Venezuela Tells Climate Doomers It Has ‘Sovereign Right’ to Pump Oil, Iran Demands Environmental Reparations

The U.N.’s COP31 climate alarmism summit in Antalya, Turkey, is proving to be a fractious affair, as energy-producing nations insist on their right to sell the fossil fuel products that drive their economies. On Thursday, Venezuela became the latest nation to declare that it will not stop pumping oil.

“We reaffirm our sovereign right to ​strengthen our energy and oil industry as a driver of our national development,” Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, said after hearing the latest U.N. demand to phase out fossil fuels.

“We believe there is no inevitable contradiction between energy development and environmental protection, because a just transition does not shut down economies – it transforms them,” she argued.

Rodriguez and her team actually used the COP31 conference as a venue to drum up more investment in Venezuela’s oil industry, including pitch meetings with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar.

Bayraktar said he was excited to discuss “potential joint projects in the hydrocarbons sector, particularly oil and natural gas” with Venezuela — on the sidelines of an expensive international summit nominally dedicated to wiping out that entire sector.

Brazilian Environment Minister Joao Paulo Capobianco insisted there was no “contradiction” in Brazil’s actions, because it is “pursuing an accelerated energy transition agenda,” even as it continues to regard oil as a “strategic resource from an international point of view.”

This kind of talk infuriates climate activists, who denounce it as “greenwashing” — showing up at conferences to mollify the global warming faithful by paying lip service to their agenda, while plotting the next big natural gas field, oil refinery, or coal power plant back home. 

The argument made by Capobianco is used even more aggressively by China, the world’s worst polluter, which insists its titanic carbon emissions are karmically offset by all the solar panels it sells.

Rodriguez offered her own version of this strategy by rolling out “Plan Venezuela Vive” at COP31 on Thursday. She argued that Venezuela is a “net carbon sink” despite selling prodigious amounts of oil, and pledged to sink even more carbon with a national program of forest and ocean conservation.

Meanwhile, the terror masters of Iran — another major oil-producing state, currently under a blockade by the United States — showed up in Antalya to demand reparations for environmental damage caused by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes earlier this year.

“We expect the global community to establish a genuine and meaningful link between climate commitments in ​times of peace and responsibility in times of war, ​to document and assess the environmental damages caused by ⁠military aggressions and to develop compensation mechanisms,” sniffed Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Of course, Pezeshkian did not dwell on the environmental damage from Iran’s terrorist program of launching missile and drone strikes at defenseless civilian oil tankers, or littering the Strait of Hormuz with naval mines. 

On the very same day he demanded environmental reparations, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed it turned two fully-loaded oil tankers into fireballs with its mines. Iran has also attacked dozens of oil refineries and storage facilities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Iraq, Qatar, and Kuwait over the past eight months.