Oil, Guyana and Climate Change – Quo vadis!!

Dr. Neville Trotz served as Dean, Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Guyana and Director of the Institute of Applied Science and Technology at Turkeyen, Guyana, before becoming Science Adviser to the Commonwealth Secretary-General (1991-1997). Most recently he served as Science Adviser to the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, based in Belmopan, Belize.

The global community was ecstatic when in December 2015 at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), countries successfully negotiated the Paris agreement. The agreement called for actions to be taken to curtail the rise of global temperature this century below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; and also, to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This optimism was tempered with the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special 1.5 report three years later, commissioned by the Convention to underline the need for the global community to aim for the 1.5 target. It justified the position of developing countries with Caribbean leadership that the 1.5-degree target would still result in unimaginable damage to our economies and aspirations to the achievement of our sustainable development goals. Caribbean scientists provided an input into the report and at the IPCC Outreach event in Kingston, the Caribbean 1.5 project reported that limiting global warming to 1.5 does not stop further significant changes in regional climate with which the region will have to contend, and that 2.0 degrees will result in even further significant changes (over 1.5) in regional climate which take us close to climates we have not experienced to date. Their research concluded that at the present rate of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, we were on track to achieve the 1.5 threshold by mid 2030s and not by the end of the century as called for in the Paris accord.

Earlier this year, to add to our concern, the 16th IPCC report concluded that global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century, unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) and other GHG emissions occur in the coming decades. Even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise to around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, forecasting a hotter future which the global community is now essentially locked into.

In short, we are running out of time to take the necessary action to avoid catastrophic climate change. Action is required for a drastic reduction of GHG emissions by 2030 and to aim for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 (the basis of the 29-year window for action as stated in Mr. Clement Rohee’s recent letter to Stabroek News).

The Paris agreement also had as part of its goals the development of mechanisms to support countries that are most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. Ever since the 2009 COP meeting in Cancun, developed countries pledged $100bn (US) a year by 2020, to help poorer nations address climate change challenges. To date this has not materialised. The most recent figures showed that by 2018, about three-quarters of the money was in the form of loans to highly indebted countries that need to be paid back. Add to that the fact that many CARICOM countries are designated as middle income and thus not eligible for access to concessional finance.

It is against this background of lack of time to meet the Paris accord targets and the absence of resources for developing countries to build resilience and to decarbonise their economies, that I would like to discuss the Guyana situation. Let us first disavow ourselves of the belief that if we shut off all GHG emissions tomorrow the climate will stabilise immediately and we would no longer be exposed to the impacts we are now experiencing. The fact is that we are living in a world already committed to a changing climate and this will continue for a long time after we cease putting Carbon into the atmosphere. Net zero Carbon emissions by 2050 means that the world has the capacity to absorb all the Carbon emissions produced so that there is a steady state of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Finally, and most importantly, fossil fuels will be part of the energy mix for some time in the future as the world graduates to a fossil fuel free energy sector.

The recent discovery of massive oil resources in Guyana comes at a time when there is urgent need to move away from fossil fuel use and instead rely on renewables and implementation of efficiency measures to satisfy our energy needs. Not surprisingly there is a call for countries to cut back significantly on fossil fuel production or “to leave the oil in the ground”. We do have that option but let me be devil’s advocate and ask us to consider the consequences of what is, from a principled and moral standpoint, a laudable approach. The difficult question to answer is where would we get the resources to transition to a green energy sector? Where are we going to get the resources to build climate resilience in our agriculture, health, water sectors, protect our heavily populated and developed low lying coast from inundation from extreme rainfall events and sea level rise and the dire consequences of the latter on the health and livelihoods of our citizens as experienced during the floods of 2005?

I have already alluded to the fact that the developed world has not lived up to its promise of providing support for countries like ours to adapt to climate change, nor are our countries in a position to garner the international investment to transform our energy sector and wean it off fossil fuel. I myself, have worked alongside colleagues from the Global South trying to access resources to help our countries to address adaptation needs. It is no easy job and the level of resources available is a pittance, compared to what is required for effective and sustainable adaptation. Furthermore, the conditionalities and constraints that accompany such contributions are overwhelming. Added to that, the time taken to agree on support is completely out of step with the urgency for action that the recent science calls for. We have had a coral reef restoration proposal languishing with one financial organisation for six years now and we are still discussing the details, without one cent being disbursed for implementation! The present funding mechanisms in place for climate action are not time sensitive!

There is one condition where “keep it in the ground’ may be considered as a feasible option for a developing country like Guyana. It requires the international community to pay Guyana the equivalent of lost revenue to do so. After all we are speaking about a global public good which is for the benefit of all inhabitants of mother earth. A useful corollary here is the Norwegian project that is meant to provide revenue to Guyana to keep its forests, an