Comment by croes
3 days ago
And the US want oil and other resources.
So Venezuela has to vote correctly otherwise it will get "freed" again
3 days ago
And the US want oil and other resources.
So Venezuela has to vote correctly otherwise it will get "freed" again
Going by what recently happened in Honduras, they won't even need to vote. The US will just choose for them!
How convenient.
Why would Washington try to get oil from Venezuela when its domestic oil industry produces all the oil the US needs (and if production were to decrease, the US economy could easily make up the shortfall by buying oil from Canada)?
It's not about needing the oil to use, it's about profit for American oil companies. Resource extraction from foreign countries at gunpoint is a major basis of the US economy.
US has a long history of overthrowing both democracies and dictators to allow their companies to extract resources lining the pockets of already rich industrialists.
The US intentionally uses only a fraction of its oil reserves so it can control the price, and will still have plenty when others run out.
Check out the capacity of the Alaska pipeline, and how much goes down it each day. Literally the least possible to keep it well maintained.
Has that got anything to do with why these[1] graphs of US oil and gas production are limited to "Lower 48 states". I found that restriction to be very strange.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66564
Domestic crude oil is mostly not compatible with US refineries, so it mostly gets exported. The US imports heavy crude, like that produced by Venezuela, for our domestic use.
Why would you buy oil from Canada when you can take oil from Venezuela?
>Domestic crude oil is mostly not compatible with US refineries
The oil produced in Texas is easy to refine. Some of it is exported as crude, and an approximately equal amount of heavy crude is imported because US refiners have a competitive advantage in refining it. It is not that US refiners cannot refine Texas crude: they make more money refining the heavy stuff or stuff with a high load of contaminants.
>Why would you buy oil from Canada when you can take oil from Venezuela?
But the US is not going to take it, just like they never took oil from Iraq after conquering that country. The value of all the oil produced worldwide in 2023 was about $1.7 trillion. Of course it cost a lot of money to extract the oil. That year the IRS collected over $4.7 trillion in tax revenue. The US government has easier ways of getting money than invading oil-rich countries.
The US does not want any country or economy in the Western Hemisphere to be stragically dependent on Russia or China, so kicking Chinese or Russians out of the oil industry in Venezuela might have been one goal of the current military action.
To hinder China, so sell it themselves, to prevent competition
Don’t forget I mentioned other resources too. Venezuela has more than oil.
Can you guess what resource the US is trying to procure by this military action?
I think you are trying to force an incorrect simplistic narrative on the situation. Obtaining natural resources is not an important motivation for US military action with the possible exception of US intervention in the Persian Gulf during the Cold War (and even there I see no evidence that the US was trying to get out of paying the going international rate for the oil as opposed to merely ensuring that willing sellers in the Gulf could continue to transport their oil over the ocean). Venezuela's cooperation with Moscow and Beijing is a much more likely motivation, i.e., US national security.
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