Andrew Sage

But this is not that.

Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, but there are significant problems extracting the oil, right?

Many of these problems stem from the 2002-2003 opposition general strike.

This is back after Hugo Chavez was elected.

So in 2002, there was a coup against Chavez that failed and was sort of overturned famously.

But later that year, there was also a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from like late 2012

2002 to early 2003.

And a huge part of that general strike was oil workers specifically.

And it was very specifically one of the things about the structure of oil production is that there were a bunch of very, very highly paid and highly skilled technical workers who are very, very loyal to the oil companies themselves and who are very loyal to sort of tend to be very right wing.

these people went on strike and sort of got fired en masse.

Oil production requires both a huge amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers.

And if you don't have both of those things, then you can't do oil extraction.

And this has sort of been a recurring problem for the entire time both sort of Hugo Chavez and Majuro has been in office is that they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch of the oil.

And also they've refused to turn the oil over to more American companies that have already been contracted.

And it's also worth noting, there's a lot of talk about Venezuela having the world's largest reserves.

And a lot of that is them jinking the numbers by including a lot of tar sands that no one's going to try to extract fuel from because it's too expensive and too much of a pain in the ass.

It's just not worth it.

anyway and also their claims to reserves that are not actually part of venezuela at this time right right like we're not working with exact with accurate information yeah it's it's messy and it's also worth noting that like the the oil numbers i mean obviously all oil numbers are political but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political because these are numbers that are basically used as a pitch by sort of like the opposition to try to get a u.s backed coup and

And it's also sort of worth noting that the other thing that's happening here, and the reason this is all going to probably cause really significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela and probably also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan oil to have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan economy has been

really structured around oil in a way that they failed to transition out of multiple times.