What I’m Reading: A long article and photo spread, this Sunday, in the New York Times.

Venezuela’s Oil Industry is Broken. Now It’s Breaking the Environment

Venezuela’s oil industry, which helped transform the country’s fortunes, has been decimated by mismanagement and several years of U.S. sanctions imposed on the country’s authoritarian government, leaving behind a ravaged economy and a devastated environment.

The state-owned oil company has struggled to maintain minimal production for export to other countries, as well as domestic consumption. But to do so it has sacrificed basic maintenance and relied on increasingly shoddy equipment that has led to a growing environmental toll, environmental activists say.

. . . Mr. Aguilera lives in El Tejero, a town nearly 300 miles east of Caracas, the capital, in an oil-rich region known for towns that never see the darkness of night. Gas flares from oil wells light up at all hours with a roaring thunder, their vibrations causing the walls of rickety houses to crack.

Many residents complain of having respiratory diseases like asthma, which scientists say can be aggravated by emissions from gas flares. Rain brings down an oily film that corrodes car engines, turns white clothes dark and stains notebooks that children carry to school.

And yet, paradoxically, widespread fuel shortages in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves mean virtually no one in this region has cooking gas at home.

Soon after President Hugo Chávez rose to power in the 1990s with promises to use the country’s oil wealth to lift up the poor, he fired thousands of oil workers, including engineers and geologists, and replaced them with political supporters, took control of foreign-owned oil assets, and neglected safety and environmental standards.

Then, in 2019, the United States accused Mr. Chavez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro, of election fraud and imposed economic sanctions, including a ban on Venezuelan oil imports, to try to force him from power.

The country’s economy collapsed, helping to fuel a mass exodus of Venezuelans who could not afford to feed their families even as Mr. Maduro has managed to maintain his repressive hold on power.

— Isayen Herrera and Sheyla Urdaneta, “Venezuela’s Oil Industry is Broken. Now It’s Breaking the Environment.”
New York Times, 22 Quintilis 2023.

I’m going to interrupt the reporting here for a minute to say that one of this story’s weaknesses, like many reported in U.S. press, comes from its diplomatic attempt to apportion blame and avoid putting too much on the Bolivarian regime. This has some cautious and good-hearted motives behind it; in any case it doesn’t lead to stating any concrete falsehoods about the development of Venezuela’s catastrophic economic and political crises. But leaping from Chavez’s strike-breaking purge and reorganization of PDVSA — in February 2003! — to Then, in 2019… is telescoping an awful lot of extremely eventful time in between. This bookending leaves the misleading impression that something may have been going wrong from the early 2000s, but things didn’t really get so obviously, unbearably bad until — boom! — the U.S. sanctions came along in 2019. That’s not at all what happened. The ongoing train-wreck demolition of Venezuelan industry, consumer economies, standards of living, political liberties, physical security, and the most basic necessities of everyday life, were being widely reported in Venezuelan and international press from 2013-2014 and went on and on for years prior to 2019. U.S. sanctions made this catastrophically awful situation even worse, but it was overwhelmingly due to the foreseeable economic results of the Venezuelan government’s own policies and increasingly violent, extraconstitutional rule.^[1] Be that as it may, whatever weakness it may have in contextualizing these disasters, I think the reporting in this story is really important and heartbreaking. And behind story after story is this:

In eastern Venezuela, rusting refineries burn off methane gases that are part of the fossil fuel industry’s operations and are important drivers of global warming.

Even though Venezuela produces far less oil than it once did, it ranks third in the world in methane emissions per barrel of oil produced, according to the International Energy Agency.^[2]

Cabimas, a city about 400 miles northwest of Caracas on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, is another center of regional oil production. There, the state oil company, PDVSA, built hospitals and schools, set up summer camps and provided residents with Christmas toys.

Now oil seeps from deteriorating underwater pipelines in the lake, coating the shores and turning the water a neon green that can be seen from space. Broken pipes float on the surface, and oil drills are rusting and sinking into the water. Birds coated in oil struggle to fly.

The collapse of the oil industry has left Cabimas, once one of the richest communities in Venezuela, in extreme poverty. . . .

The poor maintenance of the fuel production machinery in Lake Maracaibo has led to an increase in oil spills, which have contaminated Cabimas and other communities along its shoreline, according to local organizations focusing on the issue.

