Forget fentanyl and cocaine. The substance Donald Trump really wants to stop flowing out of Venezuela is crude oil to China.
This is not because America craves the stuff itself. The United States produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and more gas than Russia.
True, some American refineries would like more of Venezuela’s glutinous oil, which is good for making asphalt and similar products, but it is by no means essential.
No, what really bothers Washington is Beijing‘s special deal with Venezuela’s narco-communist thugs: to buy oil on the cheap, reportedly at a $14-per-barrel discount on the price of Brent crude, the world benchmark. That’s a deal that came to an end with the extraordinary events of the past few days.
From now on, sanctions-busting tankers heading out from the Venezuelan coast will be turned back by acting President Delcy Rodriguez, if not by the American navy, to the huge frustration of China’s leaders.
It’s likely American firms will start pumping from Venezuela’s massive reserves, which on paper are the largest in the world but have been producing very little.
First rotted by nationalisation, the Venezuelan oil industry was then destroyed by Leftist autocrat Hugo Chavez, his successor Nicolas Maduro – now in a Brooklyn jail – and their crony-communism.
Oil fields in neighbouring Guyana are already looking safer, now that the threat of annexation by Venezuela’s dictatorship is at an end.
President Trump during a news conference following his country’s attack on Venezuela
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, who has been seized by the US and flown to New York
Trump’s Venezuela intervention promises to keep world oil prices low indefinitely, while starving China and hurting Russia (which wants high prices to fund its war machine).
China’s President Xi has limited himself to a veiled attack on ‘unilateral and bullying actions’, but his true reaction is probably unprintable. It is striking that, a quarter of the way into a new century, geopolitics continues to be determined by hydrocarbons, as if the green energy transition never started. And that’s because it never really did.
If you watch the BBC or listen to net-zero obsessive Ed Miliband, you might get the impression that oil, gas and coal are yesterday’s story.
The Energy Secretary and those like him claim the future is about solar panels and windmills with a little nuclear power thrown in.
Yet in the real world, solar and wind generation provided only six per cent of the world’s energy in 2024, while coal, oil and gas generation continued to grow. In fact they broke new records that year, supplying 12 times as much energy as wind and solar. It is estimated that oil, coal and gas supplied 76.4 per cent of the world’s primary energy in 2024.
Such figures show the supposed ‘energy transition’ away from fossil fuels is largely a myth. Between 2023 and 2024 the world added more energy from gas-powered generation than from solar and more from coal power than from wind.
The world has increased its use of hydrocarbons by 50 per cent in 25 years and reduced our dependence on them by less than one per cent. Trillions of dollars have been spent trying to wean the world off fossil fuels – to very little purpose.
Like it or not, hydrocarbon energy is the very lifeblood of prosperity. Vastly powerful and efficient, it turns a chaos of random atoms and electrons into a cornucopia of useful devices and services.
It moves goods and people, powers electronics, lights and heats homes, fertilises crops, fuels manufacturing, creates the plastics upon which so much of modern life depends, and more.
President Maduro in December 2025, greeting supporters during a rally in Caracas
More energy means higher living standards pretty much by definition. Even the ‘green transition’ depends on hydrocarbons: it is hard to make electric-car batteries, wind turbines and solar panels without coal, oil and gas.
Manufacturing solar panels involves coal, coke, charcoal and wood. Smelting silica, the key component, with these carbon sources turns it into metallic-grade silicon for use in solar panels, releasing six tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of silicon produced – not counting the emissions of fuelling the smelter. That’s why solar panels are made in China, where coal is cheap.
And here’s a line you will not often read: one of the best things about hydrocarbons, as opposed to carbohydrates, is that other species don’t need them.
When you burn oil, coal or gas, you are not stealing the lunch of beetles, birds or bison, the way you might when you burn wood or harvest crops for oxen or for biofuel. Switching to fossil fuels was the best thing our ancestors ever did for forests and wildlife – as well as for the world’s poorest people.
Until almost ten years ago, it was generally agreed oil and gas would run out and get very expensive as they did so. Burning coal was too dirty. It was urgent to harness alternatives such as nuclear, hydro, biomass, solar and wind power.
Then along came the shale revolution. Between 2008 and 2024, America – once written-off as a declining producer of hydrocarbons –doubled its output of gas and trebled its output of oil.
Those hoping rising fossil fuel prices would bail out wind, solar and nuclear have grown disappointed.
But, as the author of the book Fossil Future, Alex Epstein, likes to say: hydrocarbons do not take a safe climate and make it dangerous, they take a dangerous climate and make it safe.
It is fossil fuels that, directly or indirectly, provide the transport, shelter, information and food that save lives during floods, storms and droughts. Our lives depend upon them.
Burning hydrocarbons does affect the climate, of course, and the world must adapt and mitigate by, for example, reducing coal use in favour of gas where possible. Britain has already done this. But going ‘cold turkey’ by banning all hydrocarbons, or pinning our hopes on unreliable renewables such as wind and solar, would do more harm than climate change could ever do.
Whether we like it or not, the rest of the world’s obsession with climate change is fading – and with it fades any realistic prospect of artificially pricing fossil fuels out of the energy market through carbon taxes.
The race to dominate the artificial intelligence industry, with its massive demands for electricity, is being fuelled not by windmills but by gas in America and coal in China.
Instead of buying exorbitantly expensive liquefied gas from America and Qatar, Britain must tap some of our own, rich, reserves of shale gas under Lincolnshire and Lancashire. Rather than buying oil produced in the North Sea by Norwegians, we need to drill for oil in our own sector of that same sea.
Instead, thanks to the exorbitant cost of wind and solar energy, our industrial electricity prices are four times those of America.
This, plus the crackdown on gas boilers, petrol cars, holidays and beef are not just a drag on our living standards, they are lacerations of economic self-harm.
The green dogma is destroying our competitiveness, removing our steel, car, chemical and oil industries and excluding us from the race for an AI industry.
As Venezuela reminds us, the world economy relies on fossil fuels now, and probably well into the future. It’s a lesson we can’t afford to ignore.
Matt Ridley is an acclaimed science writer whose books include The Rational Optimist.