The Global Oil Rush

region and Africa particularly hard. Today, I'm bringing you a conversation with reporter Jeff Goodell at Rolling Stone, who's just written a scorching piece on what's been happening in Namibia, particularly with respect to a company that seems to have claimed on paper that there are billions of barrels of oil on its land, but never actually proven that there's anything there that never stops them from drilling though right next to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, no less, and

those completely unnecessary exploratory wells have caused plenty of environmental damage. Jeff went to Namibia to figure out what the heck has been going on. He's going to talk us through all of it, how it fits in with what we've been seeing in Guyana, and how it all relates to the global oil rush. After this quick break.

and so I kind of didn't think about it. And then then I was just sort of googling around one day and thinking more about it, and let's started to look into it a little bit and it became really interesting to me very quickly. Because this company called Recon Africa,

which was based in Vancouver. They were kind of, you know, a small kind of or oil and gas exploration company, and there was some really good reporting that had been done by National Geographic that suggested that, you know, maybe this was not all up and up, and maybe there was some other game being played here besides straightforward oil and gas drilling and exploration. And it just piqued my interest, and the more I looked into it, the more complex

and fascinating it became. I pitched my editors and said, yes, let's go go have a look. And that's what I did.

it was more less covered with ice in it. It's very controversial theory, but he he is the one who kind of proved it, and he proved it by studying the rocks in Namibia for about forty years. And he knows the rocks in Namibia the way you know most people know their children's faces or something. And I called him and he basically said, I explained the story to him and I was interested in drilling. Did he have any advice for me about traveling in Nmidia and this

and that? And he said, you know, there's no oil there And I said, well, what do you mean? And he said, whatever they're saying. I know this place and there's basically no oil there. And I was like, well, then what are they doing? And he said, well, you know, one thing you're going to learn is that a lot of oil and gas company or companies are better at drilling into their investor's wallets than they are into the rocks in the ground.

basin that they that they had so called discovered. And as you know, one hundred and twenty billion is a pretty big number. And so that got all their investors in a tizzy.

through there, for its wildlife population of lions and you know, all the sort of big mammals that people pay a lot of money to go on Sofari to see. But it's also just this, you know, this kind of miraculous place, this delta where the water runs down out of the highlands of Angola and creates this unique ecosystem that is very that is basically unpolluted and untouched, and then that water disappears into the Kalahari desert and just sort of vanishes,

and it's this is amazing place. So the first thing I did was go see this amazing place, which I'd never been to before. And sure enough, it was, you know, astonishing in its diversity of wildlife and in its sort of sublime beauty. And the notion that all this was going to get you know, screwed up and polluted because of these you know, wildcat explorers who were drilling upstream of this was you know, pretty shocking in the sense of like, what the hell are we doing? You know,

what is going on here? So it wasn't just the climate aspects of it. It was also just this incredible wonderland of wildlife that was at risk.

so who cares? Well, it matters a lot because an ecosystem like the Oka Bango delta is very fragile and it's all built around this sort of flow of water. And as even drilling these four or five wells that they have drilled, they're you know, they're using drilling MUDs that have god knows what kind of chemicals in them. They're pumping up water from below that has all kinds of chemicals in it that are not mixed in the surface waters. They're cutting roads through these pristine areas, changing

wildlife migration patterns, you know. And then there's the whole sort of economy of drillers and kind of get rich quick people who you know, invade this area trying to exploit this, and so it's like, you know, even this level of modest exploration in a pristine place like that has profound implications.

in this projection. Like it's one thing, if you know, axel On or Shell says there's one hundred and twenty billion barrels of oil somewhere, but this is not one of those companies no, it's not.

you know, middle aged white guys. Basically you know, made a little bit of money in cracking the premium basin and in parts of Canada and have basically spent the last ten years trying to kind of export fracking around the world basically, and you know, they fracking as a you know, North American invention that was sort of you know exploited here, and these guys figure out, oh, well,

we can do that in other places. So they've trotted around to Mexico and France and Poland and other places trying to frack in basins there and they've been basically shut down in all those places or else the gas fields turned out to be dry or the gas too

difficult to get for whatever reasons. But they've perfected this idea of you know, hyping up the possibility of these discoveries and then selling you know, creating a corporation that they then put on the Vancouver Stock Exchange or some other small exchanges and hype up investors in retail investors on who are on boards like on Reddit in places like that, and they get a lot of money invested in this by hyping up the possibility of you know,

an enormous find in this case in Namibia and Botswana. So it really is just I mean, really it's a handful of people. When I was in Namibia, I went to the company headquarters. You know, it's like, okay, so Recount Africa has got this operation that I'm reporting about,

this drilling, high profile drilling operation. I figured they would have a building, a like an office, you know, there would be some kind of establishment, And it was basically this like rented little office at the end of this empty hallway where one I was sitting in a chair with like office depot kind of steel furniture. Who was in charge of their operations there? And I went in and you know, said hello and told him who I was, and I was from Rolling Stone and and you know,

