Jagdeo has put himself in a knot
Kaieteur News- Forty-five years ago, Burnham began to explore the possibility of reducing fuel imports by using a mixture of ethanol and gasoline. At the time, the fuel crisis was raging and Brazil had begun to use the ethanol-gasoline mixture in motor vehicles.
Ultimately, the cost of conversion prevented the use of this mix in Guyana. And today, while they are still the main producer of ethanol, most Brazilian cars still run on fossil fuel sources.
At the time, the conversation was that ethanol-based fuels would eventually come to replace fossil fuels. But this never happened. While cars in Brazil still use ethanol, ethanol production has been declining in recent years.
Brazil had the advantage of being a major manufacturer of its own cars and could therefore have installed transformers that allowed vehicles, previously made to run on gasoline, to run on an ethanol-gasoline mix.
But that didn’t even lead to the gradual elimination of fossil fuels in Brazil. That country today still uses three times as much gasoline than ethanol in its transportation sector.
Brazil knows that fossil fuels will not be phased out anytime soon. It doesn’t get hyped about all the talk of renewable energy replacing fossil fuels in the near future. Brazil has begun a rights auction for its offshore oil blocks. Instead of reducing investments in fossil fuel development, it is actually opening up the country for more investments in its oil industry.
Guyana’s Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, however, seems to think that the future of fossil fuels is uncertain and therefore Guyana has only a small window of opportunity to exploit its vast hydrocarbon resources. Jagdeo is convincing. His assessments sound more like an excuse rather than an explanation.
Does he really think fossil fuels are on their way out? A recent CNBC report noted that the World Green Futures Index shows that the United States and China, two of the world’s largest fossil fuel guzzlers, are behind Europe in de-carbonizing their economies. In fact, the projections are that the end of the pandemic will lead to an increase, rather than a reduction, in oil production and fossil fuel consumption.
Does anyone, other than Jagdeo, really believe that we are nearing the end of the fossil fuel era? Does anyone really believe that the world’s workers will abandon hundreds of millions of motor vehicles in order to succumb to electric cars?
Does anyone think that the industrial companies around the world are going to stop using heavy fuel, having invested trillions of dollars in capital equipment? Does anyone think the world can find substitutes for the thousands of products including fertilizers made from petroleum by-products?
In the United States, six million families rely on fossil fuel jobs. Where will breadwinners in these families find jobs if oil is phased out? Green jobs are not being produced close to the rate needed to compensate for job losses resulting from the gradual removal of fossil fuels.
But Jagdeo need look no further than Guyana where oil companies invest more than US $ 20B in the industry. Why would these companies sink such huge investments if the future of fossil fuels is as bleak as Jagdeo wants us to believe?
But no one should be naive enough to believe that at any time this century renewables will replace oil. It can replace coal but not oil. Too much runs on heavy fuel for the oil market to be ruled out by sustainable energy sources.
The world population is expected to grow by two billion within the next 25 years. Urbanization is expected to increase at a rate higher than this population growth. So where does the energy come from to provide for the needs of an additional two billion people and for the expansion of urbanization? These developments will increase rather than reduce the demand for fossil fuels.
Jagdeo was once involved in the global climate change advocacy. It is now promoting an unwritten depletion policy that is gambling on Guyana’s fossil fuel exploitation as much and as quickly as possible.
While he is doing so, climate change advocates are calling on countries to keep their oil in the ground. And Earth Champion now says this makes no sense. For a tangled web he has woven around himself!
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)