Welcome to a new year of Drilled and our sister show Damages. I'm Amy Westervelt. Next month we'll be bringing you a new narrative season across both shows that is all about the new wave of oil colonialism underway in the global South. Fossil fuel companies can see the writing on the wall, and they are raising each other to tap all of their reserves. No one wants to be the one left standing with the most unsold barrels of oil. So we're seeing this explosion of development across Africa, the
Caribbean and Latin America. A lot of these projects fall into what reporters for The Guardian described as carbon bombs last year. I don't know if you're remember reading that story about how all these companies had committed to emissions reductions but also had plans on the books for these major fossil fuel developments. Here we are, the carbon bombs are being built, and there are some efforts underway to
diffuse them. We're going to tell that story through a deep dive into what's been happening in one small South American country that's gone from being the world's top eco tourism destination to one of its largest oil producing states in just a few years. That country is Guyana. It's the only English speaking country in South America. It has a population of just under eight hundred thousand people, and
today it is the fastest growing economy on Earth. That's thanks to a major oil boom led by Exxon Mobile. This is a fascinating story with a lot of twists and turns. Today as a special preview of what's to come, bringing you an interview with attorney Melinda Jankie. She's filed six different lawsuits over the last few years in an
effort to curb oil development in her home country. As you'll hear, Jankie grew up in Guyana, but went to university in England and actually worked as in house counsel for BP before moving home and getting into environmental law. Many years before filing her recent cases, Jankie helped to write the country's constitutional right to a healthy environment, as well as some of the bedrock environmental policies in Guyana. Here she walks us through what's been happening since Exon
first discovered oil in twenty fifteen. You'll hear our senior producer and editor Sarah Entry in this interview too. We are very excited to bring you the full story next month. Make sure you're subscribed so you won't miss it. I would love to have you tell me about where in the country you grew up and what you remember Guyana being like when you were a child growing up.
I grew up in Sabrianville, which is very close to the sea, and so every night for the first few years of my life, I went to bed with the sound of the sea in my ears, and Sabrianville was very quiet. We lived with our neighbors basically, so all the children were in all the houses all of the time. And I would say I was obviously brought up by my mother and father, but I was also brought up by all the other parents in the neighborhood.
Yeah that's so nice, okay, And how did you wind up working for BP?
So I basically became a lawyer. I didn't actually want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a vet, but I didn't think I was clever enough to be a vet. So I thought, well, I'll do law instead, and discovered that I liked it, and I went to work for what they call one of the Magic Circle firms. In London at the time it was called Levels, and enjoyed it very much, but I thought that there ought to be a bit more to this, and so I
left and then went to work in industry. And at the time it seemed like BVP was a good place to go, and indeed it was. The work was very interesting. I had far more responsibility than I would have had if i'd stayed in the law firm. I met some very interesting people, and I traveled, and you know, when you're young, the idea of seeing the world is very attractive. You want to go to other places, you want to meet other people, you want to experience other cultures, and you just want to learn.
Yeah, yeah, And what was it like there? What kinds of things did you work on to the extent that you're able to say.
Some of the work that I did towards the end of when I was there was on refinancing, so on bonds and swaps, and that involved me going to a lot of capital cities in Europe, which I enjoyed enormously because that's where we were doing the closings.
And what did you learn about sort of how the oil industry operates seeing it from the inside.
I think we just take these things for granted when you work in the industry. But of course, the purpose of an oil company is to make money. They have no other purpose. And I think sometimes people don't realize that the purpose of the oil company is to make money and they have no other purpose. They're not there to promote human rights, they're not there to protect the environment. They're there to put the share price up and to
give big fat dividends to their shareholders. The other thing I think I learned was that they're very efficient, very very effect at what they do. They're very good at what they do, and they're very good at telling people a story about how beneficial this is for the world. So the oil industry always tells you how good it is for you to have them, how your life is much better because they're there, And that has the way
of removing every other narrative. So we have a situation where, for example, they say, well, we power the world, we are the energy that keeps the economy going, we heat your homes, were enable you to cook, and people say, oh, yes, that's wonderful. They don't say we're frying the planet so that we can make money, and we are going to make sure that renewable energy doesn't get anywhere, because that
will put us out of business. So in a way, I think you sort of understand that oil companies capture the public mind. I think they capture the political sector of society, because I don't think that the fossil fuel sector would survive if it wasn't for politicians who are prepared to prop them up, no matter the cost to the earth.
