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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

People need to retire the oil argument, it isn’t credible. We don’t live in the 1980s. The US has been the world’s leading oil producer for years now, is expected to maintain that position for the foreseeable future, and has several trillion barrels equivalent of hydrocarbon reserves.

Venezuela’s oil production is a single digit percentage of US oil production and the quality of their crude is famously poor. The US neither needs it nor wants it except to the extent they pay the US to refine it for them because they don’t have that ability.

Pinning this action on a desire for oil is a lazy argument far past its expiration date.

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Venezuela also has large gold deposits, gold is currently near an all time high.

There's also speculation that it may have lithium deposits because of it's location.

So your argument is my argument is old? Why were there oil corps there and why were they so pissed when they got kicked out?

Also did you think I was suggesting the U.S. govt wants it? Donnie's friends in the oil industry want it, single digit, double digit, doesn't matter to them greed knows no bounds with that crowd and this isn't Iraq in 2004 under Bush which I never believed had anything to do with oil.

Don't forget the hawkishness and anti-socialist sentiments of Rubio. He can't wait to smash some "commies".

My argument is that it seems like you haven’t updated your understanding of oil geopolitics for several decades.

The US has always had significant control over Venezuelan oil production because the US runs some of the only refineries that can process that type of low-quality crude. If the US banned Chevron from refining Venezuelan oil in the US, Venezuela has few other options. The US already captures much of the value of Venezuelan oil production because of the refinery monopsony. There is little margin in the rest of it. They’ve been profit-maxxing Venezuelan crude for decades.

Your argument could have been reasonable a few decades ago in a “big picture” geopolitical sense but we don’t live a few decades ago. OPEC no longer controls oil prices and the US is the uncontested oil producing superpower. No one saw that coming. Pretending all of this history never happened isn’t going to lead to rational conclusions.

The US used to expend a lot of power ensuring its oil supply. It hasn’t needed to do that for a while. Now it expends power to control oil supplies to other countries. None of this applies to Venezuela though because Venezuelan oil has a dependency on US refineries that other oil producing countries don’t have.

> My argument is that it seems like you haven’t updated your understanding of oil geopolitics for several decades.

Your argument, then, is the GP has a more recent and up to date grasp of geoplotics than the current POTUS?

The same POTUS with a 1930s grasp of tariffs?

What reason exists for the US to "bail out" Argentina? Was that as simple as extending time for those who contributed to the Presidential library fund to claw back their money from Argentina?

Modern geopolitics is all very well and good, but it falls well short of explaining some of blatently century old banana republic stuff going on in the current US administration.

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