Constitutional Violation: Guyana's Climate Lawsuit

I grew up on an island called Wikenham. It's an island in the Zukuba River and it's a low right at about or even below sea level. An important feature you will notice on the island is there is what we call this sea wall or sea dam that's necessary for keeping the ocean out.

This is doctor Troy Thomas. He's a math professor at the University of Guyana. It's easy to tell when you're talking to him he's a professor. That quick description of his home island you just heard it actually spanned about five minutes because he wanted to explain a few things along the way, like what sort of island Wiknam is.

It's not a rock sticking up in the ocean, quite like we might have for a lot of Caribbean islands. It's an island form from the position where the large river brings down all this material from higher areas and deposited at the mouth of the river.

There are more than three hundred islands like these in the Essequibo River, which is Guyana's largest, and having to keep the ocean out is not a problem that's unique to waken them.

Dana itself, while it's a large land mass, you'll find that more than ninety percent of its population reside on a narrow strip, the coastal strip, and that coastal strip where the population resides is below sea level.

That's not because Guyanese people have a particular affinity for the coast.

And what happen is that a lot of the lands on the coastal area would have been re claimed from the sea, I think mainly by the Dutch. That's something we inherited from the days of colonialism and slavery and all that. You know, the colonies were really designed to get labor in or if we can call that atrocity labor, and to get whatever is produced out. That is our legacy and that's where the population exists today.

Thanks to rising sea levels caused by climate change, the people who live on the coast, ninety percent of the country's total population are directly in harm's way.

So what I've seen within my lifetime is that we've been getting more frequent flooding where the sea is actually coming in, and this seems to happen a few times per year, and that has a knock on effects. If you have salt water coming in, then it's going to start to affect farming. It's going to affect animals. It's not just the say, the inconvenience of flooding. Now and then.

When Exon Mobile first discovered oil in Guyana in twenty fifteen, doctor Troy Thomas focused on the same thing everyone else did the contract. At the time, he was head of Transparency Institute Guyana, a government watchdog group, so he was looking into the role that government corruption might have played in the contract. That eventually led him to file a lawsuit challenging the permits the government had given to Exon.

We actually got those permits reduced to the correct time.

For Doctor Thomas was represented by Melinda Jenkie and it was one of her first attempts to block oil drilling in the country. As time went on, doctor Thomas started to think about the more long term impacts of the offshore drilling project.

I have small kids. What kind of environment to be leaving for them? And if you don't have the healthy environment, you don't have the basis for anything that really.

So he and Melinda Jankie started working together on a different sort of case, one that takes the long view. That's our story today. I'm Mimi Westerveld and this is Light Sweet Cruit. Last up, we talked about how Attorney Melinda Jenkie helped shape Guyana's environmental legislation, including its constitutional right to a healthy environment. In May twenty twenty one, Jankie went to court to defend that right on behalf

According to ESSU, climate change is a matter of scientific opinion. Climate change is not fact. They say that all of these things need to be proved by experts, and that doctor Thomas is not an expert and therefore cannot say that climate change exists, for that extreme weather exists, etc. In addition, we have quoted extensively, of course, from esso's own documents, including the greenhouse Gas review that came out I think round about nineteen eighty nine or sometime around then.

Their own documents are hearsay.

They say that their own document is hearsay and has to be taken out. We have also referred to Darren Woods's testimony on Oath to Congress last year in October twenty twenty one, when he said that Exon Mobile has long known about climate change, and they say that this also is hearsay and should be taken out.

In twenty twenty three, a new peer reviewed study into Exxon was published in the journal Science by doctor Jeffrey Soupran and his colleagues at Harvard University. It showed that not only did Exon's own scientists suspect that burning fossil fuels was changing the climate in potentially dangerous ways, but that they were terrifyingly accurate in those predictions. I asked Supran what he thinks about some of the arguments Exons subsidiary ESO is making in Guyana.

Well, it's like, what do you say, is pretty fabergostering. It does in some ways mirror, for instance, as the tobacco industry's gradual shift in public affairs focus, you know, from the West to other parts of the world. You know, when regulation and campaigns and scientists have studied camping down on them in the US and Europe, you know, they started to target China and India and South America and other demographics with equally if not more heinous or messaging campaigns in tactics.

So clearly it's.

Astonishing, right and at this point they're just contradicting what they knew decades ago. They're contradicting what they say on their own website. All I can say is tell me where to go testify.