Yeah, yeah, Okay, what prompted you to leave BP?
I don't think that there is any one thing that prompted me to leave BP. I suppose the question I often ask myself is why am I still doing this? And I think, you know, if you keep doing something and you get good at it, and then you become very comfortable, and comfort is a kind of trap, it makes it more difficult to leave and to grow and
to do different things. But really, also, I was in a meeting and it was a meeting about swaps, and one of the people at the table turned to me and he said, as we were discussing swap, he said, oh, this is such sexy work. And I thought to myself, you know, this is really time to leave.
Okay, And what did you do next? What happened at that point? When you left?
I left and I had an offer to join a firm in Guyana, and I decided that this would be a good time to take up that offer if it was still available, and I became a partner in the firm. So when I came back, I had something to go to, which was extremely fortunate.
And what kinds of things did you work on there?
I worked on generally commercial stuff, because really all my training and everything that I'd been doing was commercial work, hard nosed commercial work.
And how did you get involved with right legislation?
So that started in nineteen ninety four or ninety five when there was a meeting at the Pegasus Hotel, which is this big was this big hotel in Man, it's even bringher now. I wanted to go to the meeting, but I had no way to go to the meeting because I was just this completely unimportant individual and the meeting was by invitation only, and then there were some press passes. And the other partner in the firm was someone called David Decareys, who was the owner and publisher
and editor of Stabreick News. And I said to him that I wanted to go to the meeting, and he said, I'll give you a press pass. So I went and it was interminably boring, but in the break I was able to talk to one of the government officials and say to him that I had looked at their draft Environmental Act and I thought that it was inadequate. And he didn't brush me off. He said, oh, well, send me something about it. I mean, I suppose that was the brush off, but I didn't think it was a
brush off. I thought that it was actually really a really exciting opportunity. So I wrote a paper explaining why I thought this Act was inadequate. The next thing I knew was they asked me if i'd like to actually work on this as a consultant, and so I said yes, and I was hired. I think the IDB paid for it because they had a team working on it at the time, and so that's how I became involved in
drafting the legislation. And I worked with the rest of the IDB people, none of whom were lawyers, and the result was this completely completely changed piece of legislation. I put in all the stuff on the environmental impact assessment. I put in the impact on the climate the impact on the atmosphere. And this is nineteen ninety five, ninety six, This is at a time and nobody really was thinking
about those things. And I put in principles of environmental management, so things like the pollutera pays that you have to take action to the precautionary principle. And I put in principles of natural capital, which again people really weren't talking about and even now seems to be unknown again even though it's been in the legislation since nineteen ninety six.
How did you get interested in this stuff? Like you were, you know, a commercial lawyer, worked in industry. How did you start to learn about environmental legislation and or was this like something you'd always been interested in and just hadn't been able to work in.
Well, I think when you grew up with nature, then you have a relationship with the world around you, and then if you're a lawyer, you sort of at some point I suppose that to connect. And I wanted to protect Guyana's environment. I wanted to protect the nature that I grew up with and that I think everybody should have a chance to grow up with.
How did the constitutional rate to a healthy environment come about well.
This was just another one of those opportunities. The government decided that they would look at the constitution and that they would begin a process of constitution reform, and they set up different committees and subcommittees and it was all terribly exciting. I wasn't on any of the committees, but I was interested in the constitution bit of it, and I decided that I would write something and send it to them as a sort of background paper that would
add to the discussion. So I looked at constitutions around the world that at that time had the right to healthy environment, and then I put forward the arguments for having it in the Constitution and I sent it to
the committee. I happened I didn't know two of the people on the committee, so I think that helped to get people to read it, and they decided that it was worth paying attention to, and they said to me that they would use it and that they would recommend that the right to a healthy environment went into the Constitution. And actually what they did was to adopt entirely the provisions from South Africa, which I think was a good move to do at the time.