I'd like to go look at the drill sites. And he was at first really friendly to me. It was really sweet, and like he's like, oh great, welcome to the maybe and all that, and then he said, okay, we'll arrange this. Let me let me call me back in a couple of a couple of hours and we'll set it up. And I left and called him a couple of hours and he was immediately very gruff and like, no, we're not you know, no, no drill visits. Sorry, we're

not cooperating and hung up the phone on me. He'd obviously checked in with somebody and like, you know, we're not letting any reporters anywhere near this. But that's the kind of operation it is. It's not a you know, it's not a big company. It's like four guys, you know, who have corralled a bunch of investors, have some money, bought a drilling rig and are punching holes in Namibia.

insiders cashed out. You know, this company was worth at a certain point something like a market cap of like two billion dollars, even though you know they'd never found any oil and their office was nothing more than a you know, steel chair in a in a lonely little building in Hindu, Namibia. You know, I don't know where it's going to go. They look like they have enough operating cash to get to go through another quarter or two.

But a lot of the main investors have already moved on to other companies, and even the key player, Craig Stankey, who is the sort of man behind this, he's moved on. He's involved in some other companies. So I basically think they're going to fade away. I think that, you know, they're just going to vanish in this sort of petroleum haze.

I think that after several years of promising and promising and promising, I think even there, you know, cult like investors are losing patients with them, and you know, they've been talking about it, you know, a joint venture somebody one of the big oil majors coming in and you know, buying them out or buying out a portion of their operation, and which would certainly happen if if there was one hundred and twenty billion barrels of oil, sure, yeah they

would have. It would be a pretty good shape. But the fact that nobody has after all this time, it's pretty good evidence that even insiders don't believe what they're selling.

you know, was not available to them to develop. And then a couple of these big a couple of these big offshore discoveries came on which do seem real, and then the some other discoveries in the southern part of the country. But you know, Africa, as you know, is at this sort of turning point right of are they going to develop in this old like you know, nineteenth century you know, resource curse kind of development path or

are they going to move in a new direction. And I think Namibia is like really at the kind of full crum of that decision.

big oil and gas producer. And I'm curious about what you found in terms of what I don't know, what people think about it there, how the government is reacting,

how people on the ground think about it. I had someone I talked to someone just the other day who said, you know, for a long time, folks in global soft countries thought about climate change as global North problem, a problem that was created by the global North and should be solved by it, which is not necessarily untrue, but unfortunately everybody is going to be impacted by it too,

right in these countries, you know, more than most. So Yeah, I'm just curious what you saw in terms of people kind of grappling with all of those things at once.

have created this problem of climate change. We're the ones who have spent you know, one hundred years dumping ZO two into the atmosphere. And as you chronicle better than any buddy with oil majors like exce On Mobile knowing what they were doing, and you know, there's no question about who's responsible for this, right right, And you know when you travel in when I traveled in Namibia in Botswana,

you know, I mean, energy poverty is very real. I mean, you know it's really important in countries in Namibia, in Botswana for more people to get access to energy for all kinds of very obvious reasons. And you know, there's a legitimate argument to be made that. Look, you know that I even in a meeting with the Maybe is Drilling the head of their sort of drilling operations oversight agency said to me basically is, look, you guys, you

meing America have look what you've done. You know, you drilled everything, and you know, look what's going on now. We just okay drilling in the World Willow Project in Alaska. Look at what we're doing in the Gulf. I mean like you have no right to tell us like not to drill. You know, you have no moral standing.

want us to do or care. It's like for our own good, you know, we need to go on a different path because the future is not oil and gas. These things are going to turn out to be stranded assets. They're going to screw up our country. They're gonna pullue, they're gonna do all the things that we can see has happened to the US and to other countries who have gone down the path of fossil fuel development. Were smarter than that. The advantages is to go on this

new and different path. And Namibia is a great example because Namibia's solar resource, for example, is just phenomenal. I mean, it's better than California or Nevad. I mean it's really they have the real gold mine or the real one hundred and twenty billion barrels of oil in Namibia is not in the ground. It's in the sun, and the

possibilities of that are huge. And they're also doing things very innovative things like green hydrogen development that they have a big project going on that is I think it's nine billion dollars or something of investment that is very progressive and you know a kind of step towards this sort of new energy economy also, so they're at this sort of you know, full crumb of this of this change.

