“Biden woos Venezuela, Saudis for oil … while clinging to climate-change restrictions at home,” reports Hot Air:
If the Joe Biden administration has any strategy at all on energy, it appears to be of the rotating-despot variety. It seems Biden would desperately like any country other than his own to step up its production. That desperation has led the White House to send envoys to Nicolas Maduro, hoping to convince the Venezuelan tyrant to turn on the Russian tyrant to get more of the dirtiest oil available:
“A group of senior U.S. officials flew to Venezuela on Saturday for a meeting with President Nicolás Maduro’s government to discuss the possibility of easing sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports as the Biden administration weighs a ban on imports of Russian oil and gas, according to two people familiar with the situation….Venezuela, the Kremlin’s most important ally in South America, used to be a significant supplier of crude to the United States before exports were hobbled by domestic mismanagement and crippling sanctions from Washington.”
This is quite a change in American policy toward Maduro, who violently suppressed an uprising in the national assembly and has oppressed dissent for years in a starving Venezuela. Not only is he the same kind of tyrant as Putin (only less effective), Maduro is still holding a half-dozen American oil executives on bogus corruption charges. The Citgo Six got lured to Venezuela in 2017 and have been captives of Maduro ever since….
Maduro’s reward for keeping the men in prison will apparently be a new agreement to sell the US enough oil to keep prices down at the pump. Let’s not forget, by the way, that Venezuelan oil is particularly hard to refine thanks to its level of impurities, which means it will be even worse on the environment than the oil we pump in North America — worse even than the supposedly over-bituminous oil from the Alberta sands that would have come to our refineries over the Keystone XL pipeline.
