An Inquisitive Man was one day met by a friend who cordially hailed him. “Morning, my good fellow! And where do you come from?” So begins the eponymous 1814-fable by the great Russian storyteller, Ivan Krylov.
“From the Museum of Natural History, where I have just spent three hours. I saw everything there was to see and examined it carefully. It was all so astonishing that honestly, I am not clever enough to describe the half of it. Nature is certainly wonderful in her rich variety!” the Inquisitive Man replied.
He marveled, “There are more birds and beasts than I ever dreamed of – not to mention the butterflies, dragonflies and beetles – some green as emeralds and others as red as coral! And there were tiny little gnats too – why, really, some of them are smaller than the head of a pin!”
The acquaintance then asked, “But, of course you saw the elephant? What did you think of him? I’ll wager you felt as though you were looking at a mountain!” The museum-visitor was astounded, “What elephant? Are you quite sure that they have an elephant?” confiding, “Well, old man, don’t tell anybody – but the fact is that I didn’t notice the elephant!”
A popular metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is ignored, the “elephant in the room” satirical tale by the Moscow-born fabulist inspired the showstopping act by the American comedian, Jimmy Durante who starred on Broadway in the musical Jumbo. A police officer met Durante leading a live elephant and questioned in astonishment, “What are you doing with that elephant?” Durante countered, looking around, equally bewildered, “What elephant?”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the New York Times recorded an early use of the phrase, as a simile, in June 1959, “Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room. It’s so big you just can’t ignore it.”
The elephants are spilling out of our living rooms, faster than we can acknowledge them across the country’s threatened landscape of rich natural history, no doubt searching for visas, life jackets and fast ferries given our fast crumbling sea defences and growing sea levels. A caretaker government that refuses to acknowledge it is such, an even more questionable Opposition, cursed corruption, crippled race relations, ethnic voting and road carnage are some of our challenging behemoths, like ExxonMobil, fossil fuels and climate change.
Some may well point to widespread alcohol abuse as “seeing pink elephants” since it is a euphemism for drunken delusions, dating back to a character in Jack London’s 1913 novel “John Barleycorn,” who hallucinates “blue mice and pink elephants.”
Critics can scoff that a political herd of “pink elephants” must have been behind the decisions in the lopsided agreement with ExxonMobil’s subsidiary Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) that meant one side enjoyed peppercorn rental rates and the other ended up with less than a blue church mouse’s profit of rice, barley and corn. Commentators have long questioned how the multinational managed to be given 600 valuable blocks under one overly generous licence and an adjusted contract during the previous People’s Progressive Party (PPP) administration in 1999, when the legal limit was 60. In 2016, the new APNU+AFC governing coalition received a US$18M signing bonus in secret and did not renegotiate the block allocations.
Twenty years after the 1999 signing, as we await the imminent coming of our first commercial oil just off our noticeably vulnerable strip of inhabited coastline, amidst the great expectations of the waiting public and eager plans for the profits, we would do well to ponder what constitutes the term, “Mokita” a powerful word in the Kilivila language. Meaning the “truth we all know but agree not to talk about” “Mokita” and Kilivila are spoken on Kiriwina, the largest of the low-lying Trobriand Islands, an archipelago of coral atolls off Papua New Guinea, in the Pacific. Most Trobrianders live on less than one United States (US) dollar a day, with food traditionally distributed among residents based on their needs.
We should also consider the famous psychological demonstration termed, “The Invisible Gorilla.” Published in 2010, the book was based on an interesting experiment by American university researchers, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons revealing that people who are focused on one thing can easily overlook the obviously important. Awarded the 2004 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize, a group of scientific commendations that “make you laugh, then think,” the work centres on a video where viewers were asked to count the number of times certain players passed a basketball. Oddly, most did not notice a woman in a gorilla suit walk through the scene, and those told to make a more demanding tally were even less likely to see the gorilla.
Low-lying, impoverished Guyana is caught in a petroleum paradox with an “800-pound gorilla,” an organisation so powerful that it has deliberately financed and fostered climate disinformation, and ruthlessly acted without regard to the rights of others in its pursuit of profits. As the impact of climate change, both immediate and the upcoming extreme, catch up with us, and the global outrage and litigation mount against private producers and culpable nations, we will be contributing with every barrel of oil to the planet heating up. The last five years were the hottest ever recorded.
To date, 16 discoveries have been made offshore Guyana since 2015, 14 by ExxonMobil, the operator of the 6.6 million acres prized Stabroek Block. The gross recoverable resource for the block is estimated to be over six billion oil equivalent barrels. The subsidiary has applied for permission to drill 31 new wells in three offshore blocks, Stabroek News reported this week.
A recent investigation by the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper, revealed that many big companies are instead planning to increase their fossil fuel output by more than a third rather than cut their oil and gas production by a similar amount by 2040.
The seven listed oil majors, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, British Petroleum, Dutch Shell, Italian Eni and French Total would need to slash the total amount of oil and gas they produce every day by 35% to avoid driving temperatures 1.5 degree Celsius higher than pre-industrialised levels. The report from Carbon Tracker (CT), a financial thinktank, indicated that global oil projects that have already been approved are almost enough to meet demand and there is “very little headroom for new fossil fuel projects.” Governments would have to halt issuing new oil and gas licences for fossil fuel exploration, the agency said.
Using publicly available oil company data to measure carbon footprints today and by 2040, CT’s analyst, Mike Coffin declared, “The industry is trying to have its cake and eat it – reassuring shareholders and appearing supportive of (the) Paris (agreement on climate change), while still producing more fossil fuels.”
“If companies and governments attempt to develop all their oil and gas reserves, either the world will miss its climate targets or assets will become ‘stranded’ in the energy transition, or both… if companies really want to both mitigate financial risk and be part of the climate solution, they must shrink production,” he warned.
ExxonMobil and Shell will be among the leaders with a projected output hike of more than 35% between 2018 and 2030. In other words, the gargantuan gorillas are going to continue to sit wherever they want. Only time will tell if Guyana will be able to get out of the hot room quickly enough.
ID wonders about Guyana’s “elephants.” Colombia’s Cardinal Pedro Rubiano likened candidate Ernesto Samper’s denials that drug money financed part of the presidential campaign to not noticing “an elephant entering one’s living room.”
