ed: a smallish minority but still a significant amount of oil is at stake, and given the nature of world energy demand....I think he'd do it. Between the direct swaps he has been pushing, example, thousands of medical personnel from Cuba in exchange for oil, and some farm commodities from some Caribbean nations directly for oil, and the markets elsewhere, notably Asia..he may lose some assets now but still keep right on selling oil, and instead of a minority interest Exxon would get bupkis in Venezuela.

The US supreme court let stand the "lawful" ability and "right" of governments-local to federal, to seize property as they see fit, under eminent domain laws, even to transfer it to other private parties, as long as it falls under a -to their POV -better public good. Plenty of examples out there, I remember when they seized a smaller Vine City neighborhood in downtown Atlanta-probably the last ultra cheap housing near the downtown area for that matter- in order to expand the World Congress Center. So now when an outside sovereign nation declares and acts on the same basic principal, that they should be in majority control over their own natural resources, and not a foreign corporation- somehow according to these guys bringing suit, it is "illegal" and Chavez/Venezuela are being dangerous and acting irresponsibly and so on.

Why? Really, why? If it is common and legal practice in the US, why shouldn't it be common practice elsewhere? And he didn't seize the whole deal, just told them the nation would be majority partner from now on, that the lions share of the profits would stay at home, instead of being exported, but the companies could still make a ton, just not two tons of profits like they were before.

In another example from long ago, that has 100% direct linkage with a still serious geopolitical flashpoint today, an elected leader in Iran was bumped off and forced out by combined western and quite "oily" "spookish" interests because he dared want his own nation to also have controlling interest in their own oil reserves, and not just get a minority stake. That lead to the imposition of the "royal" Shah, with his SAVAK torture organization, which then lead to the ease of recruiting for the more radical Imams in Iran, the Khoemeni takeover, then to the "hostage crisis" and so on to today.

Where there is oil, there is war or the immediate prospect of war, and/or serious environmental degradation, plus the accumulation of money and power into...well...pretty much nutjobs hands, and I mean all over, this is a flag/nation neutral general observation. Oil is a magnet for megalomaniacs and various regimes revolving around that type of insanity. Another example of why it is imperative we come up with a substitute for petroleum oil, for liquid transportation fuels (because the bulk of the worlds engines run on liquid fuels already) like yesterday, time's a-wasting, it is just too contentious, too valuable because we have no good substitutes yet, it leads to wars and geopolitical tensions, and why I support the deployment of larger scale biofuels efforts across the board, with continuing improvements in efficiency and techniques. Unfortunately, it is a lesser of evils approach, but few things aren't once they reach that level of importance. You have to weigh all the tradeoffs in total.

War or serious economic destruction is no good for the environment either.

Just saying we shouldn't use oil, then saying we shouldn't use the only viable alternative that our science and economy can even barely even think about affording right now-the various biofuels- leaves you with...nothing. Nothing at all. We'd have to put the planet into some sort of suspended animation and wait for the space dudes to come save us in the future or something. And that's why I disagreed with the assessment on biofuels, because the other option -to maintain what we are doing now-is much worse and could easily lead to more wars, and you can't just shut everything off either, that's just never going to happen so no sense even contemplating it. This is adapt time, not still "think about it" and theorize time.

The quicker we make that nasty stuff in the ground not as "valuable", the better, IMO, and I have been saying this since the days of the OPEC oil embargo, which *should* have resulted in a much larger and longer range rational response, but was quickly forgotten for the most part until just recently when the "greenhouse gas" awareness seemed to hit harder. We've still got the world's transportation for humans and products tied to petroleum for the most part (no, the zero vacuum energy Mr. fusion powered maglev trains don't haul everything yet), this is the "all your eggs in one basket" approach, and I don't think it is all that hot an idea. It was OK 80 years ago, started to be seriously questionable 30 years ago from a combined geopolitical threat/economic/environmental conglomerate of angles, and why it isn't being seen now for the "clear and present danger" that it surely is, is beyond me.

I'll repeat what I said before, we are 1 single oddball "decision" away at any time from suffering a rather severe global economic and social shock, because of our collective dependence on petroleum oil. And if we wait until *after* such a decision gets decided....run your own extrapolations there. Build the levees stronger in advance, or wait until after the hurricane hits, choose one.