While it has been known for decades that the sustained recovery of fossil fuels has militated against scientific efforts to properly assess just where the world is going insofar as climate change is concerned, the picture has changed dramatically in recent years… to a point where confident predictions are being proffered with regard to the rate at which fossil fuel recovery must decelerate in the period ahead lest the world drifts into the zone of a climate catastrophe.
Whereas, a decade or two ago the climate change fight was being waged by vast armies of mostly conscience-driven ‘environmentalists’ whose demonstrations were backed by the pronouncements of reputable scientists, the climate change adherents, these days, have upped their game, their painstaking research actually turning up evidence that can no longer be dismissed out of hand.
Last week, the World Health Organization COP26 Special Report on Climate Change and Health sent an unmistakable signal of its understanding that there has been a paradigm shift in the ‘balance of power’ between the climate change adherents, on the one hand and hardliners, including the huge oil companies which, up until recently, could afford to ‘throw money’ behind their own brand of anti-climate change pushback. The ‘guns’ of the oil barons may not have as yet fallen completely silent, but they are heading none too slowly, these days, in that direction.
The WHO, seemingly entirely unafraid these days, of pushback from resistors to the climate change argument, has confidently asserted that countries must now begin to set realistic national climate commitments if they are to sustain a healthy and green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a bold and to some extent risky demand since, by linking the demand for positive national time frames on climate change to bringing an end to the now raging pandemic, the WHO is, in a sense, setting the tightest of deadlines for a quantum shift in global attitudes to fossil fuel recovery.
These days, however, the WHO comes to the table with a considerably strengthened hand, armed as it now with an enhanced body of scientific research that establishes inseparable links between climate and health. Recently, WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus was moved to remark that the COVID-19 pandemic had “shone a light on the intimate and delicate links between humans, animals and our environment.” “The same unsustainable choices that are killing our planet are killing people,” he said. The WHO has now moved to a position where it now “calls on all countries to commit to decisive action at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow” beginning on Sunday October 31 “to limit global warming to 15 degrees Celsius.”
It is a call that is driven by a fair degree of lobbying force behind it. A recent document authored by reputable health professionals asserts that “wherever we deliver care, in our hospitals, clinics and communities around the world, we are already responding to the health harms caused by climate change,” The document “calls on the leaders of every country and their representatives at COP26 to avert the impending health catastrophe by limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and to make human health and equity central to all climate change mitigation and adaptation actions.”
From a Guyana standpoint there are two significant dimensions to COP26. First, unlike many other international gatherings in previous decades, COP26 seeks to address what has been beyond reasonable doubt, a proven global emergency. What this means is that delegations that will represent their respective governments in Scotland will not be afforded the environment in which to mouth platitudes or else, proffer wildly ambitious but unverifiable undertakings. If the Scotland forum is to be a success, the climate change commitments of its participants must be unambiguously verifiable.
As a ‘new kid’ on the fossil fuel ‘recovery’ block, it is in Guyana’s interest to begin to follow the global climate change discourse with particular keenness. Unlike countries in the Middle East and elsewhere that have already transformed much of their oil wealth into alternative developmental tools, Guyana’s oil and gas industry is still very much in the starting blocks. For all the talk about what the future may hold for the country on account of its proven oil wealth, therefore, the realities of climate change now require a recalibration of such projections and ambitions as have been mooted over the past few years.
The Government of Guyana would presumably be aware that other producer governments, wary of being ‘caught short’ as the now strongly trumpeted climate change time lines kick in, are currently engaged in an energetic lobby for a “go-slow approach to climate action,” pointing out that any acceleration in the pursuit of de-carbonization would not only be costly but is also likely to create varying degrees of socio-political destabilisation arising out of unfulfilled popular expectations. Indeed, there has even been the argument that some level of damage from human-caused climate change would be preferable to drastic schemes to slash emissions.
While recent remarks by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo point to a level of official awareness of the conundrum that arises from the contradiction between long-term unrestrained oil & gas recovery and the imperative of climate change, little has ever been said (in terms of public education) about the contradiction and how, from a policy perspective, it can be tackled. Up to this time, insofar as we are aware, Guyana’s immediate-term development plans centre on incremental increases in oil & gas production even though there has been some level of national discourse with regard to converting the country’s ‘oil wealth’ into resources that can create a robust and sustainable agricultural sector.
None of this, however, has as yet been packaged into a policy that addresses either time-frames for realisation or the setting of limits for oil & gas recovery and the investing in the returns therefrom into sustainable development options.
If the prognoses of the various reputable international organisations are to be believed, considerations relating to suitable climate change responses cannot be delayed for much longer. Here in the Caribbean we have already been witnessing a pattern of unprecedented extreme weather events and various other climate impacts that continue to take an increasing toll on human life and human health. Increasingly frequent extreme weather events, including storms and floods, all believed to be consequences of the climate change phenomenon, continue to take large numbers of lives and to significantly disrupt others by threatening healthcare and other infrastructure. Changes in weather and climate patterns across the Caribbean, including Guyana, have been increasingly threatening food security and increasing the levels of food, water and vector-borne diseases including malaria while simultaneously impacting on mental health.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to suggest that Guyana’s preoccupation with the development prospects that derive from its oil & gas industry is responsible for the under-educating of the population in matters that have to do with climate change. This is not necessarily the case. The reality is that issues not seemingly directly connected to our day-to-day existence have never ranked particularly high on the day to day popular education curriculum.
In the instance of the climate change agenda we have little choice, our envisaged oil & gas economy notwithstanding, but to accept and embrace it since, in this instance, what we might wish to treat as a domestic issue, namely oil & gas recovery, will have much broader global repercussions. Here is an issue that exemplifies the age-old axiom that ‘no man is an island.’
