Editor’s note:  Tom Steyer, a hedge fund billionaire, is funding efforts to impose a severance tax on oil production in California. The following is a response from the President of Western States Petroleum Association

By Catherine Reheis-Boyd

Tom Steyer, the San Francisco billionaire environmentalist, has launched a campaign to increase taxes on energy production in California. He thinks oil companies are allowed to “siphon California resources without providing any meaningful return to Californians.” Beginning an education campaign on inaccurate claims doesn’t bode well for the quality of the educational experience.

To claim Californians receive no meaningful return for the oilwe produce is puzzling. Oil companies in California generate $6 billion in tax revenues for state and local governments, according to an analysis by Purvin & Gertz in 2011.

While it’s true California does not have an oil severance tax per se, California taxes oil companies and oil production in a variety of other ways.

We have the highest corporate income tax in the United States. Texas, an oil-producing state with an oil severance tax, has no state income tax.

We have high sales taxes. Alaska, another oil producing state with a severance tax, has no state sales tax.

And California assesses oil-producing property based on the present value of the oil in the ground, meaning oil in California is taxed whether it’s extracted or not.

Only a billionaire would claim California is a low-tax state.

Steyer also appears confused about who owns the oil. When oil companies produce oil from state lands, they pay the state royalties in addition to taxes. Last year, royalty payments to California exceeded $500 million. Additionally, oil companies pay billions in royalties to private individuals who own mineral rights — all of which generate additional taxes.

Steyer also ignored the benefits derived by the more than 330,000 people whose jobs are directly and indirectly linked to the petroleum industry in California. Oil production jobs are typically high paying jobs. High paying jobs in the San Joaquin Valley, where most of California’s oil is produced, are badly needed in a part of the state with chronic poverty and high unemployment.

Study after study has shown that increasing taxes on oil production almost certainly will result in production shifting to other, lower tax locations. This type of tax policy puts California energy at a competitive disadvantage and penalizes California workers. Declining oil production means fewer jobs for Californiansand more reliance on imported oil.

California produces slightly more than a third of the oil we in California need every day. The balance is imported, almost all of it in tankers, and much of it from countries hostile to U.S. interests. Reduced California oil production also results in increased greenhouse gas emissions from the tankers transporting the oil we need.

Steyer noted that Alaska under Republican Gov. Sarah Palin increased its oil severance tax in 2007. What he didn’t mention is that Alaska in 2013 reduced those taxes because they had dramatically reduced production and investment in Alaska.

Some of this might sound familiar to you. Rarely a year has gone by since 2006 when a severance tax has not been threatened or proposed for California. Fortunately, after considering the facts and full implications, those proposals all have been defeated.

What is different about Steyer’s effort is that, by all accounts, he is willing to spend some of his billions to persuade you that he knows what is best for you.

He has been the leading cheerleader and financier of efforts to block Canada’s oil from being brought to U.S. consumers in the Keystone XL pipeline. He is the co-founder of Next Generation, a group dedicated to pursing climate-change policies. And he has spent millions to influence elections across the country.

But to say Californians receive no benefit from oil production here isnot only inaccurate, it is a terrible disservice to the men and women who produce our state’s energy under some of the strictest environmental controls in the world.

It also displays an appalling lack of sensitivity to the 24 million Californians who need abundant, reliable and affordable fuels to get to work each day, visit the doctor, take vacations, and pursue their aspirations for a better life.

Catherine Reheis-Boyd is the president of the Western States Petroleum Association.