Jankie is waiting to find out if the judge will approve Exxon's request to leave several paragraphs of doctor Thomas's testimony out, but Thomas is not overly concerned. He says, either way, the argument and the ask are clear.

It's not petroleum per se. It's not about Exo Mobile or some specific oil company. It's that this thing that we're doing has a net negative impact on our well being, which our constitution seeks to guarantee. And it's nowhere being closed. It's nowhere near net zero or anything like that. It's terrible. So then for me as a citizen, this is a law of my land, and I'm saying to my government, look what we have here, Look what you're doing. This

The question of balancing climate concerns with the need for economic development is not unique to Guyana. Of course, it's global. But there's a particular argument that's been growing louder as oil companies FastTrack projects in global South countries. So when you deprive people of fossil fuels, you deprive them things like clean water. Alex Epstein is the author of a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which was first published in twenty fourteen, but has had a bit

When push comes to shop, it's like, is it the environment or poor people? If your idea is that we have to limit growth, to say of the planet, If we limit growth, poor people starve.

That's Canadian philosopher and frequent Joe Rogan podcast guest Jordan Peterson. Michael Schullenberger made similar arguments in his book Apocalypse never.

The idea that the Congo would need to limit its emissions is offensive.

Poor country, you should be able to get a hydroelectric gamor or a coal plant or a.

Nuclear plant or whatever because they're poor, full stop.

That's it.

There's no negotiation, that's it.

Fossil fuel lobbyists and spokespeople make this argument all the time too. Of course, here is Mandy Gunnisakara, a spokesperson for the CO two coalition, testifying to Congress during a hearing on climate disinformation in twenty nineteen.

And parts of the developing world, life expectancy today is ten to twenty years shorter, and children under five regularly succumbed to preventable diseases. The reality is that we could change these outcomes by sharing our six successful energy technologies, not by prohibiting their use as a result of misaligned environmental policies.

At that point in time, there was published research that already showed that increasing energy use is not necessary to increase life expectancy.

That's Julius Steinberger, an ecological economist at the University of Lausan and a lead author on the most recent report from the Inner Governmental Panel on Climate Change. Steinberger has studied the intersection of environmental issues, energy choices, policy, and economics for decades.

So, for instance, I published a paper all the way back in twenty ten that showed that the amount of energy required to reach high life expectancy is going down and down and down over time. And so we already had a pretty good level of knowledge to show us that you need a certain amount of energy in order to have some kind of a decent living standard. But that amount does not require an insane amount of growth.

You find In most cases, the folks making these so called moral case for fossil fuels don't deny that climate change is happening. That's part of what can make their arguments compelling. Instead, they argue that it's not as bad as it's been made out to be, and that certainly it is not worse than energy poverty that's a term used to describe lack of access to a reliable energy source. They argue energy poverty is a much more urgent crisis than climate change. It's one of those arguments that just

Just to be clear, the reason that poor people starve is a question of distribution. It is because of a question of imbalance of power.

As for the idea that it's elitist to deprive the global South of fossil fuels, this.

Is very important how we manage our emission in this decays and so of course, so when I just see that many countries are thinking in terms of fossil free, weell, I just feel that, you know, those policies are not really well informed by signs.

This is doctor Joyashri Roi, an Indian economist and lead author of the chapter in the most recent report from the Inner Governmental p Chanel on Climate change that dealt with the issue of how to tackle development and decarbonization at the same time.

I see as an economist, you know, I just see that, oh, there is going to be there committing for so much of stranded asset which will become valueless at very near future.

What doctor Roy is talking about there is all the oil and gas that the world won't want or need as it transitions away from fossil fuels. These are referred to as stranded assets, and oil companies have been worrying about how to deal with them for years now. Their current strategy is to drill as fast as they can to make as much money as they can before anything gets stranded.

What worries me is that when these decisions are taken for the fALS and fueled expansion, I just feel that how these countries would manage or aren't they having any built in transition policy within that, because when the assets becomes stranded and people are going to lose their jobs, is there any social protection policy built in so that the investments the employees are protected from job losses. That's something which worries me.

Doctor Steinberger also notes that the idea of political compromises around fossil fuel expansion is outdated and unscientific.

So I think that this talking point is a bit of a holdover, including in climate circles from days gone by when there was more of a carbon budget left for anything. Right now, it's pretty much negative. And so the idea was, well, the global North countries should do the utmost and pay the most to do that, and the global South countries should have more leeway and more time.

