Reuters has this scathing investigation of the rubble of Venezuela's energy-rent populism, a sad tale of how Venezuela's elites sabotaged Chavez' goal of national development.
It's worth emphasizing that the Chinese companies aren't to blame for the disaster. Rather, elites milked grifted state contracts and bribed officials to look the other way. The Chavez and Maduro governments promised development for all, but delivered the privatization of state energy-rents on behalf of the wealthiest few.
The fundamental lesson progressives and citizens should take to heart is this: the strategy of "sowing the oil" is broken. "Sowing the oil" has worked in only one nation: Norway, which was already a wealthy industrialized nation to begin with. It has failed everywhere else. In retrospect, "sowing the oil" was the final chapter of the oil nationalizations of the late 20th century. These latter were supposed to bring modernization, but produced nothing but massive corruption, broken economies, and despotic petro-colonialisms everywhere from Iran and Iraq to Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
The entire planet needs to abolish energy-rent capitalism and replace it with a green energy commons -- green electrons from solar, wind and storage, green mobility from batteries, and green buildings for the world's cities. This is especially important for the countries of Africa and South Asia, which are going through their rural-to-urban demographic transitions and will benefit the most from the green energy revolution.
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