In twenty twenty three, Guyana's vice president, Baratcha Gayo was asked to speak at the oil and gas industry's biggest annual conference, Cambridge Energy Research Associates Executive Conference. It's put on by S and P Global and everyone calls it Sarah week at.
It's my understanding, this is the fastest offshore oil development in history.
How did it happen?
Well, we support that vision, a fast baced development of the resources offshore, particularly in the context of net zero. We believe it's a wide strategy to do as much exploration as possible, now prove the resources, and then have them removed and transfer into financial assets that in the future can serve to transform the country.
Particularly in the context of net zero. Let's get fat oil out and sold as quickly as possible. Net zero was meant to be a goal for companies and governments to work towards in emissions reduction target, not an incentive
too fast track oil and gas production. But Jagdeo is putting into plane words there what the fossil fuel industry's approach to net zero has been all along, despite a whole lot of slickly produced ads to the contrary get as much oil out of the ground and sold before it's too late.
Ghana is emblematic of what we are seeing in countries around the world. It's emblematic this broader wave of extractive colonialism that is playing out in frontier countries across the global South.
Carol Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, has worked with Melinda Jinki, the attorney we heard from earlier this season.
Countries that don't have a history or any significant history of oil and gas development or oil and gas dependence are being pushed into that dependence.
That push tends to include swift backlash to any opposition.
When people on the ground speak out against that development, when they ask difficult questions, when they ask why is this investment happening, what are the risks? What is really in this for the people of our country. They come under profound political pressure, they come under social and economic pressure you and they are criminalized and intimidated.
Sometimes the pressure is just in the form of financial incentives or brigging the system in a particular direction.
It's important to right noize God is a very small country, and that means that the universe of people with expertise in any given domain is also going to be comparatively small. I think that means that for an actor like Exam, it is really surprisingly easy and probably highly cost effective to identify those people and to take them of the equation one way or now, whether it's by offering them grants and donations, whether it's offering them jobs.
That's true of journalists as well. When Keanu Wilberg first started covering the oil and gas beat for Kyter News, she had five colleagues working on the desk with her. Now it's just her. The others were all hired away by the government or the oil companies.
While company's typical incentive is that you get a car, and almost every young journalist sees that as a very good incentive to.
Switch. And I think also there's.
This sort of esteem these very sexy titles corporate public and governance affairs, liaison for exemobile or snock or whats not. There's an appeal to these titles. If I did not see the need for staying and serving in my capacity, I would have been gone to because I was offered multiple times.
So far in Guyana, the oil companies are sponsoring cricket making big donations to all of the environmental organizations that might have been opposed to oil, and hiring journalists away from newsrooms. Sometimes shutting down opposition is as easy as just offering people a higher salary, a big donation, or a free car. The critics who remain have to be willing to withstand negative political and social pressure. Here's Vice President Jagdeo.
Again, the industry had some negatives at home because of what is taking place globally, this push the net zero. We have a lot of NGOs that have descended on the country, some saying don't leave the oil in the ground. It's flawed. With ten FPSOs operating offshore, we will be carbon negative. We're already carbon negative. Where the world is hoping to get to in twenty fifty, we're already there.
Our force is bigger than England and Scotland combine, so it's a huge sink and they're for we have a balanced strategy to develop the oil and gas in the street.
This is something Jagdeo has been saying a lot lately that even with ten FPSOs offshore, Guyana would still be a carbon sink. It sounds like he's just making up that ten pulling it out of the air, but it's actually a reference to something specific. In twenty twenty two, the government asked Exxon to include a new metric in
its environmental impact assessment for its latest drilling site. They wanted the company to lay out what the accumulative impact of all of its existing and proposed offshore activities would be on the country's greenhouse gas emissions. It concluded that even taking all of Exxon's biggest plans into account, the country could have ten FPSOs offshore and still remain a
carbon sink. But and this is a really big but, it calculated only the emissions generated by extraction and refinement, not the emissions that come from the actual use of that oil and gas. To put that in perspective, the emissions associated with fossil fuels are about ninety percent how you use them burning oil and gas, and about ten percent how you got them to offset those operational emissions. One of Axon's partners in the offshore oil project, Has Corporation has made a big commitment.
The government of Guyana on Friday signed the first sale agreement of its carbon credits to HASS cooperation at a tune of US seven hundred and fifty The sale agreement, which was signed on Friday State House, will support Guyana's efforts to protect the country's vast forests and provide capitals to improve the lives of Guyana's citizens.