That was a big topic of conversation in the nineties and into the two thousand so when the Kyoto Protocol was being hotly debated. It was the first international climate treaty that would have required emissions reductions. At the time, it was the fossil fuel industry that fought hardest against this idea. They used the fact that emissions reductions commitments were not being universally applied to torpedo Kyoto. Here's an example of how they talked about it.

The US is preparing to sign a United Nations treaty on the Global climate, but their global agreement isn't global. One hundred and thirty two of one hundred and sixty six countries are exempt. So while the United States is forced to make drastic cuts in energy use, countries like India, China, and Mexico are not. The countries responsible for almost half the world's emissions.

Won't have to cut back. Check it out for yourself.

It's not global and it won't work.

Now. It's the industry arguing that global South countries should be allowed to continue using and developing fossil fuels for longer.

You know, it's a bit like the tobacco industry. This is another sort of tobacco industry trajectory that the fossil fuel companies are following. So the Marlborough men never died. I mean, of course he did diveline cancer, the real malabor men. But he you know, the saying is he never died. He just moved to Africa. And the fossil

Most media reports that have grappled with this so called moral case for fossil fuels have criticized messengers like Alex Epstein, Jordan Peterson, and Michael Schellenberger reporting on faults in their ideologies or past histories, but economic research has debunked the message itself to there's no data to back up the claim that we need to increase fossil fuel development to solve poverty.

We can conclusively put in a coffin bang the lid chut with big old males saying fossil fuel use does not contribute significantly to improvements in life expectancy.

Research from doctor Steinberger and other economists over the past several decades has also found over and over again that we do not, in fact rely on fossil fuels for improvements to our quality of life either.

The first article that counters this and counters it in a way that is extremely convincing and statistically robust and so on, was actually published in nineteen seventy four in Science. It's called Energy and Lifestyle. It basically says American quality of life would be just as high if we used a fraction of the energy we are using, and it demonstrates it using a statistical method that is perfectly robust.

It's not just economic studies that show fossil fuels don't actually correlate with improved life expectancy or increased per capita wealth. Does the promise of oil wealth actually pan out for these.

Countries generally does not pan out for anyone other than the elites of those countries. That's what the record shows.

This is Steve Call, the journalist who wrote the book Private Empire about Exonmobile. While working on that book, Call spent years traveling to Chad and Equatorial Guinea in Venezuela to get a sense of how Exon operated outside the US.

What happens is that the elites that control the resource that produces sudden wealth and sudden opportunity generally don't distribute the benefits equitably. Talking about some utopian socialist kind of perfect distribution, but even just to reinvest it in a sustainable strategy of private enterprise led development just generally doesn't happen. And it's not just about the greed of elites.

It's also.

About the way sudden wealth distorts the patterns of investment in a country. By essentially alleviating the pressure to educate a new generation of young scientists and tech entrepreneurs or wealth creators, or people who are going to figure out how to save and improve agriculture in an era of climate change, that all of these urgent problems that emerging countries face in the global South. I mean, they get displaced by the easy money that comes from a resource boom.

The example development economists most often give is a comparison between South Korea and Nigeria. It's not a perfect example, because, of course, there are non economic cultural reasons for the way that countries developed to but it's an interesting contrast.

I mean, in the nineteen fifties, Nigeria and South Korea had roughly the same per capita income, and they were both very poor countries. South Korea had just emerged from a terrible long experience of wargn occupation, and Nigeria was blessed with this huge oil bounty, and South Korea chose to kind of industrialize on its own without a lot of resources, and in a single generation, one country got rich and the other one cycled through the resource curse.

There are examples in North America too. In Canada, Alberta's trillions of dollars in oil and gas revenues have benefited companies tremendously, but its schools are carrying a fifty million dollar budget deficit. In Louisiana, residents pay about ten percent higher than the national average for energy, despite having been

It is incredibly stupid for anybody to say, well, because you did something bad and broke it, we now have a right to do something bad and break it even further. It's morally indefensible, of course, but it is also incredibly stupid because the climate, the global climate system, is precisely what it says, it's a global climate system.

Jenkie particularly bristles when that argument is disguised as a concern for justice by NGOs and pundits who often suggest that global South countries should be given more time to transition off of fossil fuels.

