9 ms·

Might be the shock we need to work on renewables and batteries more seriously on a global level.

ajross 7y ago
That's what we thought 20 years ago during the "peak oil" nonsense and they just invented fracking. Talking about oil "reserves" paints a picture that petroleum extraction is like just scooping sludge out of a big underground bucket. Real deposits come in a huge variety of forms and qualities, and extracting them sits on a cost spectrum. All making oil more expensive does is make the more expensive oil worth extracting, prices stabilize at a slightly higher point and the market adapts. Unfortunately we aren't going to run out of oil anywhere near soon enough to save the planet. We need to do it the hard way.
- ed312 7y ago
  However the costs of renewable tech is coming down - at some point it's just a better business decision to switch off oil.
  - ajross 7y ago
    Exactly. Which is the "hard way". We need to win this with technology and, where technology alone isn't enough, with government action to curtail emissions. We aren't going to get lucky and run out of oil.
- acchow 7y ago
  > prices stabilize at a slightly higher point Which encourages renewable development. Renewables would not be as successful today with oil at $20/bbl.
  - fooblitzky 7y ago
    Renewables would be ahead on cost down to USD 9-10/barrel: https://investors-corner.bnpparibas-am.com/investment-themes/sri/petrol-eroci-petroleum-age/ https://investors-corner.bnpparibas-am.com/investment-themes...
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      "Competitive" is a curve, not a point. Solar can be cheaper for daytime generation before it's cheaper for nighttime generation (when you need to tack on the cost of storage). Electric cars may already have a lower TCO, but if you already have an ICE car, it may not be worth the transaction costs of immediately selling it and buying an electric car instead of waiting until you would have bought a new car anyway, whereas it could be if gas prices were higher. The TCO is also affected by how much you drive, so the gas price that justifies replacing your car depends on how much you drive it. There isn't a price level where $0.01 below it no one can justify buying an electric car and $0.01 above it everyone can. The higher oil prices get, the more people end up on the other side of the line.
      - disjhshava 7y ago
        I'm really skeptical of lower TCO for electric cars. My gasoline-powered car is worth $5k. All electric cars with decent range cost more in depreciation alone than my TCO. I think in a few years a Bolt will have a competitive TCO, and maybe a Model 3 will a few years after that.
        AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        You're comparing the TCO of a new electric car to a used gasoline car. We all know that used cars have a lower TCO than new ones in general. Nobody is going to crush a perfectly operational two year old gasoline car just because of higher gas prices (though that would obviously cause it to suffer higher depreciation due to the loss in resale value). The real question is, as the old cars become unreliable and age out of service, how does the TCO compare as between the new cars that will replace them?
        disjhshava 7y ago
        I'm comparing the TCO of a good value gasoline car to the best value electric car available (including used models). If you have a ton of disposable income, buying a Tesla could be a good decision, but very few people are in that position. Since we are taking about TCO, I assume we are talking about a financially literate purchaser. I fully expect that electric cars will have a reasonable TCO in the future.
- acqq 7y ago
  > All making oil more expensive does is make the more expensive oil worth extracting, prices stabilize at a slightly higher point and the market adapts. For traders, at exactly which point matters a lot. > Unfortunately we aren't going to run out of oil anywhere near soon enough to save the planet. Yes, it's probably a good estimate: It doesn't mean that we won't achieve the "peak" in some decades, eventually even "more expensive" options will be used up, just that that won't prevent having much more CO2 than now.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    "Some decades" ? Last time I checked, Laherrere predicted peak conventional + unconventional for 2019 ? (There's always the political uncertainties of course, especially in the Middle East!)
    - acqq 7y ago
      The latest I was able to find from Laherrere is: https://aspofrance.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/35cooilforecast.pdf https://aspofrance.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/35cooilforeca... "The main conclusion of this study is this from 2018: -only 6 countries have not yet reached peak: Brazil, Canada oilsands, Kazakhstan, Iraq, UAE, Venezuela Orinoco -19 countries (out of 35) have or will have a decline rate of 5 %/a It means that, excluding the 6 countries before peak, the best and the simplest way to forecast future production is to decrease present production by 5 % per year" "6 countries have not yet reached peak" and "excluding the 6 countries" surely doesn't sound like "peak" everywhere. So yes, it seems that, at longest, in "some" decades the global peak will do happen. Laherrere also documents why the exact predictions are hard (see all the graphs there). My point is more, whoever thinks that "scientists will always find something" surely thinks in short enough frames. There is a finite amount of fossil fuel material on Earth.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- okcando 7y ago
