United States | Program Assistant, Energy, Climate Change & Extractive Industries , Inter-American Dialogue
Nate Graham joined the Inter-American Dialogue in 2018 as the program assistant for Energy, Climate Change & Extractive Industries. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. in political science and economics and a minor in environmental studies. While at Washington University, Nate spent a semester studying at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and interning at the US Foreign Commercial Service in Santiago, where he focused on the mining and automotive sectors. His articles on energy and climate policy in Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil have been published in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, World Politics Review, and Americas Quarterly. He speaks English and Spanish and has intermediate proficiency in Portuguese.
Revitalizing Brazil’s energy sector will be key to Jair Bolsonaro’s success as president – but so far, he’s had mixed results when it comes to getting reforms through Congress. Unless Bolsonaro learns to work with legislators and ease turbulence within his government, Brazil’s missing energy reforms will continue to threaten its economy, and its politics.
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The development of energy resources is an integral component of many of Latin America’s economies, from established producers like Colombia and Brazil to newcomers to the global energy market like freshly oil-rich Guyana. However, policymakers and energy companies throughout the region must devise solutions to a variety of fiscal, political, social, and environmental hurdles to ensure successful and sustainable projects, explained speakers at an Inter-American Dialogue event on May 10.
A lack of transmission-line maintenance may have been the immediate trigger for the power outage that left much of Venezuela in darkness on March 7, but it is a symptom of almost two decades of government mismanagement that has debilitated Venezuela’s power sector, draining its reserves of both human and financial capital and nudging it towards collapse.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has shaken up Mexico’s energy industry even more than anticipated. Nate Graham, assistant for the Energy Program, posed some questions to non-resident senior fellow Héctor Castro Vizcarra to discern where the country’s energy sector is headed.