Coming up after the break, Exxon finds Oil and Melinda starts filing cases. Stay with us. Talk me through the path from working at this firm. You're getting involved in some of the legislation. How do you then start filing cases around environmental issues.
Well, I had left the firm to become a consultant and that gave me a lot more freedom to do things. And then I actually I went away and then came back again. And at the time, nothing much was happening until suddenly in twenty fifteen, ex All announced that they had found oil, and my heart just sank because I know oil is a disaster and it's the worst possible thing that could have happened to Geana. And people just began to go crazy at the idea of all this
oil wealth. They were talking exclusively in terms of oil wealth. But I thought that we were really heading for trouble. And sure enough, the first thing that we saw was that they changed. They entered into a new agreement which was secret. They wouldn't release it to people. When they finally released it, it was atrocious. The previous government had signed an agreement that was very much in favor of Exon.
The next government which came in took that agreement and made it even more favorable to the oil companies, so you can see why the government wanted to keep it secret. They had also taken eighteen million dollars which they hid in a secret bank account instead of putting it into the consolidated fund, so right from the beginning this was problematic.
Then they ESSO, which is the low subsidiary. You see, this dealer is not with Exon Mobile Corporation, the big company that has billions of dollars worth of assets, albeit assets that may well be stranded assets, but nevertheless assets. This subsidiary is registered in the Bahamas and doesn't have anything anything like the assets that Exon Mobile Corporation has, So you're dealing with somebody who is thin on the ground. SOSO started to do this environmental impact assessment. It was
absolutely atrocious. It was done by erm who have Exon Mobile as their clients. Anyway, you are supposed to have the environmental impact assessment done by an independent consultant. Now independent obviously means independent of the person for whom you're doing it. That rule was breached from day one. But people were so excited about this oil that no one was focusing on this, and the environmental Impact Assessment has things like ESSO will be allowed to put four thousand
barrels of sewage into the sea every day. They carried out studies of birds using bird lists that are very old from the nineteen sixties. They went out into the sea and they looked at the fish, and they came back and they said the most common fish was the
unidentified flying fish. And the regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency, raised no objections to any of the stuff that they had put into the Environmental Impact Assessment and issued a permit on the first of June twenty seventeen, in which they said that ESSO was authorized to carry out the laza I project in accordance with the Environmental Impact Assessment also dated the of June twenty seventeen, and the Environmental
Management Assessment dated the first of June twenty seventeen, and various other documents dated the first of twenty seventeen. These documents run to fifteen hundred pages or more. So it is a mystery as to when exactly the Environmental Protection Agency read these documents, if in fact they did read.
Them, Wow, what was the first case you failed?
So this is happening in twenty seventeen and it's becoming increasingly obvious that the sector is going to do whatever it wants to do. So at this event, the advisor to the President on oil was telling people that they didn't really know the oil industry and they had to trust the oil companies. I was utterly outraged by that, particularly as it was coming from someone who was very
close to the president. And I began talking to someone there and he said he would like to do a case, but nobody would do the case for him to challenge the oil and I said, I'll do it now. I had not done litigation for a very long time, and I thought I'll get someone else to help with this, but in fact I couldn't get anybody to help with it until a senior council who was based in Trinidad agreed to take the case and to do it with me.
And the case was completely unfunded. We had a little crowd justice thing, a little crowd justice page, and some of the Guyanese diaspora gave us one thousand dollars and that's how we started. I had no clerk. I had to go and line up at the Court Registry with the documents and wait. My turn, and everybody would push in front of me because they know how the system works and I don't. And eventually I got the documents stamped and filed, and then so on the other side. And then the case began.
And what case was that?
