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.