Why would you say that when in every single former colony people are saying, stop the oil, we don't want it, and places like Uganda and Mozambaca, you know, they're putting their lives on the line to stop oil. And you sit in your comfortable university room and say, oh, well, I've decided that I'm in the interesting justices. People shouldn't have to get rid of the fossil fuels until twenty fifteen. And in order to make this really.

Fair, the first world should now immutually convert.

To renewable energy.

In other words, all the white people go straight for renewable energy, dump the stuff on the third world. But I'm doing this under the guise of a just transition.

All the white people go straight for renewable energy, dump the fossil fuels on the third world. But I'm doing this under the guise of just transition. Janki has a very different view on the morality of fossil fuels than the many global North white men who pontificate on the subject. Guyana currently acts as a carbon sink. It absorbs far

I think it's really important that people stop thinking of Ghana as a developing country that needs to be helped and starts looking at us and saying, Wow, these guys are a carbon sink and they are under threat because of Exxonmobile and the other oil companies, and we have a responsibility to rein in those oil companies because those are oil companies coming from the global North.

For decades, global South countries have been asking for funding the rewards environmental stewardship, including carbon storage, and for development financing that enables a transition away from fossil fuels. Negotiators from the island nation of Vanawatu first brought this idea up at a UN Climate negotiation summit in nineteen ninety one.

We have to ask ourselves, can we ever attain the ultimate objective of the convention, which is to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with a climate system. By failing to meet the objective of the convention, we may have rapified our own doom. And if we have failed to meet the objectives of the Convention, we have to confront the issue of loss and damage.

Sano made an impassioned plea at the meeting. He announced he was going to start a hunger strike until rich countries agreed to help countries like the Philippines prepare for super typhoons and other disasters that will become more severe and more frequent with climate change. Global North countries agreed to create a fund of one hundred billion dollars per year by the year twenty twenty. In the ten years that have followed, those countries, including the United States, have

It's that colonialism in the fossil fuel era reconfigured to the world economy.

This is Harpre Paul, a human rights lawyer and an expert in UN climate finance negotiations.

The Indian subcontinents share of the global economy shrank from twenty seven to three percent between seventeen hundred and nineteen fifty, and it's estimated that at the same time, the UK benefited by approximately forty five trillion US dollars from its colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent alone. And there are similar stories to be told of colonial endeavors in the Americas, in the African Continent and beyond.

In other words, the economic costs of climate change are only the latest in a long history of economic extraction and transfer of wealth away from global seuth countries and

The bottom line is to build back, we have to borrow, and when we borrow, it is added to our debt to GDP. And when our debt to GDP raises, our credit rates and drops, and then we are unable to meet the basic fundamental demands that normally development requires us. There has to be a recognition of being able to isolate that debt which is necessary to build resilience or to build back from a climate disaster, as opposed to the normal aspects of development.

Instead, as Harjeet Singh, who's followed these negotiations for several years, explains, polluters continue to receive incentives in the form of subsidies from their home governments.

Yeah, getting subsidies to the tune of eleven million dollars a minute, eleven million dollars a minute, and yet they're not being held accountable and they're using these public resources and further causing the problem.

In that context, it's easy to see why global salth Countries with fossil fuel resources like Guyana are turning to the unlikeliest of sources, global oil majors to pay for climate adaptation. Here's Antonia Juhas, the investigative journalist. We heard from last time.

Ninety percent of the population lives on the coast, So ninety percent of the population is expected to live in a place that's going to be underwater by twenty thirty. You're going to move ninety percent of the population where there's no good example anywhere in the world of relocation to where, because where in Guyana isn't impacted by climate That's the other thing, isn't already being harmed by extreme weather.

Jankie's not ready to accept that bargain. She's tireless in her commitment to this work, but she's also fighting a pretty solitary fight. Most of her countrymen don't want to see the Guyanese industry killed off so much as they want oil money to actually make their lives better, and that includes the country's environmentalists.

So we have a relationship, as you know, with Exxon Foundation and that's a long term grant for four years. And yes, the obvious question is, you know, should we be taking money from the oil company.

That's our story next time. Late Sweet Creep is a drilled and Damage's co production. Both shows are critical frequency originals. Our editor and senior producer is Sarah Ventri. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Martin saltz Ostwick. Our fact checker is Anna Prujel Mazzini, and our first amendment attorney is James Wheaton. The show is reported and written by me Amy Westervelt. Additional reporting by Keana Wilberg in Guyana and