  Peak oil isn't nonsense. Predictions about when are often wrong but the idea is sound. And it never meant running out. It's exactly what it says on the tin: a peak and a probably very long tail of decline.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    There is "peak oil" as the basic geophysical concept, which is perfectly fine. There is also "peak oil" as the prophecy of imminent collapse of industrial civilization, which was a much bigger thing a decade or so ago. It may still have some loyal believers. I think that people unfortunately have the means to extract far more oil than we have the means to safely burn in Earth's atmosphere.
    - pault 7y ago
      I can confirm. My mom is susceptible to internet fear mongering and got on some "peak oil" forums back around 2005. Many of them wanted you to believe that things were going to spiral out of control and that rioting and food shortages were imminent. Of course they could go back and say that they never said that explicitly, but the implication was there and it was clearly meant to scare the shit out of you. It seems that there's a certain type of person that secretly wants society to fall apart because they think it will solve all of their social and financial problems. I'm not sure they've thought it through very well.
  - stale2002 7y ago
    Well, there is an alternative. You are talking about peak oil supply. Instead, what if we run into peak oil demand. IE, instead of running out of oil, we run out of oil demand, as everyone moves away from oil onto better technologies.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Not likely to happen as we don't have better technologies, and now no time left to develop and especially build the infrastructure for them...
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  I think maybe the hard way will be gene-edited phytoplankton and overcoming efficiency bottlenecks in photosynthesis, such as by introducing bacterical carboxysomes into plants to make RuBisCO more efficient, or by making plants use C3 in the midday leaves higher on the plant and C4 everywhere else, or by replacing chlorophylls with versions that respond to different wavelengths of light.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  The peak of the peak oil scare was 40 years ago (given that the peak was scheduled for the mid 70s), not 20. This is actually the first time I’ve heard of there being another scare 20 years ago. For example, Mad Max in 1979 comes from that sentiment.
  - oil-crisis 7y ago
    I think the Carter administration's incident in the late 1970's is more accurately characterized as an "oil crisis" because there were real shortages, serious enough to alter trends in car purchasing habits, warranting economy automobile redesigns (smaller, lighter, more efficient, no more muscle cars). Gas stations actually ran out of gas, resulting in hours long waits on miles long lines, and theft by siphoning forcing the introduction of keyed locks on gas tanks. These were real problems people faced, although it wasn't exactly a full panic. Oil "scares" on the other hand were threats that raised eyebrows, and caused dramatic price fluctuations in anticipation potential problems. Each "scare" really only hit the wallet and bank account, without altering real behavior. In that sense, yes, there were a few other "scares" between Jimmy Carter and present day. Each grouping came periodically, maybe every ten years. Almost all of them were tied to Iraq. The first was the invasion of Kuwait in 1991. I think gas prices blew past $2/gallon for the first time. The second was 9/11, and $4/gallon gas starting late 2001. This one was rough. Pretty much everyone I knew was groaning about gas prices, and with Iraq invasion rumors people started thinking $5 would break them. The 2003 Iraq invasion actually resulted in a downward trend (due to international theft or spoils), but it's ever been below $2 again, and it's been back up to $4 at the pump, here and there, depending on geographic region and state taxes, here and there. With the 2008 meltdown, oil prices weren't displaying any gouging, and there wasn't much of a scare at the 2001 decade mark, because as others have mentioned, fracking has buoyed domestic production.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Petrol is still cheap when inflation is considered (consider $1 in 1984 is $2.40 in 2018). Also, the first oil shock occurred during Nixon (with a second one under Carter).
  - 7y ago
colechristensen 7y ago