With this sale, announced last December, Guyana became the first country to receive and sell carbon credits under a new UN program designed to protect forests called Trees. Trees is part of the UN's Red Project, which stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. It allows polluting companies and governments to pay other groups and governments to offset their carbon emissions. So remaining a carbon sinc isn't just
about greenwashing or promotion in Guyana. There's actual monetary value to it too.
Carbon offsets basically just open up this window for emissions to actually get worse, because you can claim to have neutralized your greenhouse gas impact without actually having done so.
Katain Joshi is a writer and energy analyst and something of an expert on carbon credits and carbon offsets. It's hard to see how Guyana's carbon credits will pencil out on the emissions front, especially because around the same time that this program was announced. The government made another big announcement.
We've put an auction fourteen properties offshore. You can bid on any of them. About the maximum that would be allocated, would be per successful better.
The reason is.
That we want multiple companies there in Guyana exploring.
If you are constantly being criticized about one contract, sometimes the best strategy is to throw fourteen new contracts in the mix. Several oil majors paid the twenty five thousand dollars fee required to enter the auction, that includes Chevron, Shell and Yeah Exxon, but the auction has now been postponed for several months, so we won't know until next year whether any new companies will be drilling offshore. Which brings us back to the question we've been grappling with
all season long. How do we tackle energy poverty and the climate crisis at the same time when there's no real money in either for oil companies.
For all they talk about it, and oil.
Companies do talk a lot about getting energy to poor people. It's like their sole purpose in life these days. The reality is that in most places where they're drilling for oil and gas, it's being exported for profit, not used to provide sustainable reliable energy for locals. Nigeria, a Global South country that's been in the oil business since the fifties, for example, is currently last in the world for energy access.
The simplest answer, but not the one that anyone in the global North seems to like very much, is to reduce energy demand in the global North to allow for an increase in demand in the global South. But that increase can't be to the excessive levels of say American consumers today, who are wildly wasteful with energy. But getting everyone to it, doctor Narasima Rau calls a decent living level of energy would change the math considerably for fossil
fuel developments in places like Guyana. If you're a global oil major and your product is oil and gas, you'd prefer to just see demand a skyrocket everywhere, and that's where things like carbon credits and carbon offsets can be quite handy. They let people pretend they're reducing emissions, so
the incentive to reduce consumption disappears entirely. But while they sound okay on paper, as does Jagdeo's creative math on how Guyana can become a top oil producer and remain a carbon sink, At the same time, none of it changes how the atmosphere actually works, reducing the impact of Guyana's oil industry on the global climate system. What actually requires shutting down the industry elsewhere like Texas for example.
That's our story today. I'm Iman Westerbilt and this is the last episode of our special Drilled and Damages co Production Light Sweet Crude.
Stay with us.
I'm originally from Guyana. I as a teenager, I represented Guyana at Cricket. I was in the first class of engineers graduating from the University of Guyana, and then I migrated. We went to school in the United States and worked for for amac at time as a senior patroller engineer. I'm a Colledsta British but Trillium.
Vincent Adams went from his job as a petroleum engineer at Amaco to the United States Department of Energy, where he worked for thirty years.
I ended up at the highest level of the United States government as a senior executive of the US government within the US Department of Energy.
And then he fully intended to retire.
My plan was to do my my voluntary service that I was doing for Diana, right you know, I was going to spend more time now in Diana that I have the time to do that type of stuff. But then a lot of my friends, you know, ministers and the president you know, said please could you? So I said, okay. The President himself at to obill how long? I said, see if I you know, I've been planning for this retirement for a long time. I've been counting the days.
Then I said, okay, I'll give you three years because I figured by three years i'll set up all the institutional systems and stuff like that.
As the previous president, David Granger. And the job is a big one, updating Guyana's Environmental Protection Agency and starting a petroleum oversay program there because after decades of looking, the country had finally found oil. Unlike Melinda Jenki or Troy Thomas, Adams was not overly concerned about the climate implications of this discovery or with the industry moving quickly. In fact, he sees it as necessary.
We have an opportunity to get rich, and we have an envelope, a small envelope, to produce as much as we get because the entire world is moving towards renewables.
But that doesn't mean he fully supports Exon's expansion into Guyana.
Exxon is doing it in a way that is very risky, which is an absolute no no.
Adams has also said all along that Guyana should never have had a production sharing agreement that complicate contract we talked about early this season, and in both cases his reasoning is the same.
We absolutely do not have We do not have the capacity to do that.
