes the decimation of the Amazon would be an insult to the conference and its members.” (Hilton didn’t get a response from the organizers, according to a spokesperson.)

California Democrats have long dismissed the argument that importing oil from the Amazon harms the environment as merely a justification to boost in-state drilling. But one of the people who’s made that argument most loudly, Bakersfield Republican state Sen. Shannon Grove, found new allies this year.

She partnered with Becker on a Senate resolution supporting Indigenous communities resisting crude extraction in the Amazon, SR 51, earlier this year. The resolution passed unanimously, with support from in-state environmental groups — a far greater success than Grove’s past attempts at legislation to curb California’s oil imports from the Amazon.

A few things contributed to that: activists from the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon pressed their case, traveling to California this summer to meet lawmakers in Sacramento and protesting in kayaks near the Chevron refinery in Richmond. But also, in-state refineries announced they would close, raising fears of a spike in gas prices — and making lawmakers more sensitive to arguments about where the state’s remaining fuel supply comes from.

“We started this process of really looking holistically at the fuel transition, and part of that is, ‘Let’s get off of oil from the Amazon,’” said Becker.

Against this backdrop, California oil producers also scored their first major win in years with this year’s SB 237, which paves the way for more drilling in Kern County. It marked a major turnaround from just a few years ago, when lobbyists for California oil producers circulated an image of a sloth from the Ecuadorian jungle to urge lawmakers to vote against a state bill requiring a 3,200-foot buffer between new oil wells and neighborhoods, arguing it would increase the state’s reliance on out-of-state oil from environmentally sensitive areas. The pitch was met largely with ridicule from Democrats and in-state environmentalists, who not only passed the law but successfully batted back an oil industry attempt to overturn it at the ballot.

Kevin Koenig of the environmental nonprofit Amazon Watch, which opposed SB 237, said the group was not seeking any partnership with California oil producers. “There’s no sort of strategy of ours that involves a strange-bedfellow scenario where we’re looking to ally with industry,” he said. “We really try to have a united front on the need to get off fossil fuels, whether that’s the Amazon or California.”

What comes next: California oil producers are focused on the future of the state’s refineries, while Amazon Watch and its allies are pushing lawmakers to turn the resolution into a formal task force on Amazon-related extraction and California’s role in it. Becker said he has a few more ideas on how to transition California’s fuel supply, like possibly getting rid of a California-specific gasoline blend or finding alternatives to promote electric vehicles.

But none, he said, include further increasing crude oil extraction within California. And Newsom, while in Brazil, dismissed Trump’s reported plans to open the waters off the coast of California to more oil as “dead on arrival.”

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