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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Do we know who's been installed as a replacement? As with Libya, getting rid of a bad leader doesn't necessarily make the situation better.

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Replacement? They haven't overthrown the Venezuela government just captured it's figure head.

True. Maduro has not been the president since the last elections; he merely usurped the position. You cannot perform such an action without facing some constraints. For him, personally, maybe this was the better outcome.

They don't care about "better" they just want the oil reserves for themselves.

First, read up on Venezuela's oil. I don't think that's the case. At the very least it's very expensive oil, hard to use and very bad for engines, refineries and for the environment and also oil is over (meaning oil will go into terminal decline probably before 2028 and that will be the end of the oil companies)

Second, when the US did have Venezuela's oil things were going a lot better in Venezuela for the whole population. So would that really be such a bad thing?

Third, Chavez made things so bad in Venezuela it's tough to imagine this making it worse. Oh and then he died and Maduro came ... and made things worse.

Yeah, literally nobody but the US could possibly profitably extract Venezuelan oil at any meaningful scale.

If you're going to go with conspiracy theories, China is desperate for oil and was openly allying with Venezuela, and so was, ironically, petrostate Russia, although that's ending (for now). I bet Putin is looking for contingency plans though. Even though Venezuela is not exactly the easiest to reach for either of them, but beggars can't be choosers. Preventing any progress here might have been worth a lot to both the US and the EU. And, yes, I know how it sounds, but this will be pretty helpful with the Ukraine war. Yes, really.

Of course leftist tankies will be mad the billionaire fake-communist "revolution" that started with Chavez and should have ended 20 years ago is now very likely over. Of course, most Venezuelans (75% according to the opposition) would describe that revolution as a nightmare.

Of course I doubt 75% of Venezuelans wanted the US to resolve it.

I seriously doubt either China or Russia could manage to extract significant quantities of Venezuelan oil at a profit even if the US lifted all sanctions and completely forgot about Venezuela.

The costs of getting production set up at are so high compared to the relatively bleak outlook for the oil market, it's likely that Venezuelan oil isn't a hugely attractive proposition for anyone.

China is desperate, and also the enemy of essentially every source of oil ... "except" Venezuela (disregarding the fact that of course Maduro can't be trusted, and thus isn't really an ally of China. More accurately they're both desperate and might be able to help one another).

Russia is also desperate. And is extracting oil in Venezuela easier than doing it while under Ukrainian bombardment? Good question but we can summarize: extracting oil inside Russia is failing, thanks to Putin's 3-day special military operation ... and they've already had to import fuel twice in the past 6 months, despite how utterly ridiculous that is: the country that out-produced Saudia Arabia when it comes to oil needed to import fuel.

China is moving away from oil at such a pace that any massive development of first the extraction technologies for Venezuela and then the actual infrastructure would probably take too long to be particularly useful.

Venezuela is also simply too far from China to be a reliable source of oil.

And yet Chinese government officials were in discussions mere hours before the US attacked. There were also discussions with Russia and Iran going on.

Yes because the only reason Chinese government officials would talk with Venezuela is because China wants to spin up large-scale oil production there? Literally no other reason they could possibly be talking, right?

And ... of course the answer here appears to be that I was right. About China, about the US, about most of what I said.

With a MAJOR exception: I expected Trump to think about things for 5 seconds before ordering people killed and kidnapped and ... If he did a good thing, it's pretty clear now that it's accidental.

> and also oil is over (meaning oil will go into terminal decline probably before 2028 and that will be the end of the oil companies)

Back in the 90s, my dad told me a quote from someone big in oil:

  "Oil is too valuable to burn"

(Shah of Iran? Trouble with searching for quotes on the internet, they get misattributed a lot).

Oil as a fuel will, hopefully, be over soon. 2028 is… I think that's too soon, though it would be good if it was. But oil is useful for a lot more than just fuel, and engineered bacteria synthesising more is probably more like a 2030s thing than a 2028 thing.

You don't understand. 2028 is the time peak oil will definitely be behind us, and therefore the oil business will only deteriorate from that point forward. It will quickly mean the end of all oil producers except the very cheapest.

The vice-president: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delcy_Rodr%C3%ADguez

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