"US plan to exploit Venezuela’s oil could eat up 13% of carbon budget to keep 1.5C limit", 12 January 2026

...US plans to exploit Venezuela’s oil reserves could by 2050 consume more than a tenth of the world’s remaining carbon budget to limit global heating to 1.5C, according to an exclusive analysis...

Venezuela’s proven oil reserves are so vast that if they were fully tapped, they would, by themselves, exhaust the entire carbon budget for keeping the world within the 1.5C temperature rise that climate scientists say is the limit for avoiding the worst effects of climate breakdown.

Such an eventuality is unlikely. After years of sanctions, Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is decrepit and crumbling. But in the week since US special forces kidnapped Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and rendered him to New York, Donald Trump has urged oil companies to invest $100bn (£74bn) to get Venezuela’s wells flowing...

Hollie Parry, senior analyst at ClimatePartner, said: “The decision to ramp up production of one of the world’s most carbon intensive crude oils to historic levels would consume an estimated 13% of the remaining global carbon budget – the equivalent to nearly a decade of emissions from the entire EU, from a single oil expansion. In a rapidly warming world, such a move would lock in decades of high emissions at precisely the moment when science demands a swift transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy and low-carbon solutions”...