The case is Raymond Gaskin against the Minister of Natural Resources in the environment and then the judge added, so exploration production gay and limited, Hess gan A limited and se next in petroleum gayanulimited. So the three oil companies that are part of the petroleum agreement that was redone. And the case is very simple. So so has an environmental permit, the same permit that I mentioned that was awarded,
but Hess and s don't. However, the minister who was the respondent in the case, the minister gave a petroleum production license to all three of the oil companies. Our argument is that you can't do that. You can only give a petroleum production license to someone who has already met the requirements of the Environmental Protection Act and has obtained an environmental permit. And we say that's exactly what
the Act says. Now its opposing counsel has stood up in court and given a different interpretation of the legislation, and I can say it's a little frustrating for me because I wrote those sections and I know exactly what they mean, but you can't really say that in court. However, the case went to the Chief Justice and we waited a year for a decision. She ruled against mister Gaskin. We appealed the case within two days. It was heard earlier this year, and we are now waiting for the
Court of Appeal to give their decision. Under the Time Limit for Judicial Decisions Act, the Court of Appeal is required to give their decision within thirty days. That thirty days expired some time ago, and we have written to the court asking them for their decision, king them to give their decision.
Can you walk us through the constitutional case, the case that invokes Guyana's constitutional right for a healthy environment? How did that begin?
Definitely? So, as oil production, as zoil activities in the country continue, it's becoming increasingly apparent to people that deepwater drilling is extremely dangerous, but also that the result of this activity is killing the planet. And so I was talking to d De Troy Thomas from the University. Now.
Dr Thomas had at that stage already filed a case against es SO, and I was his lawyer on that case along with Sinasjirahm, who had also been the senior council in the Gaskin case, and that in that case we cut SOS permits down from over twenty three years to five years. So Dr Thomas had already been in court once on this and decided that he would like now to continue and do something else because fossil fuel production and greenhouse gases are killing the future basically, so
he decided that he wanted to do the case. I said that I would do it, and Cordad Defratus, who is a young Wapachan youth from the South Roupernuni, said that he also would like to be in the case. So we have those two litigants. In essence, the case is very simple, and it says that when you burn fossil fuels, they emit greenhouse gases, and those greenhouse gases cause global warming, which results in the breakdown of the climate system, extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar gaps,
et cetera, et cetera. We we've just put all of that under the umbrella of climate change. But the case very specifically talks about greenhouse gas pollution. We treat climate change as a symptom of the problem, not as the problem. The second part of the case is the other bit where the greenhouse gas pollution goes, and that's the ocean.
And we say that it's making the greenhouse gas pollution is making the ocean acid, and that the ocean is already understress because it's becoming warmer as a result of the increasing global temperatures, and that there are also definite trends of deoxygenation in the ocean, and that all of this is having a very bad impact on marine wildlife. So,
in essence, the case has two prongs. One the impact on the atmosphere and then the results of all of that, and the impact on the ocean and the results of all of that.
And then taken together, those things threaten the right to a healthy environment.
Taken together, those things, in my view, and we argue this in the case, are a violation of the rights
to a healthy environment. And therefore we're saying to the court, will you please make a declaration that when the government will the state authorized esso to extract oil, the state is violating the right to a healthy environment, and that right to a healthy environment includes the rights of present in future generations, And we point out that greenhouse gas pollution has an awful habit of sitting in the atmosphere and the impacts are felt for a very long time
after you've stopped the emissions. So there is a burden on future generations, while the benefit, so called benefits, are apparently being experienced by the present generations in the sense that people say they're getting some money now and they're kicking the problem down to future generations. That's the violation of the Constitution.
And where is that case now? What stage is it at?
So the case was filed under a very simple procedure called the fixed state application, where there is no dispute on facts, and it was filed against the Attorney General as a representative of the state of Guyana. The judge then decided that he would add es as an added respondent. So the judge converted this statement of case and told es So and the Attorney General to just respond to the fixed state application as if it was a statement of claim and to ignore the affidavit in support they
put in their defenses. Then we put in another affter. David responded to that the Attorney General has not, and then ESSO decided to find an application to strike out statements in Dr Thomas's AFFI David of Witness statement, according to ESSO, climate change is a matter of scientific opinion. Climate change is not fact. According to ESSO, ocean acidification
is not fact. It's a matter of opinion. And throughout their application, throughout the Affidavid put in by ESO, they say that all of these things need to be proved by experts, and that Dr Thomas is not an expert and therefore cannot say that climate change exists, or that ocean acidification exists, or the extreme weather exists, et cetera.
