[pjdesno]

In the 70s the oil companies were furious that Venezuela (if my understanding is correct) revoked their leases and forced them to abandon their equipment investments.

That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, under a legal system which (unlike Venezuela in the 70s) is very keen on protecting corporate investment. It seems like a classic "takings" case.

[fsckboy]

the Venezuelan oil leases you are talking about was 1990s, not 1970s.

for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"

the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.

if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.

[roenxi]

> for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production"

That isn't a crazy interpretation of what actually happened. According to wiki [0] the industry basically collapsed to 50% of its former production after the nationalisation era and the overall trend since then has been downwards. If a major political contingent in the US sets themselves against wind energy it could easily play out similarly. That'd be in line with other battles in the War on Energy that played out with nuclear and fossil fuels.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Venezuelan_oil_...

[simonsarris]

A helpful visual (Wiki has a picture of an outdated version of this graph): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...

[bruce511]

>> I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole

Wait..what? Made whole by whom? Has this happened before?

(I'm genuinely curious, I've not seen this brought up before...)

[Drupon]

Were the Venezuelans wrong? Should a country just legally accept its conquerors economically?

[aucisson_masque]

That's pretty much the law of the strongest. Mess with American colonialism and you end up like Cuba or Venezuela.

It's better to have your natural resources stolen than having your whole country wrecked by embargo, secret NSA plots, etc..

[dionian]

its not like they built it.

[unyttigfjelltol]

If the concern is the control module of the wind turbine— that’s not a nationalization and confiscation program. It might look similar in the near-term to participants, but that’s simply because they are functioning as instruments of the control module supplier, extending the inference, which isn’t a legitimate owner of the wind farms or US electrical grid anyway, and is quite unlike the fossil fuel companies in Venezuela of the 1970s.