Dear Editor,
I would sum up COP 27 in two words. Promises, promises, promises. And dud, dud, dud. Most of those 200 should have stayed home. Nothing material comes out of these talkfests, so why have them?
I give Gaston Browne and Mia Mottley a pass for sheer courage, and speaking with unfettered candour. They are my kind of leaders: no quibbling, no deference to historical and present exploiters, and no humbling before current colonizers. Somebody has to call out the big power hypocrites and pontificators. For what they have done, how they are either in denial, or engaging in the tricky, to not do their duty that is owed to the world. They have something for their toil: a pool of money for loss and damage. It will take a minimum of a year before its skeleton takes shape, how it will work, when takes effect, and how much for injured countries.
Frankly, COP 27 was a crapshoot (marked dice and cards) involving high rhetoric and low gravy. Matters boil down to this: show us the money. Everybody talking, but nobody ponying up with the pesos. Finally, movement. It is of men who can do something, but are too beholden to oil companies, too tied to hydrocarbons. It is accepted that any political leader who takes a stab at oil companies doesn’t survive; thus, no talk of fossil fuels phaseout. To diminish incrementally, not dismantle at all, a mega-trillion industry is a messy affair, with leaking nuclear reactors all over. People lose their appetite for substantial change. Thus, they content themselves with pious speeches, exercises in drift, and of which Guyana’s own maestro of that art, one Dr. Roger Luncheon, would have been inestimably proud. The rich countries make promises and continue their perversities, while the poor people (guess colour?) pay the prices. They are unforgiving.
Examine how ‘poor’ (an exaggeration) China and India are forced to fight for their economic life, scorned as climate change violators. The real rogues are America, Britain, and many in the NATO club that pursue fossils with a passion, reap its fabled prosperities, and resist easing the pain. The big countries that hogged the upside of fossil fuels, and never shared the wealth, confirming capitalist vulpine rapacity, now seek a level playing field where big and small must share pain. The once colonized lands, the people burning cow-dung and coal-pots instead of microwaves, and employing rickshaws as their version of space age transportation are being asked to contribute what would devastate.
So, a “loss and damage” fund looms to help out the Lilliputians, with the favourite gambit of the smart Western civilization set: study for a year. Why pay today what can wait for tomorrow? Or as little as possible? Why commit to anything since nobody stepping up to be first? In the fixed craps game that is COP 27, all like being followers, taking up the back of the line, shelling out puny cash. What and go against Exxon, Shell, Total, ENI, and BP? That’s treachery. After all, economic supremacy and military ascendancy can be sourced to their successes.
This is not about passing the buck, but bucking the tide; scientific and environmental, and those pesky tree-huggers running about spooking people with apocalyptic scenarios. Look at the destroyers of worlds. ABCE, Guyanese have fond memories of them, have a history of destroying civilizations. Oil imperialists burned up the planet in the name of progress and development, which sounds eerily like its sinister sister in Guyana. Yet the same ABCE, having had their fun with the planet, now work overtime to convert the world to conservationists. It is the same big game hunting. Just like all those lions and elephants killed off, now endangered species. Now the little people, poor people, coloured people are asked to do their part. They did not do anything, so why should they?
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