Wow. Yeah, I didn't realize that they were that they were going there.
So 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. They say this is hearsay and they want to take it out. 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 excellent Mobile has long known about climate change and they say that this also is hearsay and should be taken out.
Wow, okay, and I know you have six cases altogether. Now what are the other cases?
So I've mentioned three so far, the Gaskin case, the permit's case with Dr Thomas, and the climate change case. December twenty nineteen, SO announced that they had begun production. They call it first oil, and at that moment the then president, President Granger, was so completely over excited that he wanted to declare that day a national holiday. So
this is when they say that they began production. The environmental permit says that the associated gas, which is the gas that comes up with the oil, is to be used as fuel on board the FPS, so the floating production storage of floating vessel, and then any gas that's not used is to be reinjected. In January twenty twenty, fishermen reported seeing this vast fire in the sky, and it turned out that ESSO was in fact flaring the gas and not reinjecting it, but they had not said
so to the Environmental Protection Agency. The Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has no presence on board the fpso it's one hundred and twenty miles offshore. The EPA has absolutely no idea what's going on there, and they rely entirely on ESSO for information. So they are all self reported. It's all self reported, and the regulator no attention to its statutory duties. Now, obviously, people again are not fools.
They may think we're stupid, but we're not. People took great exception to ESO flaring and harming the environment, and if you look at the press for twenty twenty and twenty twenty one and so on, there was great outrage in the country at this flaring. And then they were told that they had to cut back on production in order to reduce the flaring, and that was done by
the then head of the EPA. So the head of the ep at this time was very different to the person who was the head of the EPA in twenty seventeen, and he took a much stricter line. This is Dr Vincent Adams, and he was very experienced in dealing with oil companies and he had worked at a very senior level in the United States. It turns out that the reason that ESO was flaring was that their gas compressor wasn't working. So the reason for flaring was defective equipment.
This gas compressor went all the way to Germany and then it came back again and it's still wasn't working. So we decided that this needed to be taken a bit more seriously, and I was approached by three women who said that they wanted to do something about this flaring. One is a university lecturer, Seneca Henry, one is an environmental activist Selina Nagere, and one was a student at
the University Andrisk Tarrington. And so the three of them decided to file this case basically saying that the Environmental Protection Agency acted wrongly because it changed the environmental permit to allow ESO to flare, and in returnes SO would pay to FLAREESO says that they were allowed to flare anyway, and the EPA said is that they are entitled to do this under the legislation. That's the case that's in
front of the judge. The case was brought against the Environmental Protection Agency, but the judge added so again, so we are waiting for a decision on that case. Now earlier this year says permit expired and the EPA renewed it. As far as we can tell, they didn't inform anybody. SOO did not apply for the permit. If they did, the application is a secret and it is supposed to be publicly available, and there was no environmental impact assessment.
So two women decided that they would challenge this. One is Seneca Henry, who is a litigant in the flaring case, and the other is Denuto rad Zig, who is a human rights activist. And they say that the Environmental Protection Agency acted on lawfully when it issued this new permit to so SO and didn't carry out an environmental impact assessment. I mentioned earlier the flaring. I mentioned the faulty equipment.
In fact, esso's local boss has sworn an affy David in court, saying that the reason that they are flaring is because of this failure of their mechanical equipment and that despite multiple repairs, it's still not working. Now, when you have equipment that is not working in oil production, that is a very serious situation. Then we hear that they are operating above the safety limits of the floating
production storage of floating vessel. Dr Vincent Adams, who was the previous head of the EPA and was then removed when the new government came in, has been warning that this operation poses significant danger. These systems' failures can lead to a well blowout. Little things were what caused the Bpmcondo well blowout and the BP Macondo well blowut happened in the Gulf of Mexico. The United States of America has more experience, more resources, more expertise, more technology, more boats,
more everything than anybody. And that happened in just in the Gulf of Mexico. And yet it was devastating.
Okay, and then there's one more sixth case.
