Guyana paying climate dues through rainforest preservation
- President Ali tells prominent environment reporter
Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali has enjoined what now appears to be an increasingly high-tempo and likely prolonged global debate on what would appear to be the rising decibel level on the issue of potentially oil-rich but substantively poor developing and underdeveloped countries, balancing their immediate-term opportunity for accelerated socio-economic development, afforded them by their significant ‘oil wealth’, against mounting pressures for them to set aside the opportunity they now have to increase the rate of oil recovery.
A recent article published by Oil Price.com and authored by energy and finance freelance writer, Felicity Bradstock, addresses what is now being ‘paraded’ in global oil circles as the desirability of substantively poor but ‘oil rich’ countries foregoing, at least in the immediate-term, the opportunity ‘gifted’ them to take full advantage of “their oil and gas opportunity” in order to ease what is being touted as “deeply worrying climate concerns.”
Bradstock’s article, headlined “Developing Nations Look to Balance Oil and Gas opportunity with Climate Concerns” published on the OilPrice.com energy site last Friday, articulates what opposing analysts might well describe as ‘half way house’ solutions centred around a recommendation emanating from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that new oil be left in the ground as one avenue towards realizing climate mitigation pursuits. Bradstock concedes that such a move would place African and Caribbean nations in a position, at least in the short to medium term, of having to leave new oil discoveries in the ground to help achieve global climate aims.
Guyana, these days a prominent global example of a new oil-producing country, which has lived for decades with the sobriquet of a ‘Banana Republic’ around its neck, is seemingly among those new oil producing countries that frown on the idea of delayed aggrandizement. Countries, mostly in Africa, that have been facing pressure to choose between economic development and climate action are evidently loathe to find themselves in a position where they would have to choose between economic development and climate change, Bradstock writes.
Here in Guyana, while enfeebled climate change lobbyists make ‘climate action’ noises that, from time to time, seek to demonize the oil and gas giants, it would certainly appear, based on the outcomes of several rounds of global gatherings that, for the foreseeable future, at least, any universal agreement to significantly reduce global oil production in deference to the dangers posed by climate change, exists only in the region of a ‘pipe dream.’
Not that the argument against the unrelenting process of oil recovery is without its adherents. Bradstock notes that while there exists a more than modest focus on ‘transitioning to green,’ on the one hand, new oil regions present the opportunity to develop lower-carbon oil and gas through less damaging operations. On the other, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and environmental organizations say it is vital to “transition away from fossil fuels to green alternatives and leave any new oil in the ground,” if global climate aims are to be achieved. In countries in Africa and the Caribbean, oil discoveries and recoveries have yielded varying degrees of material wealth and global recognition, “offering them the opportunity to develop their natural resources for significant revenues” an opportunity, Bradstock writes, “which is difficult for them to turn down.
Here in Guyana, with ExxonMobil, a seemingly single-minded political administration will have none of the argument that kicks fossil fuel recovery to the proverbial curb ‘in favour of ‘saving the planet.’ It is a posture that derives from decades of sitting and waiting on a mythical El Dorado the relevance of which, these days, belongs in the realm of the country’s folklore. While environmental concerns have been touted in the Bradstock article, it names the Guyanese President, Irfaan Ali, as asserting that Guyana continues to ‘pay its dues’ to the global climate mitigation push through a forest that “is the size of England and Scotland combined... a forest that stores 19.5 gigatons of carbon, that we have kept alive .... ” an
assertion that would appear to suggest that the Government of Guyana is unprepared to delay its oil-fed gratification any longer.
“I’m going to lecture you on climate change. We have kept this forest alive that you enjoy, that the world enjoys, that you don’t pay us for, that you don’t value,” the Guyanese President is quoted as saying on the matter of leaving the country’s oil in the ground.