Cheap Now, Costly Later

U.S. President Donald Trump’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his declaration that the United States will now “run” Venezuela are deeply concerning on a number of levels: political, legal and moral.

But we should not forget, either, about the environmental cost of Trump’s plan to ramp up production of Venezuelan oil. Nor should we ignore what Trump’s growing hunger for other countries’ natural resources might mean for Canada in the coming years.

Trump hasn’t been shy about his desire to bolster the U.S. oil economy, or about airing his thoughts that investment in renewable energy like wind and solar is a waste of time. In a speech to the United Nations in September, he said, “If you don’t get away from the green energy scam your country is going to fail.” His administration has been busy rolling back protections that it says are “throttling the oil and gas industry” (others might say they have been insufficiently holding the oil and gas industry to account for its environmental harms).

If you’re gung-ho for oil, then the numbers show why Venezuela is so attractive to Trump. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States has about 74 billion barrels of oil in proven reserves. Venezuela has 304 billion, putting it at the top of the global list, well ahead of Saudi Arabia in distant second place.

But most of Venezuela’s oil is “dirty” oil, stuck in the Orinoco Belt.

A few decades ago, this oil wasn’t considered economically viable and didn’t even count as part of Venezuela’s “proven reserves.” As technologies and global economies have changed, dirtier oil has become more accessible, allowing Venezuela’s proven reserve count to more than quadruple between 2005 and 2010. They didn’t suddenly, magically have more oil. It’s just that the dirty oil they’ve always had became more viable.

That story might sound familiar: the same thing happened in Canada about a decade earlier. As our own oilsands became more economically and technologically viable, our proven reserves count leapt up about threefold from 1995 to 2000.

Dirty dealings

As everyone knows, oilsands are hard to extract. The bitumen in Alberta’s oilsands is almost solid at room temperature, and it takes a lot of energy and water to get it out. Operations either carve out huge chunks of the surface with massive trucks or, more often, inject vast quantities of steam to dilute it underground.

Miners have gotten better at doing this more efficiently over time, reducing production emissions by 26 per cent per barrel from 2012 to 2023, according to Alberta government statistics. But getting Canadian oilsands out of the ground and to a refinery still produces about three to four times as much carbon dioxide per barrel as the global average. Even full application of the most advanced technologies can’t get our oilsands to mesh with Canada’s net-zero goals. And the mining has created vast tailings ponds that cause environmental havoc.

Venezuela faces similar issues. Its oil is warmer, younger and a little more fluid (or less viscous) than the Canadian oilsands — technically it’s called “extra heavy oil.” But it’s still much harder to extract than regular oil. Experts say that steam injection is needed to efficiently get it out.

Right now, thanks to political and economic turmoil, Venezuela’s oil production is pretty low and its infrastructure is widely reported as old and poorly maintained. Environmental conditions are abysmal. The Venezuelan Political Ecology Observatory, an environmental watchdog, says there were nearly 200 oil spills in the country from 2016 to 2021, many of which weren’t reported by authorities. Its oil and gas industry also leaks a massive amount of methane — six times the global average. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

If U.S. companies step in, they would surely bring in more modern, efficient techniques and equipment for extracting this kind of oil — at a cost of perhaps tens of billions of dollars. Maybe that would make each individual operation more environmentally responsible (maybe). Stopping a methane leak, for example, is sometimes as easy as replacing a faulty valve. Whether good steps are taken depends not just on available technologies but also on government regulation.

But we shouldn’t be digging this oil up in the first place. If the world is to hit net-zero emissions targets, we need to recover and burn fewer fossil fuels, not more.

Oh Canada

If you take a step back and consider all the classic resources that a national leader might develop a hunger for — including oil, but not just oil — Canada starts to look particularly interesting.

Canada is also high in global standings of proven oil reserves, with about 170 billion barrels. That’s more than twice the U.S. reserve, though just a bit more than half of Venezuela’s.

We also have 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water. And, like Greenland, we are rich in untapped mineral wealth — we hold 15.2 million tonnes of rare earth oxide, according to the Canadian government. Some of these elements are vital for the production of high-tech products including wind turbines and batteries. According to the International Energy Agency’s 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook, Canada has “substantial graphite, lithium and nickel reserves” that are bound to look attractive to our southern neighbour.

Food security is another major issue that is bound to get ever more important in a climate-stressed world (particularly if the United States succeeds in ramping up oil production, leading to more emissions and more planetary warming). A recent analysis by the D.C. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that the United States has cause to worry about future food production. It notes that some experts predict “climate change will make the U.S. Corn Belt, made up of central and eastern states, unsuitable for cultivating corn by the end of this century.”

One academic paper that grabbed my attention concluded that 90 per cent of the globe’s population will face the problems of less crop production and less seafood availability as the world warms. Notable exceptions to this picture are Russia and Canada, where there will likely be both more arable land and more fisheries as marine life flees pole-wards in search of cooler waters.

Food, water, minerals and oil make for a pretty attractive package.

Canada should be proud and glad of its good fortune when it comes to natural resources. But with a bully south of the border, we should also be concerned.

All of Trump’s rhetoric about taking Canada as the “51st state” and his statements that U.S. “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” give serious cause for concern.

The good news, at least, is that while nations have obviously engaged in military action for control of oil in the past, aggression is rarely part of the picture when it comes to securing food or water. The idea of “water wars,” for example, has been debunked as a myth many times over in academic circles.

The far more common solution is trade deals and international agreements. We should be prepared to fight for good deals — and not be strong-armed into bad ones. 

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/01/20/Dirty-Math-Trump-Thirst-Oil/