So we have a very very difficult situation in Guyana. The cases are taking a long time to get through the court. I mentioned the Gaskin case one year to get a decision from the judge, another year while we wait for it to be heard by the Court of Appeal, the Flaring case where we're waiting for a decision, the Permit's case where we have to wait two months before the judge even has a hearing. In the mean time,
Guyana is in grave danger. Now. Guyana has nothing. This country knows nothing about oil and even less about oil danger and oil spills. There's not a single person in this country that knows what to do if there is a problem. The risk to Guyana is incredible. This oil production. This is a reckless gamble by the government of Guyana with the future of Guyana. It's a reckless gamble by the government of Guyana for the entire Caribbean. The maps show that if there is a well blowout, that oil
is going to end up in Caribbean countries. Caribbean sisters and brothers, and they depend on tourism for their economy. A lot of the Caribbean economy is based on tourism. They depend on the fishing. So you have a situation where Guyana's oil production could potentially destroy Caribbean economies. We are talking about billions of dollars worth of loss in addition to devastating the biodiversity of the region. And you
can't put a price on that. It's all very well to say, well, we can compensate the tourism sector, but you can't walk into a shop and buy a new sperm whale. The wildlife that is in this part of the world is incredible. We have rare species and all of this is at risk because of this oil drilling has a permit. Now, if essays in breach of that permit, who's liable? Well, of course we would say that ESSO
is liable. But I already told you this is an offshore company that doesn't have billions of dollars worth of assets. It's going to come back to Guyana because it's Guyana. Oh right, Caribbean countries want to sue someone. They're going to suit Guyana.
Right, yeah, and here's why.
So doesn't have the billions of dollars that it could compensate people for. And what happens then, well, the Caribbean countries could come to Guyana and ask Guyana to pay compensation. Now, under international law, you can be liable for trans boundary harm. Ghana is not doing its due diligence. It's not ensuring that ESO adheres to the Environmental Protection Act. It's not
ensuring that SOO is running its operations properly. Why on Earth would you allow somebody to continue producing oil when you know that their gas compressor is defective. What sort of government allows an oil company to operate above the safety limits? There have already been spills, so SO has been fined for those spills. Obviously, this is a dangerous operation, and obviously the government is not doing its due diligence and it's not enforcing the law, and therefore the government
is at fault. And that means that Guyana could end up liable for billions of dollars if and I hope that this will never happen, if there's any kind of well blower or oil spill. The oil industry calls these things unplanned events, and they tend to use these horrible Weazley terms to pretend that actually they're not destroying the planet, but that is exactly what they're doing. And this graverust
to Guyana financially. So the next case is a case where the plaintiffs are saying to the court there must be an unlimited parent company guarantee. There is a provision in the Environmental Permit for insurance and for something called financial assurance. Insurance obviously is bog standard industry insurance, and it will cover things that oil industry insurance usually covers.
But there's something else, which is financial assurance, and the permit says that SO must provide a parent company indemnity for all of the liability that might be imposed on Guyana as a result of their activities in the stab Rick Block. The activities in the Stabric Block are the oil drilling and the oil production and the impacts of that. If there is a system's failure, those impacts could be very costly and it is for the oil companies to
bear those costs. So basically, the case says Ghana is not going to have to pay that money, ESO have to pay that money, And because we know that you don't really have that money, we demand a parent company guarantee an indemnity, a legal undertaking that Exon Mobil Corporation is on the hook for whatever those costs are, and there is no limit to that liability, an unlimited indemnity
from Exonomobile. And that's exactly what it means. It means that however much the damages Exonmobile Corporation has to pay, that we don't know what it could be. It could be a small amount of their value, or it could be a large amount of their value. Given that Bpmcondo roughly cost about seventy billion and the cleanup is still going on, Given that that was ten years ago, and given that there were no other countries involved, I think we can say that seventy something billion is the minimum.
