UK Guardian: Trump taking ‘drill, baby, drill’ plan to Venezuela ‘terrible’ for local weather, specialists warn – ‘If oil production goes up, climate change will get worse sooner’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/06/trump-venezuela-oil-climate-crisis
By Dharna Noor and Oliver Milman
Excerpt:
Donald Trump, by dramatically seizing Nicolás Maduro and claiming dominion over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, has taken his “drill, baby, drill” mantra global. Achieving the president’s dream of supercharging the country’s oil production would be financially challenging – and if fulfilled, would be “terrible for the climate”, experts say.
Trump has aggressively sought to boost oil and gas production within the US. Now, after the capture and arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, he is seeking to orchestrate a ramp-up of drilling in Venezuela, which has the largest known reserves of oil in the world – equivalent to about 300bn barrels, according to research firm the Energy Institute.“The oil companies are going to go in, they are going to spend money, we are going to take back the oil, frankly, we should’ve taken back a long time ago,” the US president said after Maduro’s extraction from Caracas. “A lot of money is coming out of the ground, we are going to be reimbursed for everything we spend.”
Guardian graphic. Source: The Oil & Gas Journal. Note: China and Taiwan and Sudan and South Sudan are combined in the data. *Estimates for the Saudi Arabian-Kuwaiti Neutral Zone are divided equally between the two countries
Even raising production to 1.5m barrels of oil a day from current levels of around 1m barrels would produce around 550m tons of carbon dioxide a year when the fuel is burned, according to Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This is more carbon pollution than what is emitted annually by major economies such as the UK and Brazil.
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But should Venezuela ramp up output to near its 1970s peak of 3.7m barrels a day – more than triple current levels – it would further undermine the already faltering global effort to limit dangerous global heating.
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The world is close to breaching agreed temperature increase limits – already suffering more severe heatwaves, storms and droughts as a result. Increased Venezuelan drilling would further lower global oil prices and slow the needed momentum towards renewable energy and electric cars, Sterman added.
“If oil production goes up, climate change will get worse sooner, and everybody loses, including the people of Venezuela,” he said. “The climate damages suffered by Venezuela, along with other countries, will almost certainly outweigh any short-term economic benefit of selling a bit more oil.”