Trump’s Illegal Invasion of Venezuela Forebodes an Environmental Disaster
Rebuilding Venezuelan oil production would produce new annual emissions higher than the carbon footprints of France, the UK, or Thailand
By Patrick Bigger
From the moment that Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his domestic industrial policy agenda was clear: double down on fossil fuels, preserve the tech boom, and boost Pentagon spending to appease defense contractors. In contrast, his foreign policy has been chaotic, from blowing up the international trade system through the unilateral imposition of tariffs, to threatening to seize Greenland for access to so-called critical minerals, to vacillating wildly on how to handle Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Following the US’s illegal invasion of Venezuela on January 3, 2026, however, a sharper view of this presidency’s foreign policy is available—it is unilateralist imperialism for the twenty-first century, a foreign policy of might-makes-right where the US can cajole, bully, and depose governments to seize resources and attempt to claim dominion over the entire western hemisphere. It is a foreign policy that exacerbates global instability, geoeconomic uncertainty, and accelerates atmospheric and biospheric breakdown. Returning Venezuelan oil production to 1990s peak levels would result in five hundred million tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions, a volume higher than the annual emissions of France, the UK, or Thailand.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil, although that oil is of very low quality, making it energetically intensive to refine. Because of this, the oil causes climate harms as severe, or worse, than the Canadian tar sands and other “heavy” sources, making it as much as 50 percent more emissions intensive than “lighter” sources of crude oil, like those found in the US or Saudi Arabia. Venezuela’s oil production averaged 923,000 barrels per day in 2025. If the country took ten years to return to the 1997 peak of 3.2 million barrels per day preceding Hugo Chavez’s first election, it would result in an addition of:
A cumulative 2.8 billion tons of CO2 equivalent emissions over the next ten years
503 million tons of additional annual CO2 equivalent emissions by 2035—more than the annual emissions of France (378M tons CO2e), the UK (387M tons CO2e), or Thailand (422 CO2e).
While previous US administrations have lied about their rationale for invading oil-rich countries, this administration has boasted that it invaded Venezuela to seek control of “stolen” oil. It remains to be seen how the administration will go about resurrecting the Venezuelan oil industry—a process that will likely require billions, if not more than a trillion, of dollars in investment to return to production at the level prior to Hugo Chavez’s election—nor how trebling Venezuelan oil output would interact with the geoeconomic dynamics of global oil markets. Rebuilding the Venezuelan oil sector under the control of US multinationals (likely possible only with massive US federal subsidies) would be an ecological catastrophe that will make virtually everyone in the world less secure by further turbocharging climate change.
Whether or not the plan to “run” Venezuela and its oil industry results in a return to production at its 1990s level, this shows us that Trump’s foreign policy—of establishing an imperial sphere of influence governed by loyalty to the US and run on fossil fuels—is a threat to our planetary future. This is in line with the administration’s domestic energy strategy that gives preference to fossil fuels even when they are economically unviable, and the broader militarism-fossil fuel complex that has been a critical pillar of US economic and foreign policy since the turn of the twentieth century. Unilateralism is a threat to just climate action around the world, and US military actions make the world more dangerous by destabilizing countries and regions while exacerbating the climate crisis.