I think we can be sure that if there is a well blowout or a spill, then the costs will be far in excess of anything in the Macondo well blowout, over one hundred billion, maybe even higher. We simply don't know, but there is no way that Guyana is going to be on the hook for that. And that is what this case is about. It's saying you, Excell Mobile Corporation, are responsible for the damage done by your subsidiary. So the case has been filed. The papers were served the
day before yesterday. Now the case was filed as urgent. Obviously it's urgent because every single day that they're out there drilling and they're using defective equipment, and they're operating above the FPSO levels and they're saying that there's a spill every single day is a risk that something terrible could happen. So we've said this case is urgent and we hope that we can get a hearing date as
soon as possible. Analyticans in this case are Frederick Collins, who is an insurance professional now retired and a colleague of his, Godfrey White. All the cases are brought by citizens of Ghana. There is no civil society organization involved in any of the cases. And it's one of the interesting aspects of Guyana that the so called conservation organizations do not criticize Exon Mobil, do not criticize the oil. WWF has been saying it's possible to protect the ocean
and drill for oil. I have no idea what planet that's possible on, but anyway, that's what they say. Conservation International took ten million US dollars from Exon Mobile. They say that they've given it back. The Gana Marine Conservation Society has four government agencies on its board and so on and so forth.
Wow, that's interesting, because yeah, I feel like a lot of the litigation of this kind in the US is being mostly funded by NGOs.
Yeah. In general, civil society in this country has not stood up against the oil in order to protect Guyana, and so it's come down to courageous individuals who are prepared to say no, I'm not putting up with this. It has also been very difficult to get lawyers in Guyana to work on these cases, but that is beginning to change.
Why is it that it's been hard to get lawyers to work on those cases.
Many lawyers are uninterested because they see the oil work as potentially extremely lucrative and they obviously would like to earn the money. Some think that this is just about the environment and the human rights and that we should be focused on the economy. And I think some are just afraid of standing up to the government and the oil sector.
And what does that.
Mean for the individuals or sundown is what against a case like this like the if lawyers are afraid to stand up to it and NGOs aren't standing up to it, and it's left to these individuals to put their names on these cases, like what kind of a risk is.
It for them?
Generally in Guyana, it's been individuals who have been standing up and saying no. So I think all of the litigants decide for themselves whether that is a risk that they want to take. And I would say that, you know, these are amazing people, and there are very few people in this country so far who have been prepared to say, you know what, I am going to stand up. I'm not just going to sit back and accept this. And what's really encouraging is that two of the litigants are
at the University of Guyana as lecturers. One is a dean, Troy Thomas is a dean, one is a student at the University of Guyana. And yet oil money is going to the University of Guyana.
I just watched a speech that the President gave it the Woodrow Wilson Center to this effect that Guyana is going to be an oil for just a short amount of time to get enough money to fund its low carbon development plan and green transition, and then it's going to get out. So, like, you know, don't worry, and I just would love to hear your response to that story.
Well, I think it's self serving bullshit and economic insanity. There is no way you can say that you're going to do oil for a short time. By definition, when you start doing oil, it's for the long haul. That's why ESSO has been given permits for twenty years. We know perfectly well that all across the globe now fossil fuel assets are rapidly becoming stranded assets. So that tells me that the government really has no grasp of the global energy market, has no grasp of the way the
world is moving. Everybody is moving to renewable energy. The countries that are struggling to remove the renewable energy the ones that are locked into fossil fuels. And that's why the global North is now looking to shift all of those interests to African countries and places like Guyana. You know, it's a bit like the smoking. New outlawed smoking and
then suddenly cheap cigarettes began to appear everywhere else. So ghan is an extremely rich country and for fifty five years, the political parties, the PNC and the PPP and then more recently they're sort of offshoot the AFC, have run this country into the ground. Where are Guyana's gold reserves?
Where is the money from the gold? Where is the money from the box side, Where is the money from the diamonds, Where is the money from the sugar, Where is the money from the agriculture, Where is the money from the fishing, etc. The list is almost endless because we are so full of wealth and yet the people in this country are poor. We have people sleeping on the streets and eating out of the bins. Point in
anybody saying oil is going to make Guyana rich. We have had year after year after year of resource curse, and now we have something that is infinitely worse, which is the oil curse. And there's not a single government official in this country that is prepared to do what is in the best interests of Ghanna.
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