The gas flares that burn across parts of Venezuela also point to the enfeeblement of the country’s fossil fuel industry: So much gas spews into the atmosphere because there is not enough functioning equipment to convert it into fuel, experts say.

— Isayen Herrera and Sheyla Urdaneta, “Venezuela’s Oil Industry is Broken. Now It’s Breaking the Environment.”
New York Times, 22 Quintilis 2023.

So it goes, and so it goes, onward while the Maduro government continues to look at the wrecked machines and ruined livelihoods, the violence and filth and pestilence and famine that decades of its policies have left on what had been one of the world’s richest natural landscapes. And they open their mouths and say that the fault for this decade and more of grueling man-made disaster lies, entirely and as always, not with the party in power since the turn of the century, but with their political enemies. The Bolivarian Process must, if anything, continue, and deepen.

At a U.N. climate change summit last year, Mr. Maduro did not address the environmental damage resulting from his country’s hobbled oil industry.

Instead, he claimed that Venezuela was responsible for less than 0.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and blamed wealthier countries for causing environmental harm. (Experts say that figure is accurate and note that the country’s emissions have decreased as its oil industry has cratered.)

The Venezuelan people must pay the consequences of an imbalance caused by the world’s leading capitalist economies, Mr. Maduro said in a speech at the summit.

A top government minister, Josué Alejandro Lorca, said in 2021 that oil spills were not a big deal because, historically, all oil companies have had them. He added that the government did not have the resources to address the problem.

— Isayen Herrera and Sheyla Urdaneta, “Venezuela’s Oil Industry is Broken. Now It’s Breaking the Environment.”
New York Times, 22 Quintilis 2023.

Que se vayan todos.

1. ^[1]In more detail: In my view the main effect of writing down the timeline in this sort of tightly bookended way, is to strategically and dramatically overemphasize the role that U.S. sanctions could possibly have played in the catastrophic collapse of the Venezuelan economy. Really this is not only the main effect but also one of the purposes of writing it up like that, in the interest of spreading some blame around in such a high-stakes, politically sensitive international story. And the U.S. government certainly deserves a lot of blame for its actions. The broad sanctions that the U.S. state imposed in 2019 are an awful policy that have produced predictably terrible effects and failed utterly even to produce anything like their intended effects; they should never have been considered and should be scrapped immediately and completely. That said, they are not the original or the chief cause of any of the disasters that have befallen the Venezuelan oil economy; they’ve just made an already awful and worsening situation even worse, even more rapidly. But mass protests over hyperinflation, crippling shortages and the collapsing economic situation — and violently repressive responses by the Maduro government’s formal and informal security apparatus — were already widespread back in the winter of 2013-2014 (2, 3, …). The situation had deteriorated into a heartbreaking humanitarian catastrophe of ever-greater proportions by 2016, and it just got worse and worse and ever more unbearably worse for years — a deterioration which the U.S.’s hostility only ever exacerbated and accelerated, but which had been going on for years and as a direct, foreseeable result of the actions that the Venezuelan government inflicted on Venezuelan workers, consumers and industry for years before the U.S. government added harsh general sanctions in 2019.↩
2. ^[2][R.G. I checked; according to the IEA report, Venezuela comes in third after Turkmenistan and Algeria.]↩

The entire principle of copyright, and so-called intellectual property broadly, is and always has been basically obscene, censorious, tyrannical and absurd. But nearly the entire press discussion of generative Artificial Intelligence systems in connection with the arts and literature has been characterized by a really loopy disconnection from anything approaching even the real (if awful) state of copyright law or the principles behind it. This is partly because of the usual computers are magic, this changes everything! thoughtlessness of a great deal of tech journalism. It’s also partly because the entitled holders of copyrights have a really strong tendency, wherever there is someone to indulge their flights of fancy, towards the most ludicrous exercises of copyright maximalism. To be clear, this lawsuit would be bad and absurd enough if it were a normal assertion of copyright against, say, internet book pirates, or an attempt to police the boundaries of what’s allowed as fair use of copyrighted material quoted for a transformative purpose.^[1] But this lawsuit is ludicrous even if taken on copyright’s own terms, even if you stipulate to the whole ridiculous pseudo-propertarian structure of intellectual and literary monopoly rights.

