On 8th February 2018, the same day the Guyana International Petroleum Business Summit and Exhibition (GIPEX) began and the vice president of ExxonMobil, Lisa Waters, was playing up the need for world economic growth to help the poor, an article by Ted Nordhaus was published in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine entitled The Two-Degree Delusion: The Dangers of an Unrealistic Climate Change Target (FA: 08/02/18), in which he said something similar but suggested that social development will be better achieved if we liberate fossil fuels and oil and gas in particular from the strictures placed upon them by the 2015 United Nations climate change conference in Paris.
In an article in The Guardian International (06/10/2017), Dr Michael Taylor of the University of West Indies said that the devastation wrought by hurricanes Maria and Irma left three words resonating in his mind: unfamiliar, unprecedented and urgent. The climate in the Caribbean is changing in ways that suggest the emergence of a new climate regime. ‘At no point in the historical records dating back to the late 1800s have two category five storms made landfall in the small Caribbean island chain of the eastern Antilles in a single year.’ Furthermore, the region is experiencing repeated and prolonged droughts, more very hot days, intense rainfalls, repeated flooding and rising sea levels that are destroying the beautiful beaches on which its tourist industry relies.