Speaking of Chavez, here's something interesting. Regular readers know that i harp on and worry about the fact that some scientists believe that we are approaching or have reached the point in time where we will be at peak oil extraction, meaning that from here on in oil will be harder to access and become gradually more expensive to the point where our modern way of life is no longer viable. I highly recommend (again) renting or borrowing The End of Suburbia or reading The Long Emergency. Seriously.

Anyway, this article talks about how when the scientist who made the intial estimate regarding peak oil made his calculations, he was only considering the "light sweet" crude oil, but now that oil is $70+ a barrel it's more economically viable to produce some of the types of oil that are harder to extract, like the stuff stuck in tar. (Based on what i've read from the Peak-Oil people, this type of oil isn't irrelevant due to the economics, it's due to the amount of energy required to extract it. In other words, you spend more energy digging up and refining this typing of oil than you get out of burning it. But let's pretend for a minute that they are wrong.) Well, it turns out that the majority of the world's "difficult" oil is in Venezuela.