When he was put in charge of Guyana's EPA, Adams says the office didn't even have a filing system, let alone a means to oversee major offshore oil production. By collecting fees that had been due to the agency for years, he was able to put some of those systems in place, hire more people, and even buy the agency a few vehicles to allow EPA officials to check up on permitted projects. His recommendation for the floating offshore production rigs was that
there should be an EPA official on those rigs overseeing operations. Similarly, when it comes to the contract, he says for a country to make a production sharing agreement work, they need to have the capacity to be regularly auditing costs. Diana doesn't have either the oversight or the accounting capacity, so Adam's recommended a more straightforward contract.
We should go for nothing more than just straight taxes and royalty contract or what is called a concession type contract. Give it a concession type contract, you know. Just to put it very simply, all it is, if you produce one hundred buyers of oil. I let's say I decide to be the government decided to take of that quantity. If you produce one hundred buyers of oil, I take torture buyers and you take you get seventy. I don't
have to worry about cost or anything. All I would need is some high school kid who can count barriers as they're being produced. All I would need is a mechanic or a good electrician to make sure that that oil meter that measures the art it's running properly. I don't need all these accountants and everybody. Now, of course, that's putting it very very simplest giving. But that's the difference in the magnitude of the oversight that you've got to work.
With these production sharing agreements or PSAs they're not going away. As it prepares to auction off more offshore drilling blocks to global companies, Guyana has drafted a new and improved PSA. Government officials claim it solves all the problems people had with the Exxon contract, but Adam says the country is no better equipped today to manage these complex contracts than it was seven years ago.
Is there our companies by the way that the introduced this PSA nonsense because it solves them, especially like Sandy, know that a PSA is a nightmare for a country such as Guyana to verified cause.
Adam says, the oil auction is a distraction, an attempt to shift the public's attention away from any problems with Exon and make it seem like the government is fast tracking oil profits.
It's the biggest distraction that I've ever seen, which is the motusoprande. This is right in the middle of jag Diel's playbook. It's a distraction from this renegotiation state. So now everybody are going to start talking about this new model contract mechanism, Okay, And that's exactly where everybody are right now. And even if you go ahead and look at it, it's grossly it's to protect Exon.
Again.
I'm telling you, Exon is calling all of the shots and running this country.
Exon, Chevron and shell all requested big packets for the auction, and the government will announce next year which, if any, have decided to move forward with offshore drilling projects outside of the Starbuck Plan where Exon has staked its claim. So far, even if there are no takers, Excels drilling alone is set to make Guyana the world's largest oil producer per capita in the world by twenty thirty five.
The country is on track to become a major gas producer now as well, with a new pipeline and gas plant set to begin construction this year.
Ye're producing six hundred million cubic feet of gas a d Okay, you know how much we're going to be using in that by.
Fifty Neither the government nor Exon has announced yet what the plan is for excess gas, but it could easily be sold on the global market, which brings us back to that balancing act that doctor Narasima Rau mentioned a couple of episodes ago. Is there a way to let Guyana build as big an oil and gas industry as
it wants without exacerbating the global climate crisis. So far, the answer to that question from the government of Guyana is first that it's only responsible for its own emissions, not for those associated with the oil and gas produced there, which is exactly how everyone else in the world calculates emissions. The United States, for example, likes to point out how our emissions have been on the decline in recent decades.
So does the UK, so does the European Union. The oil and gas produced by American, British and European companies all over the world that doesn't count. Guyana's leaders have also highlighted the country's leadership in forest conservation and consequently the service that it provides to the world as a carbon sink. And here again, yes, that does give it a leg up on most other oil producing countries when
it comes to climate action. What then, is the answer, Because what we've described in Guyana throughout this season is not just happening there. Guyana's neighbors are also getting into the oil business in a big way. Right next door in Surinam, for example, Shell and Total Energies are regularly announcing big new offshore discoveries. Barbados were Prime Minister Mia
Motley has become a global champion for climate action. It had its own offshore auction right around the same time as Guyana's In Africa, new fossil fuel industries are springing up in Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, Namibia and more, and the global North is ramping up too. The so called climate President Joe Biden in the United States has approved multiple large scale drilling projects longtime industry leaders Katar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Immirates, and Norway. They're all drilling as
quickly as possible. So is Brazil, which also supposedly just elected a climate friendly president. It's a global game of musical chairs where the company or the country left with the least untapped oil reserves wins and the rest of us lose in the biggest way possible. Unless unless the fever dream that capitalism built, this idea that more is always better, that the biggest consumers are the world's winners,
gets tossed on its head. Even if we managed to do what a lot of climate advocates want and electrify everything, we must at some point grapple with the very simple fact that a lot of us on this planet consume a lot more than we need to.