No, the price of oil will jump to 80-100/bbl and all of the tar sands extraction will become rather profitable again and North American production will explode. OPEC had been keeping the prices around 100 until the tar sands extraction became big and they had to drastically cut prices because they couldn't handle the loss of revenue. There is an enormous amount of oil tied up in those tar sands and it is very extricable, but it is considerably more expensive to extract such that it isn't economical at current prices.
- hangonhn 7y ago
  Not to mention actually very inefficient and polluting.
  - ndarwincorn 7y ago
    Seriously. Ask some Athabascans about how extricable tar sands oil is.
    - foobiekr 7y ago
      We are so far out over our skis in terms of the need for oil input to the agricultural sector that the overall economic system will not bat an eye at despoiling everything around it.
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  Oil prices going back up to $100 a barrel would drive adoption of electric cars at a much faster pace.
  - cobookman 7y ago
    Itd actually be a good thing for the environment. The greater the cost the more conservation makes business sense. If an efficient fridge is only 15$/month cheaper it's not replacing your current fridge. At 50$/month it quickly pays off.
ars 7y ago
If oil prices go up renewables become more profitable, BUT they also become more expensive, since energy is a huge component in their cost. It's pretty much a wash. Don't expect higher oil prices to spur renewables, it has never happened, and never will. Instead renewables become profitable (and thus popular) when we become more efficient at making and installing them.
- acchow 7y ago
  > since energy is a huge component in their cost I want to see some data to back up this claim. > It's pretty much a wash. I guess you'd need energy to make up >90% of the cost to make it "pretty much a wash"?
  - ars 7y ago
    > I want to see some data to back up this claim. I'll try to get some, but do a thought experiment: What component of, say, a solar panel cost is not energy? > I guess you'd need energy to make up >90% of the cost to make it "pretty much a wash"? Yes, and it is. Not in terms of you have to pay oil companies all that money, but rather that energy is the multiplier that all prices are based off of. If oil costs go up, then your suppliers costs go up, all the way down the chain. Including salaries - since the workers need more money to buy stuff, they want higher salaries. Think about what is costs to make something, every single thing, at it's endpoint costs energy.
    - rgbrenner 7y ago
      You've forgotten all of the other sources we use to produce energy: coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, renewables, etc.. and a fraction also comes from oil. So oil tripling overnight would not result in a tripling of energy prices. There would be a small increase as load is shifted to other sources.. and there would be an increase in transportation costs of solar panel delivery. But the cost of a panel would barely increase. And those factories near nuclear, hydro, etc plants would see a slight competitive advantage over those in areas where energy comes from oil (but again, coal is a big source of energy.. oil much less so).
zaroth 7y ago
More seriously? I’m not sure it’s a reasonable position to claim that renewables and battery tech are not being “seriously” worked on. Just looking at solar and battery manufacturing growth, on the order of $100 billion / year is being invested annually in these technologies. I think it’s very reasonable to conclude that doubling the investment would not nearly double the rate of advances, because all the top experts are already fully employed and fully funded.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Hmm, how does this compare with money invested in fossil fuels ?
  - zaroth 7y ago
    As a percentage of the current market size, the R&D for batteries and renewables is probably an order of magnitude greater than R&D in fossil fuels. From a public investment perspective, the trend is that fossil fuel R&D is shrinking, and renewables investment is increasing or steady. Renewables public investment was first higher than fossil fuels in 1998, and has been higher than fossil fuel public investment 9 out of the last 10 years. [1] [1] - https://www.iea.org/statistics/rdd/ https://www.iea.org/statistics/rdd/
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      But 20 G$ isn't 100 G$... And that's just for the IEA countries, if you aren't counting the big fossil fuel players like Russia and OPEC on one hand and also China on the other - what is even the point of these numbers ? And I see that the biggest US tight oil firms had a deficit of nearly 7 G$ for 2018, so I'd assume that their development costs (which are the majority of their costs due to the very high depletion rate) are even higher - so where does yours "order of magnitude greater" comes from ? https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-shale-finances/cash-flow-still-weak-at-u-s-shale-firms-stock-prices-underperform-idUSL1N211001 https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-shale-finances/cash-flow...
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
I can already hear the venezuela is creating weapons of mass destruction propaganda.