But one of the things that econ Africa story shows is, you know, is the ability of the oil and gas industry world players to you know, access political officials, to

to get Okays to do things. They know how to pull the levers and you know, they know how to you know, pay off the right people and you know, get the development going even in ways that you know, even if it's not the sort of smartest path or the most democratic path or the one that most people in the country want, they know how to get it done, which is the same story as you saw in Guyana and we see in America.

if it's like Gwyneth Paltrow developing. You know, it's like it's hilarious, you.

all the time there. It like that oil money is going to pay for climate adaptation, which is such a like really clear example of you know what happens when the global north does not step up and do you know what it should on climate. It's like, okay, now we've kind of abandoned these countries to rely on oil companies to pay for climate adaptation, and the trade off

is you know, more drilling and all of that. So anyway, I don't know, like is that something that you saw in Namibia as well, where like well this might be a problem, but it'll bring in money and we need that money to deal with all of these other things.

We do this right. We're not a fly by night organization. You know, we care about Namibia. Blah blah blah. You know, they're very good at you know, pitching this as the path for economic prosperity and growth. Right. And then you go there and you walk around and you talk to people in the villages and things around there, and yes, they drilled a couple of drinking wells that cost them two or three thousand dollars and that has helped a

couple of you know, the villages. And I visited some of these wells and people were happy that they were there. But it's like you know, buying the local soccer team new shirts or something. I mean, it's like, you know it. They know how to do build up this kind of good will at a very cheap cost. And you ask them about you know, when I asked people about you know, employment and jobs, and you know, they would hire someone to like hold a flag on a dirt road for a day or two and pay them less than a

dollar or something. And then that would be the end of it. And you know, clearly all this drilling stuff is you know, everything there was Haliburton. I mean this is all imported stuff, imported engineers. The actual you know, job possibilities for local people there are very very small. You know, the oil contracts, most of the money is you know, going out of the country. The money that's not going into the hands of sort of corrupt officials

got the country. You know, this is it's it's a very transparent game that anybody like you who has looked at this for a long time knows exactly how it's played. And they're really experts at it, and they're really good at it, and you know, they have that playbook down.

organizations like that have a real presence. One of the things that you know, really caught my eye and in first beginning to explore this story and deciding to actually go there and write about it, was seeing some video of some of the sort of community meetings where local activists were challenging kind of some of Ricon's officials who would come in and you know, describe this these drilling projects to them, and the local activists really kind of

got up in arms about it and really challenged them. I thought, oh, wow, this is really interesting. There's a lot of pushback here.

I mean no, I mean you can't. Right, there's if you're going to drill for oil and gas and Musemite Valley, it doesn't there's no right or wrong way. It's a disaster any way you look at it. Right. And so the same kind of thing with the Okamango Delta. It's like there's no right or wrong way to drill here. You just this should this should not this should not

be happening, right. I mean if you value this, this ecosystem and this this planet, the way that a lot of people do so, so I think that, you know, what's interesting in this story is that, you know, by choosing to drill in this we're very close to this fragile area. They they really kind of kicked off a kind of attention and got people like me and activists and others to say, hey, what the hell are you doing?

What is going on here? That I think they regret because I think that they would like this to have just gone through in a much quieter way. And there certainly is other drilling and exploration going on in Namibia that I'm not writing about, and you've probably never heard of, and I've probably never heard of, and you know that is going on quietly under the radar. But these guys were bold and stupid, and they just arrogant and just thought, oh, what the hell, We're gonna drill right next to the

Okamango Delta and lo and behold. People don't like that, including a lot of Namibians who are you know, we're marching in the streets and holding up flags. But we know what's really interesting too, is that you really feel, or I really felt when I was there, compared to covering a similar kind of you know, meetings and activism in the US is fear. There's a real fear there

of what the oil companies could do to them. There's a lot of I talked to a number of activists who said, you know, I'm talking to you, but you know, if I disappear next week, you know you need to know, you know who did this or who who is where to look first kind of thing, right, And so you really feel the kind of courage of speaking out there in a way that you know, I don't really feel when I cover similar kinds of events here in the US or in Western Europe or something.