When I awoke early last Saturday to the news that the United States had attacked Venezuela, capturing the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, I was stunned—soon to be horrified.
Like many journalists, I immediately set about interrogating President Donald Trump’s claim that US companies, backed by the federal government, would invest billions to revive Venezuela’s languishing oil sector. But as a fossil fuels and climate reporter at the Guardian, I noticed something missing from the early coverage: Almost no one was asking what Trump’s actions might mean for the climate.
There were extensive analyses of technical and political hurdles: how quickly Venezuela’s decayed infrastructure could be repaired, how much it would cost, and whether oil majors would be willing to assume so much financial risk given all the uncertainty.
Critical questions, for sure, but my colleague Oliver Milman and I focused on others. Venezuela purportedly holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, some 300 billion barrels, according to research firm the Energy Institute. Much of it is extra-heavy crude—a thick and viscous oil that’s especially carbon-intensive to extract and refine.
Any meaningful production ramp-up would require energy-hungry processing and years of investment, analysts say. That could lock in millions of barrels per day of new supply—and the associated emissions—for decades.
Even boosting production to 1.5 million barrels a day from the current level of about 1 million barrels would produce some 550 million extra tons of carbon dioxide annually, Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. That’s more carbon pollution than the UK spews in an entire year.
This reality sits uneasily with the scientific consensus that global oil production must decline rapidly to avoid the worst impacts of the climate breakdown. At a time when governments should be shrinking carbon budgets and making moves to rein in climate damages, Trump is treating fossil fuel expansion as a geopolitical asset rather than a planetary liability.
Check out our story on the climate costs of Trump’s Venezuela ambitions.
—Dharna Noor
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