That's what we thought 20 years ago during the "peak oil" nonsense and they just invented fracking. Talking about oil "reserves" paints a picture that petroleum extraction is like just scooping sludge out of a big underground bucket. Real deposits come in a huge variety of forms and qualities, and extracting them sits on a cost spectrum. All making oil more expensive does is make the more expensive oil worth extracting, prices stabilize at a slightly higher point and the market adapts. Unfortunately we aren't going to run out of oil anywhere near soon enough to save the planet. We need to do it the hard way.

ed312 7y ago
However the costs of renewable tech is coming down - at some point it's just a better business decision to switch off oil.
- ajross 7y ago
  Exactly. Which is the "hard way". We need to win this with technology and, where technology alone isn't enough, with government action to curtail emissions. We aren't going to get lucky and run out of oil.
acchow 7y ago
> prices stabilize at a slightly higher point Which encourages renewable development. Renewables would not be as successful today with oil at $20/bbl.
- fooblitzky 7y ago
  Renewables would be ahead on cost down to USD 9-10/barrel: https://investors-corner.bnpparibas-am.com/investment-themes/sri/petrol-eroci-petroleum-age/ https://investors-corner.bnpparibas-am.com/investment-themes...
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    "Competitive" is a curve, not a point. Solar can be cheaper for daytime generation before it's cheaper for nighttime generation (when you need to tack on the cost of storage). Electric cars may already have a lower TCO, but if you already have an ICE car, it may not be worth the transaction costs of immediately selling it and buying an electric car instead of waiting until you would have bought a new car anyway, whereas it could be if gas prices were higher. The TCO is also affected by how much you drive, so the gas price that justifies replacing your car depends on how much you drive it. There isn't a price level where $0.01 below it no one can justify buying an electric car and $0.01 above it everyone can. The higher oil prices get, the more people end up on the other side of the line.
    - disjhshava 7y ago
      I'm really skeptical of lower TCO for electric cars. My gasoline-powered car is worth $5k. All electric cars with decent range cost more in depreciation alone than my TCO. I think in a few years a Bolt will have a competitive TCO, and maybe a Model 3 will a few years after that.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        You're comparing the TCO of a new electric car to a used gasoline car. We all know that used cars have a lower TCO than new ones in general. Nobody is going to crush a perfectly operational two year old gasoline car just because of higher gas prices (though that would obviously cause it to suffer higher depreciation due to the loss in resale value). The real question is, as the old cars become unreliable and age out of service, how does the TCO compare as between the new cars that will replace them?
        disjhshava 7y ago
        I'm comparing the TCO of a good value gasoline car to the best value electric car available (including used models). If you have a ton of disposable income, buying a Tesla could be a good decision, but very few people are in that position. Since we are taking about TCO, I assume we are talking about a financially literate purchaser. I fully expect that electric cars will have a reasonable TCO in the future.
acqq 7y ago
> All making oil more expensive does is make the more expensive oil worth extracting, prices stabilize at a slightly higher point and the market adapts. For traders, at exactly which point matters a lot. > Unfortunately we aren't going to run out of oil anywhere near soon enough to save the planet. Yes, it's probably a good estimate: It doesn't mean that we won't achieve the "peak" in some decades, eventually even "more expensive" options will be used up, just that that won't prevent having much more CO2 than now.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  "Some decades" ? Last time I checked, Laherrere predicted peak conventional + unconventional for 2019 ? (There's always the political uncertainties of course, especially in the Middle East!)
  - acqq 7y ago
    The latest I was able to find from Laherrere is: https://aspofrance.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/35cooilforecast.pdf https://aspofrance.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/35cooilforeca... "The main conclusion of this study is this from 2018: -only 6 countries have not yet reached peak: Brazil, Canada oilsands, Kazakhstan, Iraq, UAE, Venezuela Orinoco -19 countries (out of 35) have or will have a decline rate of 5 %/a It means that, excluding the 6 countries before peak, the best and the simplest way to forecast future production is to decrease present production by 5 % per year" "6 countries have not yet reached peak" and "excluding the 6 countries" surely doesn't sound like "peak" everywhere. So yes, it seems that, at longest, in "some" decades the global peak will do happen. Laherrere also documents why the exact predictions are hard (see all the graphs there). My point is more, whoever thinks that "scientists will always find something" surely thinks in short enough frames. There is a finite amount of fossil fuel material on Earth.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
