It’s always about the oil.
The invasion of Venezuela is not about democracy, national security, or an unavoidable threat.
It is about oil, and Trump has essentially said as much.
He openly described conversations with oil executives, admitted they were told before members of Congress, and talked about Venezuela’s reserves as if they were an untapped business opportunity rather than a country already dealing with deep political and economic pain that military intervention will almost certainly make worse.
Venezuela happens to sit on the largest proven oil reserves in the world — roughly 300 billion barrels. Even developing a fraction of what’s underground would mean locking in decades of new emissions at the exact moment scientists say production needs to rapidly decline. Opening another mega–oil frontier right now would push us closer to a future of permanent heat, fires, floods, displacement, and communities stretched past their breaking point.
So when this gets framed as “security” or “stability,” what we’re really being asked to accept is decades more climate chaos so oil companies can get what they want.
“The oil companies were told before Congress.”
Trump didn’t say Congress was consulted and details were withheld for security reasons. He said he spoke with oil executives — “all of them, basically,” — and only afterward justified the military operation on national security grounds. In other words, the people with the most money to make from this were allegedly briefed before the people we elected to oversee war and foreign policy.
Critics across the spectrum have since pointed out how surreal that is. One former Army officer running for Congress said he “can’t begin to tell you how insane this is.”
Trump has also publicly said the U.S. will run Venezuela and hand access to American oil companies to go in, rebuild the industry, and start pumping. He’s even floated the idea that U.S. oil companies could get reimbursed by American taxpayers for the billions they spend doing it.
There’s a long backstory here, FYI. Big oil companies have been circling Venezuela for years. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips have spent years pursuing compensation claims after their assets were nationalized in the 2000s. A secret meeting late last year reportedly brought together U.S. officials, oil companies, and members of Venezuela’s political opposition to discuss control over fields. I’d say this feels less like a national crisis and more like an industry finally getting the opening it’s been waiting for.
The mess behind the promises
Even the rosy narrative about American oil companies riding in to “fix” Venezuela’s production doesn’t really hold up. Analysts point out that it would take years and tens of billions of dollars just to bring production modestly higher. The infrastructure is decayed, sanctions are complicated, political uncertainty is enormous, and companies have been burned here before.
And all of this is happening while oil prices have actually fallen, thanks to global oversupply – not exactly the kind of conditions that make companies excited to gamble billions on risky projects in a struggling petro-state.
Moreover, the oil extracted does not end up in the United States by some miracle; it moves through refineries concentrated in places like Texas and Louisiana, many of them near Black, brown, and working-class neighborhoods that already live with higher asthma rates, cancer risks, and constant exposure to industrial accidents. For them, expanding the flow of Venezuelan crude means more smokestacks, more flares, more nights when the air smells strange and nobody quite believes it’s safe.
And all of this is happening while we walk backward on clean energy
This would already be alarming in any context, but it feels especially perverse given the moment we are in. We have the tools to move away from oil, today! Renewable power is cheaper than ever, storage is advancing, and electric vehicles, heat pumps, and efficiency upgrades are beginning to scale. We actually have a path toward reducing the leverage oil has over our lives.
Yet Trump is dismantling clean energy incentives, attacking offshore wind programs, and rolling back climate policies, while insisting that invading a country to secure access to its oil fields is somehow about protecting American households.
It isn’t. It deepens the problem and extends the lifespan of an industry that keeps pushing us into these crises, whether they look like heat waves, refinery explosions, or military operations wrapped in patriotic language.
As our friend Bill McKibben put it simply, “a solar panel is the new peace sign.” No one sends aircraft carriers after sunlight and no one topples governments to capture the wind. Clean energy doesn’t eliminate every danger in the world, but it removes the single biggest excuse for why we keep finding ourselves here.
The uncomfortable truth underneath all of this
If oil stays at the center of global politics, there will always be another excuse, another emergency, another country offered up as collateral.
So if there is a call to action in this moment, it isn’t just “oppose the war,” though that matters. It’s to break the cycle that makes wars over oil feel inevitable in the first place. That means refusing to let oil executives write our foreign policy, insisting on transparency about who profits from these choices, and accelerating a transition to energy that doesn’t require extraction, occupation, or sacrifice zones.
Stopping oil profiteering and building clean energy aren’t separate fights. They are the same one. And the sooner we treat them that way, the better off we’ll be.
America, get rid of oil, pollution, trump corrupted maga fascists, greedy billionaires all at once. It's time now to chose the Sun father of Life. To start a new era for the human race and all Life on Earth. People, you have the power now. Do it.