If the current political controversy is about the control of the anticipated oil revenues and continues to escalate, we would have failed the first test in our attempt to avoid the resource curse.
Before we proceed with today’s article, a few preliminaries as usual. A judge in Wyoming, the United States, has blocked oil and gas drilling on almost 500 square miles because the government failed consider the cumulative effects of climate change. The order follows a similar one issued last month in Montana because inadequate consideration was given to greenhouse gas emissions when issuing leases and permits for oil, gas or coal production.
On 9 May 2013, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record level of 400.03 parts per million (ppm), rising to 412.97 ppm on 19 March 2019. If the planet is to be saved for future generations and to prevent it from becoming uninhabitable for both plant and animal life, urgent and drastic actions are needed at all levels of society – individually, organizationally, nationally and globally – to scale back on the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and switch to renewable sources of energy such as from wind, water and the sun. It is in this regard that the 2015 Paris Accord on Climate Change should be viewed.
On the corruption front, former Brazilian President Michel Temer was arrested last week on corruption charges in what is dubbed ‘Operations Radioactivity’ involving kickbacks of some $471 million in the construction of a nuclear power plant. He had replaced Dilma Rousseff who was impeached and removed from office in 2016 for breaching budget laws, a situation not dissimilar to what we witnessed in Guyana in the run-up to the 2015 elections. In 2017, former President Lula da Silva was convicted on corruption and money laundering involving $1.1 million that he received from a construction company for the renovation of a beachfront apartment. This was in exchange for the grant of lucrative contracts from the state-owned oil company Petrobras. He is currently serving a ten-year jail term.