okcando 7y ago
Peak oil isn't nonsense. Predictions about when are often wrong but the idea is sound. And it never meant running out. It's exactly what it says on the tin: a peak and a probably very long tail of decline.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  There is "peak oil" as the basic geophysical concept, which is perfectly fine. There is also "peak oil" as the prophecy of imminent collapse of industrial civilization, which was a much bigger thing a decade or so ago. It may still have some loyal believers. I think that people unfortunately have the means to extract far more oil than we have the means to safely burn in Earth's atmosphere.
  - pault 7y ago
    I can confirm. My mom is susceptible to internet fear mongering and got on some "peak oil" forums back around 2005. Many of them wanted you to believe that things were going to spiral out of control and that rioting and food shortages were imminent. Of course they could go back and say that they never said that explicitly, but the implication was there and it was clearly meant to scare the shit out of you. It seems that there's a certain type of person that secretly wants society to fall apart because they think it will solve all of their social and financial problems. I'm not sure they've thought it through very well.
- stale2002 7y ago
  Well, there is an alternative. You are talking about peak oil supply. Instead, what if we run into peak oil demand. IE, instead of running out of oil, we run out of oil demand, as everyone moves away from oil onto better technologies.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Not likely to happen as we don't have better technologies, and now no time left to develop and especially build the infrastructure for them...
logfromblammo 7y ago
I think maybe the hard way will be gene-edited phytoplankton and overcoming efficiency bottlenecks in photosynthesis, such as by introducing bacterical carboxysomes into plants to make RuBisCO more efficient, or by making plants use C3 in the midday leaves higher on the plant and C4 everywhere else, or by replacing chlorophylls with versions that respond to different wavelengths of light.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
The peak of the peak oil scare was 40 years ago (given that the peak was scheduled for the mid 70s), not 20. This is actually the first time I’ve heard of there being another scare 20 years ago. For example, Mad Max in 1979 comes from that sentiment.
- oil-crisis 7y ago
  I think the Carter administration's incident in the late 1970's is more accurately characterized as an "oil crisis" because there were real shortages, serious enough to alter trends in car purchasing habits, warranting economy automobile redesigns (smaller, lighter, more efficient, no more muscle cars). Gas stations actually ran out of gas, resulting in hours long waits on miles long lines, and theft by siphoning forcing the introduction of keyed locks on gas tanks. These were real problems people faced, although it wasn't exactly a full panic. Oil "scares" on the other hand were threats that raised eyebrows, and caused dramatic price fluctuations in anticipation potential problems. Each "scare" really only hit the wallet and bank account, without altering real behavior. In that sense, yes, there were a few other "scares" between Jimmy Carter and present day. Each grouping came periodically, maybe every ten years. Almost all of them were tied to Iraq. The first was the invasion of Kuwait in 1991. I think gas prices blew past $2/gallon for the first time. The second was 9/11, and $4/gallon gas starting late 2001. This one was rough. Pretty much everyone I knew was groaning about gas prices, and with Iraq invasion rumors people started thinking $5 would break them. The 2003 Iraq invasion actually resulted in a downward trend (due to international theft or spoils), but it's ever been below $2 again, and it's been back up to $4 at the pump, here and there, depending on geographic region and state taxes, here and there. With the 2008 meltdown, oil prices weren't displaying any gouging, and there wasn't much of a scare at the 2001 decade mark, because as others have mentioned, fracking has buoyed domestic production.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Petrol is still cheap when inflation is considered (consider $1 in 1984 is $2.40 in 2018). Also, the first oil shock occurred during Nixon (with a second one under Carter).
- 7y ago