When I was first in Chile researching the social and environmental impacts of lithium mining there, and Chile is the world's number two producer of lithium, and also some of the kind of contentious politics around extraction of this mineral. I started to kind of think, you know, would it matter in terms of how much lithium was needed, how the sort of global energy transition is designed, or how the US energy transition is designed right THEA.
Rio Francos is an associate professor of political science at Providence College and a member of the Climate and Community Project. Her research focuses on the impact of extractive economies and how we might rethink them, and she's been concerned for a while about the fact that if we keep everything else the same and switch to renewables tomorrow, we're pretty likely to end up with some major environmental crises on
our hands. The land use and mining impacts of electrification are often cynically weaponized by those who would prefer to see us hooked on fossil fuels forever, but there's substance to them too, which got Rio Franco's thinking. Are we destined to replace one environmental problem with another? Or could we do things differently? And how differently would we need to do them to really change things.
Are there futures in which less lithium and less of these other transition minerals are required than some of the most alarming kind of reports and predictions I began to see from the International Energy Agency and then the World Bank and multiple other forecasting agencies which were and remain pretty alarming in terms of how much mining they are predicting will occur or be demanded.
Rio Francos recently looked at this question in great detail around transportation and whether there are decisions we could make today that would make the electrification of transportation more sustainable.
So I was thinking a lot about an urgent and rapid and just energy transition in the US, but I was kind of thinking about both ends of the supply chain at once, Like here I am in Chile the to come at desert, seeing these mining related harms, and then there I go in the US kind of advocating for a rapid transition, like how do I align these two goals and how and is there a way to kind of have a less extractive energy transition, And the answer was that research didn't exist, at least not for
the US transportation sector. I saw forecast after forecast that assumed basically a binary of the future. Right, Either we stay with the fossil fuel status quo and the existential crisis that that is causing for the planet and all of its people, or we transition to an electrified, renewably powered future. But that doesn't really change anything about how these sectors or economic activities are organized.
There was a powerlessness to it all, a global giving up on ever doing things differently. Rio Franco's thought, surely this is not all actually set in stone.
It's totally understandable to me that, you know, the vast majority of Americans use cars to get around because they live in contexts, even some urban contexts, but especially suburban and obviously especially rural context where there really is no other option. And so I neither blame individuals for those choices.
But nor do I see our current transportation system as a paragon of freedom, right, I mean, especially when we consider how financially burdensome cars are for peign working class people. We're at a critical juncture in terms of specifically how that renewable energy transition is designed, who the winners and losers are, what decisions made around certain trade offs. Right
in the thort of policy and resource decisions. So I'm worried that this moment, which could could if we think about it, critically, organize around it, and advocate for it, maybe put us on a slightly less car dependent path.
Spoiler alert, none of it is set in stone. It's absolutely possible to shift energy demand and behavior with policies that support those shifts.
But if we just take that snapshot year of twenty fifty and we look at lithium demand, our worst case scenario to our best case scenario is in ninety two
percent difference. So if we just take the year twenty fifty, this future that we're looking at as er emission transportation sector, our worst case scenario is we maintain current levels of car dependency, car usage, Cars have this outsize kind of share of overall transportation modes, Vehicle ownership rates remain like the same as they are now, and we also get to continue on the trend of bigger and bigger batteries right that are getting more and more out of step with global averages.
That's our worst case scenario.
Things get kind of actually worse but electrified, and our best case scenario is we bring battery sizes back to sort of reasonable size. We expand how many folks are using buses or cycling. We densify our suburbs a bit, we have maximum levels of recycling and recovery that are technically feasible. That second future is ninety two percent less lithium than the first future. And I know that the ambitious future is probably beyond the realm.
Of what feels ploki possible right now.
And I understand that. You know, I am not like living in the clouds. I'm aware of that, but I think that having that option on the table, because in that most ambitious future, we totally limited emissions and everyone.
Has a way to get around.
Right.
But even in the least ambitious, most politically feasible future that Rio Francos and her colleagues imagined and modeled, some pretty simple decisions made a big difference.
Another finding that I really like, just because it addresses folks who are understandingly concerned, all like, there is no America without car detent. You know, we can't move away from being heard a pentent.
We just have to suck it up.
