WASHINGTON (AP) — Besides a social media post from President Donald Trump, the White House has said little about what he is calling “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” in Venezuela.
Trump said the agreement announced Friday night would give the United States a stake in Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, a step toward his goal of extracting energy from the country after American forces captured then-President Nicolás Maduro in a middle-of-the-night raid in January and brought him to New York to face federal drug trafficking charges.
Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, described the deal as a step toward economic recovery that will modernize the country’s oil industry.
But the answers to questions such as how soon the reserves could be drilled and who will pay to make it happen were not immediately clear. No text of any agreement has been released.
A look at what is known and unknown:
The U.S. government and an unnamed private operator in Venezuela formed a new private company that was given the rights to vast, untapped oil fields for 100 years.
A statement from Rodríguez said the deal involves the development of 17 fields with a proven potential of 65 billion barrels. It said the agreement could draw $100 billion in investment into Venezuela’s oil industry and yield over $209 billion in taxes for Caracas.
Trump said the agreement was negotiated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Rodríguez.
The deal gives the United States 55% effective output of the new private company, including an ownership stake and rights to buy oil at cost. American purchases of the oil will go toward the U.S. strategic oil reserves along with the military, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The company would be the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco, according to the official.
Probably not any time soon.
Trump says the deal will help lower gas prices for Americans. That is an important objective for the Republican president as the Iran war slows the shipping of Persian Gulf oil and keeps prices elevated months before November elections in the United States.
But experts have repeatedly warned that Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure will take years and billions of dollars to repair. A substantial boost in production is not expected to happen quickly.
The deal could be “helpful in the long run, but it’s not going to do anything to change the price of gasoline at the retail station for Labor Day weekend,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University.
Neither side made clear who would pay for infrastructure investments and at what cost.
The average price of gas in the U.S. stood at about $4.08 a gallon on Saturday, according to AAA. The average price was $3.20 at the same time last year.
Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, urged caution because so few details are known about the deal. He said Venezuela has room to build on its oil production — in the past it produced more than 2.5 million barrels a day above current levels — but this kind of investment does not come quickly.
“It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s going to take time — many years — to deploy that much capital and produce the kind of incremental results that history suggests possible," Book said.
Some in Venezuela consider it a betrayal of what their government has stated repeatedly for decades: Venezuelan resources are for Venezuela and that leaders would not allow the U.S. government to lay a hand on those resources.
At a market in eastern Caracas on Saturday, Douglas Borjas said he was upset about the announcement.
“I think they’re doing it to cling to power,” he said of Venezuela’s leaders. “It’s like, ‘I’m giving you a vast amount of petroleum as long as you leave me alone here in power.’”
He added: “The Venezuelan people deserve better. Venezuela has resources that can be exploited, but for the benefit of the people, not for the benefit of the corrupt elite.”
Harvard University professor Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan planning minister, called it a “shameful deal."
“Venezuelans will not respect this illegitimate deal and no major US oil company will take it seriously because they know it will not last,” Hausmann said on social media, adding that Rodríguez “has no legitimacy or constitutional power to commit Venezuela to any such deal."
It is unclear whether Congress will play a role in the arrangement, but lawmakers from both parties were quick to weigh in.
Trump allies called it a win.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, said it was a historic deal that helps both countries. “If it were up to DC Democrats, Maduro would still be in power, Venezuelan oil would be going to China at half price, and the people of Venezuela would be getting robbed by a corrupt regime,” Moreno wrote on social media.
It was condemned by Democrats who said Maduro's capture was a means to this end.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Trump was always after Venezuela's oil, branding it “corruption at epic scale.”
“Will prices come down for Americans? Who knows but likely not as much as Trump has forced them up thru his idiotic Iran War," Kaine said on social media.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said Trump “put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies.”
Many important details remain unclear, including the identity of the private operator, who will cover necessary investments and how America's stake in the company breaks down.
The U.S. will get 55% of the company's effective output, but it was not clear what portion of that comes from the ownership stake and how much comes from the right to buy oil at cost.
It also is unclear how the industry will react. Persuading big American oil companies to return to the region could prove a challenge given the political uncertainty and damaged infrastructure.
Chevron, the only U.S. oil company actively producing in Venezuela, declined to comment. Separately from Trump’s announcement, Chevron already had been in talks to expand investment in the country. Exxon Mobil also declined to comment.
David Oxley, chief climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics, said that on its face the deal could double U.S. oil reserves and reduce dependence on crude oil from Canada and Mexico. But Oxley, writing in a commentary, cautioned that there are logistical hurdles and he said the value of Venezuela's reserves may have been exaggerated under former President Hugo Chavez.
Even with legal and security guarantees, it is not clear that U.S. oil companies “would be eager to invest,’’ he wrote, noting that “there simply might be more enticing commercial opportunities on offer elsewhere.’’
Arráez reported from Caracas, Venezuela. Associated Press writer Moriah Balingit and AP Economics Writer Paul Wiseman in Washington contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump speaks during an event to present the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Artemis II crew members, Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
FILE - Flames rise from flare stacks at the Amuay refinery in Los Taques, Venezuela, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix, File)
BOSTON (AP) — Climate change has been the backdrop to Charles Hughes’ entire life, from kindergarten lessons about disappearing habitats to wildfire smoke billowing through the air he breathed while growing up in Colorado. But now that he's a college student in Massachusetts, he said global warming is rarely a top issue.
“Honestly, it doesn’t come up as much,” said Hughes, who chairs the state's chapter of the College Democrats.
What a difference six years makes.
During President Donald Trump’s first term and especially during the Democratic primaries to determine who would run against him in 2020, Democrats spoke constantly about climate change. They used it to rally young voters such as Hughes, fueling protests and sweeping demands to remake the economy with proposals like the Green New Deal.
