BRAZIL GOT OFF OIL IN THE LAST 30 YEARS? Liberal commentator Bill Maher was clearly out of his league Sunday at a roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week."

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=19297

Liberal commentator Bill Maher was clearly out of his league Sunday at a roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week." He made the absurd claim that Brazil "got off oil 30 years ago," only to be corrected by a much more knowledgeable George Will, a conservative newspaper columnist for the Washington Post.

Indeed, the idea that Brazil got off oil 30 years ago cannot be farther from the truth, says PolitiFact.com:

Brazil is one of the largest producers of ethanol in the world and is the largest exporter of the fuel.
Additionally, more than half of all cars in Brazil are flexible-fuel capable, which means they can run on 100 percent ethanol or an ethanol-gasoline mixture.
However, even though Brazil aggressively uses biofuels, and invests quite a bit in hydroelectric power, it still produces and consumes a lot of oil.
In 2008, Brazil ranked No. 7 on the list of the world's countries that consume the most oil, using about 2.5 million barrels per day; in first place was the United States at 19.5 million barrels per day, followed by China, Japan, India, Russia, and Germany.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that Brazil will become a net exporter of oil this year.
According to the Oil and Gas Journal:

Brazil had 12.6 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in 2009, second largest in South America after Venezuela.
In 2008, Brazil produced 2.4 million barrels per day (bbl/d) of oil, of which 76 percent was crude oil.
Brazil's oil production has risen steadily in recent years, with the country's oil production in 2008 about 150,000 bbl/d (6 percent) higher than 2007.
Because of this rising oil production and flat consumption growth, the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects that Brazil will become a net oil exporter in 2009.
Despite Brazil's ethanol expansion, cars there still burn a huge amount of oil-related product.
Potentially even more embarrassing for Maher, the Obama administration is funding some of Brazil's offshore production, the Wall Street Journal reported last August.