When U.S. forces entered Venezuela in December and removed President Nicolás Maduro, officials framed the intervention as a strategic economic opportunity. President Donald Trump repeatedly pointed to the country’s oil reserves and rare earth minerals, saying U.S. companies stood to earn billions of dollars. Less attention has been paid to the environmental risks of this plan. More than half of Venezuela is covered by forest, much of it in the Amazon Basin. It also has grasslands, wetlands and thousands of kilometers of Caribbean coastline. These ecosystems were already under strain under the Maduro government, but critics warn that foreign intervention could intensify the damage. “If environmental risks aren’t taken into account in this process, we’re probably facing a potential environmental catastrophe of a very large magnitude,” Eduardo Klein, a marine ecology professor at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, told Mongabay. Venezuela has an estimated 300 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, the largest in the world. Yet it produces slightly less than a million barrels a day, far below many other oil-producing countries with smaller reserves. By international standards, Venezuela’s oil is heavier than in other parts of the world, making it more costly and requiring special processing equipment. (Venezuelan oil costs around $80 per barrel, compared to around $60/barrel in the U.S. and other parts of the world.) The government has also allowed pipelines and refineries to fall into disrepair over the last 20 years, the result of financial mismanagement, corruption, an untrained workforce and sanctions. In 2024,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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