Guyana will soon become the champion of dirty energy
Kaieteur News – The second set of criticisms of the gas-on-shore (GTS) project concerns Guyana’s international environmental commitments. Critics of the GTS project have opposed it on the basis of its inconsistency with the commitments made under the Paris Agreement.
The Paris agreement of December 2015 is the most ambitious global environmental agreement. It aims to limit global temperature rise to less than two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. To achieve this goal, countries are required to make national commitments, known as nationally determined commitments, to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the United Nations, the APNU + AFC government committed Guyana to what many considered an unrealistic goal: 100 percent renewable energy consumption by 2025. As recently noted on Kaieteur Radio’s show, there is a caveat to this commitment. It is subject to the availability of funding.
Funding for renewable energy development would always be a challenge. There are a number of facilities available to Guyana to find funding for a transition towards 100 percent renewable energy use, but with Guyana’s economy, the level of funding required would have been unachievable in the timeline set by the APNU + AFC.
The PPP / C government is likely to revise this nationally determined commitment. But the Irfaan Ali administration itself is committed to reintroducing its so-called Low Carbon Development Strategy, something touched on under Jagdeo’s presidency.
The Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) is a misleader. It is not a strategy but essentially an international agreement signed between Guyana and Norway and detailing how the profits provided by the Norwegians will be spent.
Recently, while criticizing David GSger’s Green State Development Strategy (GSDS), Bharrat Jagdeo said it was not a development strategy because it had no projects. His erroneous statement reveals his obsession with projects and his identification of strategy with projects.
In 2017, he had sung a different tune. He had said that the undeveloped GSDS at the time was ambiguous and devoid of political plan and the means to achieve its goals. He referred to the LCDS, and said that it had projects that would allow for green outcomes and prosperity.
In 2019, he repeated the same message: that the GSDS is an environmental strategy. He committed to its termination when the PPP / C returned to government.
In November last year, the Vice President said that the GSDS was loosely defined and without a project [major] to make it work. Jagdeo either hasn’t read the GSDS, or has done so, doesn’t understand what he has read, or is simply inventive. The GSDS is a much higher strategy than the project document developed under his tenure and labeled the Low Carbon Development Strategy.
Jagdeo undoubtedly wants a major project to drive the LCDS and that project appears to be the gas-to-shore (GTS) project. But such a project is the opposite of a low carbon path to development.
Natural gas is produced in the production of petroleum. Natural gas is not ‘clean.’ It is a source of fossil fuels. One commentator on Kaieteur Radio’s recent show said it was a greater source of pollution than carbon dioxide. But this is controversial. What is certain is that natural gas does not produce clean or renewable energy and add rather than draw to global warming.
This is why environmentalists have been so concerned about Exxon’s ‘blaze’. With the amount of torching that has taken place over the last year, Guyana can no longer consider itself as a net carbon sink – a country that absorbs more carbon than its man-made activities produce.
Norway, one of the world’s leading oil pollutants, used the PPP / C government to replicate Norway’s environmental image as a champion of the environment. Norway agreed to pay US $ 250M to Guyana for environmental services, which Guyana would have provided to the world anyway. Jagdeo basically signed that agreement as a funding measure but the so-called LCDS was essentially a funding source that Norway controlled to such an extent that Jagdeo, at one point, had to complain about Norway’s failure to release funds.
The PPP / C still adheres to the LCDS in doing the very opposite of the LCDS goals. The PPP / C is now on the path of producing dirty energy with its gas-to-shore project. That gas-on-shore project effectively demolishes the commitments made by APNU + AFC in its nationally determined commitments under the Paris Agreement.
The GTS project will be a source of dirty energy, flying in the face of Guyana’s reputation as the champion of the earth. And while the PPP / C is critical of Granger’s GSDS, it still has the temptation to copy aspects of it by promising to expand the LCDS to address biodiversity and water management.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)