But there has been a national shift in the conversation that is sharp enough for some researchers to coin the term "climate hushing” to describe it. The Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank, urged the party to stop mentioning climate change because it is not a priority for voters. The Sunrise Movement, a left-wing group that pushed global warming as a top issue for young people, switched its mission last fall to a broader mandate of fighting the Republican president.
The shift is encapsulated by the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts on Tuesday as the incumbent, Ed Markey, 80, tries to fend off a challenge from U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, 47. Although Markey still talks about sponsoring the Green New Deal, his campaign is more focused on other issues to burnish his left-wing bona fides and prove to voters that he is not too old for the job.
It is the latest example of how climate change has been eclipsed by issues such as affordability, U.S. support for Israel and, above all, how to confront Trump.
“Six years ago, Green New Deal was every phrase out of Ed Markey’s mouth every chance he got. That is not the case now,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a veteran Democratic strategist in Massachusetts. “It’s about who’s best to fight. Period, full stop. Everything falls under that.”
Even if the political discussion on climate change has quieted, the planet has not. Scientists say there is an increasing chance that by the end of the year, 2026 could be the hottest year on record, or at least come close. A strengthening El Nino is forecast to be off the charts, spiking global temperatures.
Some advocates expect the issue to return to center stage if Democrats retake the U.S. House in November and climate-sparked disasters dominate the winter.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a prominent Democratic voice on climate change, said in an interview that ignoring the issue is a major strategic “blunder.”
“Climate change has moved from the science department into the economics department," he said. "It's now battering people’s home insurance, property values, pocketbook concerns. So I think it’s a very powerful argument.”
Trump has falsely claimed climate change is “a hoax," and his party has regularly scoffed at Democratic proposals such as the Green New Deal.
The Sunrise Movement, founded in 2017 to mobilize young voters over climate issues, announced in October that it was shifting to a broader fight against “fascism.” The group’s executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, said that was a prescient move because of reports that federal agents infiltrated protest meetings during Trump’s immigration raids in Minneapolis.
“We just live in a significantly more authoritarian country. Because of that, a lot of the Democratic primaries are about more existential questions,” Shiney-Ajay, whose network generally backs left-wing Democrats, said in an interview. “It has felt less like people care less about climate and more like people are increasingly freaked out about other issues.”
About 6 in 10 Democrats say climate change is “a very big problem” for the country, according to a Pew Research Center poll from April. That is roughly the same as in 2016. Still, climate has often taken a back seat to other issues in Democratic voters' priorities, such as inflation, healthcare affordability and the role of money in politics.
Affordability concerns have dominated the political debate this year.
McKenzie Wilson of Blue Rose Research, a Democratic data firm, said voters have called for sweeping changes in response to economic discontent, demonstrating a level of anger not seen in years.
“In that kind of environment it’s hard to think about long-term, existential problems,” Wilson said. “If we don’t talk and focus our attention on the number one thing the electorate wants to talk about, as we saw in 2024, we’re not going to be connecting with the electorate.”
That view was summed up by the Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank that last year released a provocative suggestion: “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”
It contended that voters saw it as such an intimidating, complex issue that Democrats were more likely to win by focusing on other subjects — thus enabling them to regain power and tackle the crisis that they were not talking about.
Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of “The Carbon Wave,” a book about Democratic President Joe Biden's domestic agenda, said it was “galling” when politicians made the issue less of a priority.
“The climate crisis is accelerating and we can’t really not talk about it for like a decade, because the planet will be even more on fire if we do that,” she said.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, agreed with those concerns.
“What happens over the course of the next decade will profoundly shape the habitability of the planet for literally thousands of years to come,” he said.
Climate has come up as part of the national backlash to data centers, but it is only one part of the conversation about the projects' impact. Many climate advocates are adjusting how they talk about the issue, stressing how green energy can lower prices and ease insurance costs.
“What we’re seeing right now is, whether you’re advocating for healthcare reform or climate action or some niche tech issue, everything is filtered through some cost frame,” said Jared Leopold, a veteran Democratic strategist who has long focused on climate change.
That is how the Green New Deal came up at a recent debate between Markey and Moulton, when a voter asked how each candidate would reduce energy prices. Notably, the questioner asked about increasing nuclear or gas generation, not clean energy, to deal with cost. Markey turned the opportunity into a slam against the president.
“There was a plan in place in order to have a strong, clean affordable energy future for our commonwealth,” Markey said, “and Trump attacked it.”
Tatishe Nteta, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that is how Markey has used climate change this election — to signal his willingness to fight Trump as well as his alliance with the left flank of the Democratic Party, which has run up a series of primary wins this year. But other issues have become even more useful in doing that.
“The definition in where you’re at in terms of a progressive candidate and a progressive elected official is your viewpoint on Israel,” Nteta said. “You’re not hearing this in most races, that I’m the candidate who’s going to protect and save our planet.”
Massachusetts’ summer has been the hottest that Eileen Cefail can recall in the 30 years she has worked in the Roofers Local 33 office. “The roofers are tough as nails, and they work so hard, and their work is so grueling,” she said. “This heat has been horrendous for them.”
Cefail is backing Markey in the primary, but climate, she said, was not the main reason.
“He’s always been a union guy,” Cefail said. “He’s just for the labor.”
Riccardi reported from Denver and McDermott from Providence, R.I. Associated Press writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
FILE - Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., questions witnesses during a hearing on Capitol Hill, Feb. 28, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
FILE - Protestors march through Manhattan up to Central Park during the "Make Billionaires Pay" climate protest, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis, File)
