Donald Trump’s plan to ramp up oil production in Venezuela, following the capture of Nicolás Maduro, has been condemned as disastrous for the climate. The US president has taken his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda global, seeking to supercharge drilling in the country with the world’s largest known oil reserves—about 300 billion barrels.
Trump said US oil companies would “spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure … and start making money for the country”. His administration is pressing Venezuela’s interim government to scrap a law requiring half-ownership of oil projects by the state. However, major firms like Exxon and Chevron have not commented on whether they will invest.
If Venezuela raised output to 1.5 million barrels per day—up from around 1 million—burning that oil would emit about 550 million tonnes of CO2 annually, more than the UK or Brazil, according to Professor Paasha Mahdavi of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Venezuela’s extra-heavy crude is among the most carbon-intensive in the world.
“If there are millions of barrels a day of new oil, that will add quite a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and the people of Earth can’t afford that,” said John Sterman of MIT. He warned that increased drilling would lower global oil prices and slow the shift to renewables, worsening climate change.
Critics accuse Trump of fossil fuel-driven imperialism. Elizabeth Bast of Oil Change International said: “The US must stop treating Latin America as a resource colony.” Patrick Galey of Global Witness added that reliance on fossil fuels makes countries “hostage to the whims of autocrats”.