ChatGPT does not copy books. Nobody alleges that it’s producing a copy of anything. The system reads a whole lot of books (as well as a whole lot of other English text) and it analyzes how words are used in them. It uses this to prime a system which is, among other things, good at producing original content in the same language that summarizes those books, reports on them, imitates their style, or what have you, without reproducing the original text. Maybe some authors don’t like that the AI system has read their books. Tough luck; no law of copyright, whatever their other flaws, could be possibly read to imply a unilateral right to forbid people from reading books or from running computerized statistical analyses on their contents. Some copyright holders may be anxious or scared about what the ability of automated systems to create good summaries or reports or stylistic imitations and parodies of their work will imply about their social or economic prospects in the future, or the compensation schemes they have come to depend on. But that doesn’t make their anxieties a concern of copyright law. Copyright law was supposedly about controlling copying, not an open-ended prerogative to forbid, punish or shake down anyone who consumes the works they produce and to demand a veto over who can produces distinct, original summaries or analyses based on their contents. That’s bananas.

1. ^[1]These allowances are usually pretty generous when it comes to literature, insanely cribbed when it comes to audio, video and photographs, and completely, wildly unprincipled and impossible to know for sure ahead of time until the copyright holder attempts to punish you with a copyright hammer.↩

Here’s a bit from Marketplaces Find A Way, a fairly delightful article by M. Nolan Gray in the July 2023 (Adam Smith 300) issue of Reason. The photo discussed in the block quote is up at the top of the article on the web, and laid out on the page in the print edition; so I’ve embedded that here directly by the part of the text that’s talking about it.

Back in the physical world, this indelible urge to truck, barter, and exchange forms the basis of cities. As the urban planner Alain Bertaud has argued, people principally gather to exchange goods, labor, and ideas. This is why cities follow a near-universal pattern of densities peaking around a central business district and declining outward. It’s also why dedicated marketplaces are a near-universal urban design feature, from New York City’s Times Square to Mexico City’s Zócalo to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.

It’s ironic, then, that contemporary Anglo-American urban planning is almost completely defined by a phobia of markets.

The streets and sidewalks of American cities were once sites of spontaneous, unplanned marketplaces. As captured by the iconic 1900 photo of New York City’s Mulberry Street in Little Italy, peddlers with pushcarts once set up shop along busy streets selling everything from peanuts to watches—an accessible kind of entrepreneurship that naturally appealed to immigrants. Any public space could turn into a marketplace, if the conditions were right.

This kind of informal market activity was stamped out by corralling sellers into discrete districts, mandating expensive licenses, or banning vendors altogether. Similar fights are underway in cities in regions across the developing world, where a quixotic quest for visual order and a reorientation of the urban public realm around the car has led to similar anti-vendor efforts in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Likewise, markets once blended naturally into almost every neighborhood, even residential areas. As a trip to New York City’s Tenement Museum reveals, the strict distinction between home and work is an entirely modern invention; historically, front parlors doubled as offices, workshops, restaurants. The same is true of neighborhoods: Even the most humdrum residential neighborhood was once served by corner groceries, barbershops, and bars.

Zoning’s role in perpetuating the housing affordability crisis is well known. But equally pernicious has been the way zoning has excised markets from daily life. This is by design: Early 20th century Anglo-American elites saw the mere presence of market activity as corrupting. Such prejudices turned into zoning codes that strictly segregated land uses, producing a monoculture landscape of strip malls and subdivisions.

In pre-zoning neighborhoods in cities like Washington, D.C., one can still find the remnants of a lost world of neighborhood commerce, if you know where to look.

Markets find a way….

— M. Nolan Gray, Butchers, Brewers, and Bakers Still Thrive in Urban Marketplaces
Reason (July 2023)

For some past pull-quotes and extended writing on similar themes around here on the blog, also check out:

This was from a while back on the Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the Day podcast. I made a note at the time but didn’t post it. To-day I’m looking over the note, and I know so much the desolation of the airport delay. But as far as the place and the weather goes, now it all feels like a dispatch from some alien land, in an ancient age far beyond the ken of the fathers of the fathers of men.

April Snow

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world
is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep
their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred
waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle
when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows
the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.
I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various
faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t
want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep
I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces
of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.
I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

— Matthew Zapruder, April Snow
From Come on All You Ghosts (2010)
and Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the Day podcast (1 April 2023)