From Fossil Fuels Dependence to Shared Futures: What Venezuela’s Pivot Teaches Us, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 From Fossil Fuels Dependence to Shared Futures: What Venezuela’s Pivot Teaches Us

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 2, 2026

Venezuela’s recent decision to block oil exports to the United States while prioritizing markets in Asia marks a significant moment in global political economy—one that mainstream U.S. media have only partially addressed. A particularly clear and illuminating explanation is offered in the video published on December 31, 2025 titled, ¡Última hora! Venezuela bloquea exportaciones de petróleo a EE. UU.: lo que los medios no contarán (Breaking News! Venezuela Blocks Oil Exports to the U.S.: What the Media Won’t Tell You) by THAN Noticias, which situates this move within the broader context of U.S. sanctions, energy geopolitics, and a shifting multipolar world (THAN Noticias, 2024).

Read through this lens, Venezuela’s oil pivot is not simply a story about energy markets or foreign policy. It is a reminder that we live in an era of shared futures—in which sanctions, climate decisions, migration flows, and economic instability do not stop at national borders, but circulate through communities, classrooms, and institutions far from their point of origin.

As the analysis explains, decades of U.S. reliance on Venezuelan heavy crude—especially by Gulf Coast refineries designed for it—have been disrupted not simply by market forces, but by sustained sanctions that have failed to produce regime change even as it resulted in enormous suffering by Venezuelans, prompting millions to migrate to other countries, including the United States—demonstrating how policies framed as “foreign” quickly become domestic realities in societies shaped by shared economic and human futures.

Weisbrot & Sachs (2019) offer an excellent scholarly analysis on the complexity of responses to sanctions by targeted countries. Reviewing the evidence from the Global Sanctions Data Base, they find broad agreement that sanctions tend to reduce trade, investment, growth, and stability in target states, with effects that can persist long after sanctions end—but that these harms do not reliably translate into political compliance. Targets frequently respond by diverting trade and finance to third countries, shielding favored firms, forming new alliances, and sometimes retaliating—adaptation that can dilute sanctions’ leverage.

In this vein, Venezuela has redirected exports toward China and India, diversified its trading partners, and increasingly conducted transactions outside the U.S. dollar. This outcome reflects a broader pattern identified in the research literature: sanctions often incentivize adaptation and realignment rather than political compliance.

Why should an education blog care? Education is one of the primary institutions where shared futures are either acknowledged or denied—where students learn to see global crises either as someone else’s problem, or conversely, as collective challenges requiring cooperation, historical understanding, and ethical responsibility. One also learns how power operates through ostensibly technical—frequently blunt—policy tools, offering educators concrete case studies for teaching policy analysis, political economy, and global inequality.

Most importantly, this moment underscores two urgent imperatives. First, all nations—including the United States—must accelerate investment in clean and renewable energy technologies. Continued dependence on fossil fuels entrenches geopolitical conflict while delaying the climate transition that future generations will inherit. Second, sustainable global futures require diplomacy grounded in empirical evidence and mutual respect rather than coercion alone. 

Education has a vital role to play here: preparing students not only to understand these systems, but to imagine and build alternatives rooted in cooperation, sustainability, and shared responsibility in an increasingly multipolar world. Hence, despite sanctions, what impacts Venezuela impacts all of us in the U.S.

Disclaimer: I am not an economist so if I've missed anything or if anyone has anything to add, by all means state in the comment box below. Abundant thanks to Dr. Tony Baez for sharing this video with me. I had been meaning to look into this. I'm glad that I did. Happy New Year, everyone!

References

Global Sanctions Data Base. https://www.globalsanctionsdatabase.com/

THAN Noticias. (2024). ¡Última hora! Venezuela bloquea exportaciones de petróleo a EE. UU.: lo que los medios no contarán [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyb53JhDvX0

Weisbrot, M., & Sachs, J. D. (2019). Economic sanctions as collective punishment: The case of Venezuela. Center for Economic and Policy Research. https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf