Gosh, I wonder why the US is so obsessed with Venezuela

I always go to war with Venezuala in all my Vic3 games for this reason.

"No MoRe WaRs" and Trump the Peacemaker was a big part of their campaign. Hopefully invading Venezuela would hurt him more politically than any oil but who am I kidding? They'll all just lie like they always do.

resource curse

What many people don't realize is that a significant chunk of our oil processing infrastructure in America is designed for Venezuelas oil specifically. It's very thick and that means a very different procedure for refinement. Thinner/watery crude oil from other places in the world is much easier to work with and many other places are already set up to refine that oil. Not everyone in the world is set up to process Venezuelas crude oil.

This also means we can't just get oil somewhere else and run it through those same refineries with the same results. Venezuela has the single largest oil reserves and America spent a lot of time, energy and money to process that oil.

So yes it is about oil, but it's much more complicated than simply "oil".

Deja vu!

It is feeling real 2003 right about now

Eh, the reason there's so little exports is because the extraction collapsed when all the workers at the national company, PDVSA, were fired in a single day for political reasons. Then the drop in prices in 2015 further destroyed all facilities. Even if the US invades today, it would take decades to rebuild the infrastructure back to pre-2000 levels of export.

It is a combination of sanctions and a lot of infrastructure being broken. But a lot can be repaired relatively quickly. You do not need peak production levels to make a hell of a lot of money.

Their oil is bad and investing in new oil drilling is likely to yield low returns as a crash is incoming due to renewables being cheaper and most states having a desire to alleviate climate change risks.

and that is why the oil industry funds the far right with such insane sums. It is also really good news, as a decline in oil consumption is really going to hurt the far right.

Venezuela Oil is poor quality which means it costs a lot to refine.

Wouldn't refining companies like that?
- It's not worth it, maybe one day it will be worth but we are developing alternatives... Plenty of reserves in allied countries and I think the US has big untouched reserves just in case.
  Venezuela is incapable of processing that oil because when they nationalized the industry they fucked it so hard now they don't have the tools, that's what Bolivarism does.

To misattribute a quote to Gordon Ramsey: “You’ve put so much oil in this, the US want to invade the plate”.

Well we have reserves in barrels and export ind dollars.

So nobody can get any information about how much oil was actually exported.

I don't know the oil price. I don't think everyone is paying the same.

This is almost useless

oh I wonder if it's oil...

Clicks in

It was oil

surpriced Pikachu face

And they'd be exporting plenty if they weren't sanctioned by the world's largest military and single biggest consumer of oil.

Literally the most similar country on Earth to Venezuela, both politically and economically, is Norway. But they're white. That's the big difference.

It hard to think of two more dissimilar nations, outside of the fact that they both have oil and both coincidentally have almost identical GDPs (despite Venezula having about 6 times the population of Norway). But in any other area you care to consider, from per-capita GDP to political stability to education to economic diversification to healthcare to corruption to age distribution to civil liberties to pollution to population growth to the HDI, they are in extremely sharp contrast in almost every way we measure nations. Politically, it's a stable parliamentary democracy up against a polarized authoritarian-leaning republic, pretty darn far from each other. Yes, they are both resource-dependent, state-central, and redistributional nations, but they go about it in virtually opposite ways functionally, and there are dozens of such countries that would rank closely on those generic metrics.
Lol, I wish. Norway is as similar to Venezuela as North Korea and New Zealand are to each other.
- You gonna explain why you think so, or...?
  Couldn't help but notice that you showed up and got 4 updoots right around the same time I got my only 4 downdoots.
  Not that I necessarily think they're related. Just a funny coincidence. Haha.
The United States of terrorist America are going for the worst outcome for climate change: more fossil fuel through war. There is no hope for future generations if this goes through
But but but the west loves the free market and all that...
These wankies only care about "free market" when they're on the top exploiting.
As soon as a strong competitor appears, the market is cornered, blackmailed, forcefully sold off to friends/families, or simply sanctioned or embargoed along with countries who are willing to do business with them.
- I strongly oppose any US intervention in Venezuela, but the notion their civil society is equivalent to Norway other than superficial observation that both are oil-rich is absurd.

Climate heroes

It's because their name is so fun to say.

Ven-e-zue-la!

Guess Iran and Canada better get some goddamn nukes then

Have you guys already forgotten the sortie of B-2s and GBU-57s on Fordow? Damn it's scary how quickly people forget
Not allowed only the countries who had nukes firsts are allowed to have them ever its nuclear non proliferation on top of that the ones that have them pinkie promise to phase them out any day now. This is totally fair and balanced and we will bomb you if you disagree.
- to phase them out any day now
  tbf lots of progress has already been made:
  Source
  And i'm definitely a fan of not every small country having them. imagine how much harm they could do.
At this point everyone should get nukes
- You get a nuke, and you get a nuke, and you get a nuke, everybody gets a nuke!
Yo someone go let Iran know that they should probably be getting nukes. Not sure if they're aware of the need /s

Better yet, our military gets there and can't find oil. Oops, let's prop up another dictatorship

No guys, seriously? Its definitely 100% about ~~their freedom~~ the drug "problem".

why does this graph have a 2:1 ratio of content to border? did you open it full screen on an ultrawide monitor to screenshot it then not crop or?

I'm used to seeing lots of vertical borders because of phones, but this almost seems like it took more effort to make this way.

OP really wanted that red rectangle with a red arrow, I guess. Here's the original from this Al Jazeera story:
I took a screenshot from my phone of Sean Foo's YouTube video. I appreciate it looks bad but didn't know how to fix it. I redid it by from YouTube on my desktop so hopefully it looks better now.
Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lMQTqWxrNY
- Stop taking screen shots of web content