And I say to those people, we could stay in scenario one, which is the one where we keep levels of car usage and vehicle ownership rates, and we don't
identify anything and we want to sprawl. We can stay sorinary one and we can just bring our batteries to like the right size or not this gargantuan size, and in twenty fifty we could use forty two percent less lithium with the same amount of cars and the same amount of car usage and vehicle ownership if we just make the batteries a more normal size, like rather than the super size.
It's not a smart car.
You know, those tiny European cars. You know, I'm not even going there because again I know my audience, I know my limits of what I can suggest.
So no, we're talking.
About the Nissan Leaf, or we're talking about what people drive in Berlin or whatever.
Narasimhrau and joyshri Rue both mentioned similarly small shifts with big payoffs.
New homes in the US are significantly larger than new homes in some of the richest countries in Europe, and that's something that is not something one can regulate.
In cold and one countries, sometimes we make it so hot and so cold in the rooms that it becomes not comfortable anymore. The default setting can be done in such a way so that overheating and overcooling can be reduced, and that can have a very high health implication, And we could see that without reducing employment, without reducing human well being, actually forty to seventy percent of twenty to fifty level of projected emission can be reduced by working on the demand side.
I think we need to have incentives policy incentives for healthier diets that are more environmentally friendly.
We do need policy that helps food planners, choice architects, city planners, investors to plan complexities with walking, sightly lanes, public transit systems to help people to make better choices for their own health and environment.
Eating slightly less meat, living in more walkable cities, and in slightly smaller homes. None of these are actually the massive sacrifices that they're often made out to be. In fact, these are all things that tend to cost individuals less money while also improving health and quality of life. But it's important to understand that simply shifting demand or consumer behavior will not automatically curb fossil fuel production. We know
this from history time and time again. Absent policies that manage an energy transition, fossil fuel companies will simply find new markets. The plastic boom is a great example. When demand for fossil fuels in transportation and residential energy decreased, the industry focused its attention on ramping up petrochemicals as a revenue stream that could make up the difference. It's happening with the fossil fuel push in the Global South right now too. The headline here is that there is
a path forward, There is time to do something. There is a way to address global poverty and global warming at the same time. But it requires action, and it requires choices in the global North that might be briefly, briefly a little bit painful or a tiny bit unpopular. Historically, our politicians have not excelled at embracing short term pain for long term gain. But that doesn't mean they cannot or will not behave differently, just that they're unlikely to
unless pushed. In the meantime, Global South countries like Guyana are going to continue to fund both development and climate adaptation anyway they can, even if it means selling oil to pay for sea walls.
Address the.
Immediately.
That is it for this episode and this season. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget to check out our discussion guide for the season, debunking the moral case for fossil fuels. There's a link to it in the show notes. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for weekly analysis and our list of the five climate must reads each week. It never takes more than ten minutes to read, and it will
keep you up to date on climate coverage. Light Sweet Crude is a co production of Drilled and Damages, both Critical Frequency original shows.
Our senior producer and editor.
Is Sarah Ventry. Sound design and mixing by Martin Saltz Ostwick, who also composed some original music.
For the season. The song Beiji Boggi is written and recorded by Bill Rogers and licensed from the BBC Music Library. Long nam Tera Dishmann is performed by Joyce or Milla Harris in Guyana. The song Liquidator is a cover of a Harry J Allstars song performed by the Young Ones of Guyana, licensed by b Ame Music.
Our fact checker is Anna Poujol Mazzini. Our first amendment attorney is James Wheaton. Our artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Graphic design for the discussion guide was done by E. J. Baker at Maybe Ventures. Marketing and PR were handled by Maggie Taylor and Tink Media. Huge thanks to Keana Wilberg, our reporter in Georgetown, for her help and amazing work,
and to Antonio Juhas for her reporting and insight. Thanks also to all of the people in Guyana who opened their homes and offices to us and were so generous with their time, especially Annette Our June, Dane Gobin, Glen Law, and Melinda Jenkie. And thanks to Michael McCrystal, Salvador de Karrez, and Jamal Thomas for helping us navigate Guyana, and to Chef Delvin Adams for showing us Georgetown's incredible markets and
his charming backyard cafe. This show is me possible in part by generous grants from the Dock Society's Climate Storytelling Lab, the William Collins Kohler Foundation, the File Foundation, and you are listeners. We appreciate the support and can't wait to bring you another season soon. In the meantime, don't worry, We'll still be bringing you weekly episodes on all things climate accountability, Thanks again and we'll see you soon.