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Trump administration officials are claiming that talks between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Venezuelan government regarding control of the country’s oil fields will ultimately secure “America’s energy future for generations to come” — but analysts on Friday called on lawmakers to halt President Donald Trump’s “colonial” push to take over the reserves.

As Axios reported, officials including Rubio and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have been involved in talks with Venezuelan acting President Delcy Rodriguez about taking an ownership stake in more than a dozen oil fields in the Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo regions, which have about 90 billion barrels of oil reserves. In all, Venezuela’s vast reserves — the world’s largest — contain about 300 billion barrels.

The deal would double US oil reserves at a time when Americans have seen gas prices skyrocket and oil firms reap profits as a result of Trump’s war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — events to which countries that have expanded renewable energy sources have proven far more resilient, according to data from JP Morgan Commodities research.

Despite that resilience, the Trump administration has reportedly approached the talks as a way to lock the US into generations of continued reliance on planet-heating oil extraction. According to Bloomberg, one deal under........

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