Venezuela: It's the Oil, Folks. Like it was with Trump Wanting Canada.

Venezuela has 10x more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. They'll be wanting a piece, too.

OK, the longer you look at this, the clearest the fog swirling in the crystal ball is going to get.

Estimates are from EIA, the U.S. Energy Information Administration; OPEC is, well, OPEC, and BP is British Petroleum. They vary a bit in estimates for oil reserves, but not significantly. The figures they’re giving are for millions of barrels in reserve.

As you move across the chart to the column called “Oil Production”, that gives you HOW FAST they’re pumping it. And in the far right column, that tells you HOW MANY YEARS OF OIL THEY HAVE LEFT AT THE RATE THEY’RE PUMPING.

IN THE TOP FIVE ARE … VENEZUELA AND CANADA.

• Canada’s at No. 5. Its reserves are mostly shale oil—costly to dig out, and environmentally deadly, but they’ve got almost a century’s worth left. Once they press it out of the soil, then they send it down a horrible pipe that leaks all over Native American lands. AND IF THE U.S. MAKES CANADA A 51ST STATE, GUESS WHO GETS IT ALL.

• Venezuela’s at No. 1. It has, at the slow rate it’s pumping it right now, 885 years of reserves left. AND IF THE U.S. MAKES VENEZUELA A COLONY, GUESS WHO GETS ALL OR MOST OF THAT.

Now, here’s the kicker: Venezuela is a founding member of OPEC.

So, why was Mohammad Bin Salman, notorious murderer of Jamal Khashoggi, in the tarted up White House to kiss the ring last week—and to get Donald Trump to say he didn’t kill the journalist and that the journalist was a bad person anyway?

My guess is … so that Donald Trump and he could make a deal about what percentage MBS is going to take of Venezuela’s oil profits to hold off the rest of OPEC from attacking the United States or placing a crippling oil embargo on the country.

And now Trump has let the world know that Venezuela waters and air space are his. Hegseth is shooting castaways in the water. He seems confident no one will come to the aid of Nicolás Maduro Moros, president of Venezuela.

María Corina Machado, Nobel Prize Winner

Meanwhile, María Corina Machado Parisca, who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, was fawning all over Donald Trump for standing up to Maduro, but that is a short-sided, one-issue view that is going to cost her. Because even if Venezuelans elect her party again like they did last time, only to have the election stolen, it will do her no good whatsoever.

Trump will try to take Venezuela for her oil no matter who is leading. And Machado will simply be a fish eaten by a bigger fish who is eaten by a bigger fish.

Meanwhile, eat bananas, Tuvalu.

And for all the countries already starting to drown, Trump, whose friends demand he keep pumping oil, will burn fossil fuels to the absolutely exclusion of everything else if he can, and the rest of humanity be damned.

The Solutions Project reports this:

The population in coastal towns has increased worldwide over the last 30 years. The risk of low-lying coastland being submerged by water is increasing every year. In Bangladesh alone, 500,000 people already lost their homes when Bhola Island was completely submerged. If things don’t change, the predictions are not good—with scientists believing that 17% of the total landmass will be submerged by 2050. This will leave 20 million Bangladeshi citizens homeless.

In the United States, Louisiana will lose 65 square miles of land to the sea. As the wetlands in the Mississippi delta succumb to salt water’s effect on fishing in the area, fishers will be forced further away to catch fish.

Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Maldives face complete submersion, and plans are underway to evacuate the entire population should that day come. Flooding is also affecting Kenya, where a freshwater lake may merge with a nearby saltwater lake. Both lakes are on the floor of the Great Rift Valley, and this would wreak havoc on each lake’s ecosystem.

And worse, air pollution, ground pollution, and loss of species will affect us all.

This is madness of the worst kind.

---

---

Thanks, Sages. More soon …