Donald Trump’s vision of Venezuela feeding an American empire of oil is a wager that years of talk about a global clean energy transition will come to nothing.
By attempting to seize control in Caracas, the U.S. president has made Venezuela a testing ground for a gamble on the future of energy that is reordering the geopolitics of the 21st century and will determine the extent of global overheating.
It also shifts the U.S. further into a parallel universe, away from China’s enormous clean energy export machine and Washington’s climate-conscious allies in Europe.
Trump’s move last weekend to oust the sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, was immediately followed by a promise that U.S. companies will suck “a tremendous amount of wealth” from the Venezuelan ground. The oil will be sold, according to Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Wednesday, by the U.S. government.