colechristensen 7y ago

No, the price of oil will jump to 80-100/bbl and all of the tar sands extraction will become rather profitable again and North American production will explode. OPEC had been keeping the prices around 100 until the tar sands extraction became big and they had to drastically cut prices because they couldn't handle the loss of revenue. There is an enormous amount of oil tied up in those tar sands and it is very extricable, but it is considerably more expensive to extract such that it isn't economical at current prices.

hangonhn 7y ago
Not to mention actually very inefficient and polluting.
- ndarwincorn 7y ago
  Seriously. Ask some Athabascans about how extricable tar sands oil is.
  - foobiekr 7y ago
    We are so far out over our skis in terms of the need for oil input to the agricultural sector that the overall economic system will not bat an eye at despoiling everything around it.
Brakenshire 7y ago
Oil prices going back up to $100 a barrel would drive adoption of electric cars at a much faster pace.
- cobookman 7y ago
  Itd actually be a good thing for the environment. The greater the cost the more conservation makes business sense. If an efficient fridge is only 15$/month cheaper it's not replacing your current fridge. At 50$/month it quickly pays off.

ars 7y ago

If oil prices go up renewables become more profitable, BUT they also become more expensive, since energy is a huge component in their cost. It's pretty much a wash. Don't expect higher oil prices to spur renewables, it has never happened, and never will. Instead renewables become profitable (and thus popular) when we become more efficient at making and installing them.

acchow 7y ago
> since energy is a huge component in their cost I want to see some data to back up this claim. > It's pretty much a wash. I guess you'd need energy to make up >90% of the cost to make it "pretty much a wash"?
- ars 7y ago
  > I want to see some data to back up this claim. I'll try to get some, but do a thought experiment: What component of, say, a solar panel cost is not energy? > I guess you'd need energy to make up >90% of the cost to make it "pretty much a wash"? Yes, and it is. Not in terms of you have to pay oil companies all that money, but rather that energy is the multiplier that all prices are based off of. If oil costs go up, then your suppliers costs go up, all the way down the chain. Including salaries - since the workers need more money to buy stuff, they want higher salaries. Think about what is costs to make something, every single thing, at it's endpoint costs energy.
  - rgbrenner 7y ago
    You've forgotten all of the other sources we use to produce energy: coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, renewables, etc.. and a fraction also comes from oil. So oil tripling overnight would not result in a tripling of energy prices. There would be a small increase as load is shifted to other sources.. and there would be an increase in transportation costs of solar panel delivery. But the cost of a panel would barely increase. And those factories near nuclear, hydro, etc plants would see a slight competitive advantage over those in areas where energy comes from oil (but again, coal is a big source of energy.. oil much less so).

zaroth 7y ago

More seriously? I’m not sure it’s a reasonable position to claim that renewables and battery tech are not being “seriously” worked on. Just looking at solar and battery manufacturing growth, on the order of $100 billion / year is being invested annually in these technologies. I think it’s very reasonable to conclude that doubling the investment would not nearly double the rate of advances, because all the top experts are already fully employed and fully funded.

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Hmm, how does this compare with money invested in fossil fuels ?
- zaroth 7y ago
  As a percentage of the current market size, the R&D for batteries and renewables is probably an order of magnitude greater than R&D in fossil fuels. From a public investment perspective, the trend is that fossil fuel R&D is shrinking, and renewables investment is increasing or steady. Renewables public investment was first higher than fossil fuels in 1998, and has been higher than fossil fuel public investment 9 out of the last 10 years. [1] [1] - https://www.iea.org/statistics/rdd/ https://www.iea.org/statistics/rdd/
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    But 20 G$ isn't 100 G$... And that's just for the IEA countries, if you aren't counting the big fossil fuel players like Russia and OPEC on one hand and also China on the other - what is even the point of these numbers ? And I see that the biggest US tight oil firms had a deficit of nearly 7 G$ for 2018, so I'd assume that their development costs (which are the majority of their costs due to the very high depletion rate) are even higher - so where does yours "order of magnitude greater" comes from ? https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-shale-finances/cash-flow-still-weak-at-u-s-shale-firms-stock-prices-underperform-idUSL1N211001 https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-shale-finances/cash-flow...
BlueTemplar 7y ago

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

I can already hear the venezuela is creating weapons of mass destruction propaganda.