For all the public hype and euphoria that had attended both official and public responses to ExxonMobil’s announcement of its first oil find offshore Guyana back in May 2015, there was always the likelihood that that response might collide with the consequences of the mounting climate change lobby that was beginning to assume ominously global proportions despite what had appeared for a while to be the studied indifference of the oil majors to the phenomenon.
Here in Guyana, the tiny voice of a handful of environmental ‘buffs’ was never thought likely to get the better of a nation that had, overnight, become fixated with everything that it imagined a petro-state would bring. In effect, the environmentalists’ lobby remained limited to a handful of adherents who were taking their cue largely from the handful of lobby leaders who had won from the independent media houses, their prerogative of the right to be heard.
It had not always been that way, however. Underdeveloped countries like Guyana had hitherto come to see climate change warnings as no more than one of the many end times “predictive scares” that emerge from time to time. Internationally, the various incremental increases in the decibel level of the climate change lobby had been dismissed as little more than “yet another Malthusian scare” that had arrived to join its various predecessors.
The fact that climate change was at the top of the agenda of last month’s 76th Session of the United Nations, rivalling, if not at times, ‘topping’ the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic as the primary preoccupation of world leaders was, in a sense, a pointed acknowledgement of the fact that the science of global warming could no longer be debated then simply set aside.
The staging of Climate Week from September 20 to 26, and the provision of the UN General Assembly as a platform for presenting climate action and exploring ways in which initiatives could be taken to tackle what is believed to be a “climate crisis” was, arguably, a development of unprecedented significance for climate change adherents. What it would have done was to send a message to the collective gathering of world leaders at the UN General Assembly that their respective perspectives on issues relating to international peace and security and the collective material advancement of the global community could not proceed outside the framework of ‘the science’ associated with global warming and its implications for the international community as a whole.
Here in Guyana, what would have been unthinkable a few years ago has now occurred. Two Guyanese citizens have moved to the courts with a lawsuit against the government contending that oil production fuels climate change, a move that seeks to, at best, place strict limits to the time frame within which the oil and gas dream could be lived by one of the poorest countries in South America. The plaintiffs’ constitutional claim is that the present oil exploration and recovery pursuits currently being spearheaded by US super-major, ExxonMobil, is unconstitutional insofar as the state is duty bound to protect the environment for present and future generations.
For all the attention which the legal challenge is attracting against the backdrop of a global climate change advocacy surge, it will eventually have to face what is known to be robust popular sentiment about the nexus between the continued pursuit of oil recovery and the country’s economic dreams and its future. That could even prove to be a tougher nut to crack than the courts.
The court proceedings will doubtless be followed with particular interest not just in Guyana but also in the region and more particularly in Suriname whose oil recovery pursuits are roughly on the same trajectory as Guyana’s, and in Venezuela, where economic pressure from the United States rather than climate change considerations, is negatively affecting its oil & gas industry.
Used by now to the ‘culture’ of litigation associated with oil & gas discovery and recovery in poor countries and what, all too frequently, has been the legal backlash associated with climate change and other issues, ExxonMobil’s response to the local litigation development, up until now, has reportedly been confined to the assertion that the company’s pursuits offshore Guyana have, up to this time, been in strict compliance “with all applicable laws at every step of the exploration, appraisal, development and production stages.” The company adds that assessments for each of its undertakings in Guyana “outline potential environmental impacts and mitigations.”
For its part, the Guyana Government, without venturing into the legal ‘nuts and bolts’ of the court action, has said through its Natural Resources Minister Vickram Bharrat that the political administration is committed to the “sustainable development” of its oil & gas resources in order to “enhance the lives of all Guyanese,” a pronouncement which does not even remotely suggest that it intends to back away when the legal proceedings get underway in earnest.
