Copenhagen or bust!

Nov 26, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
As leaders and representatives from over 100 nations around the world get ready for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, from December 7 – 18, it has been revealed that a series of e-mails were leaked from the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia, in the UK, showing that scientists there involved in monitoring and preaching about the dangers of climate change have been fabricating data to help make their case. (May I say, as an aside, that there seems to be growing concern about who hacked into the computers and got the data and not about the damaging revelation itself)
A Mr. Nigel Lawson, writing in a TimesOnline article on November 23, 2009, had this caption, “Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too,” with this subcap, “Even if the science was reliable (which it wasn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions.” The revelation of fabricated data has stirred the debate a fresh!
With a little over a week before the Copenhagen meeting, it is still too early to determine what impact, if any, this shocking revelation will have on the types of decisions world leaders will now make in concert on cutting carbon emissions.
World leaders, like the rest of the world’s ordinary citizens, know that there is something terribly wrong with our global environment and something prudent needs to be done to avert a worsening of the situation, but how will they know what exactly to do if the scientists on whom they depend for information to help make close to accurate decisions have been lying all along?
Will world leaders now simply throw around numbers to pacify those with genuine concerns about our world environment?
And what will President Bharrat Jagdeo do now that information is out stating that the climate change situation is not as bad as it has been ramped up to be?
He has been vigorously looking for huge sums of money from rich and industrialised nations to finance his Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) that involves keeping Guyana’s rain forest largely in tact, but if the situation is not as dire as it has been made out by all and sundry, will rich and industrialised nations feel any sense of urgency in responding to his beckoning for funds? Will he be left in the lurch on December 7?
It may be just me, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask why the UN picked December 7 as the start date for the Copenhagen meeting, knowing that December 7 stands out in history as the day Japan unleashed a massive military surprise attack on America in the islands of Hawaii, leading President Franklin Roosevelt to describe the day of the attack as one which will live in infamy because of the extent of the damage, loss of lives and international humiliation. Of course America responded with an overwhelming display of atomic power.
Today, as I review the strenuous efforts put out by President Jagdeo who has been globetrotting in search of world takers of his LCDS, I am left to wonder if the combination of an apparent lack of unanimity among world leaders on fixed targets for cutting emissions and the new damaging leaked e-mails, would lead to President Jagdeo ever thinking his efforts have suffered the equivalent of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and that December 7, 2009 would be a day that will live in infamy in Guyana.
The man literally pinned the future of Guyana’s sagging economy and the sagging legacy of his presidency on LCDS taking off, and any failure to launch into orbit has to seen as just that: a tragic failure! Norway’s offer cannot be a lift off signal because that’s not enough financial fuel for Guyana to even enter the economic stratosphere.
If, on the other hand, President Jagdeo can avoid a colossal failure and manage to pull off a stupendous miracle with his LCDS after Copenhagen, I have no doubt even he will try to make a case for a third term, because after working so hard on a vision developed in Office of the President, and not at Freedom House, it is difficult to see him walk away and leave the fruition of this vision to someone else who was not integral to its fashioning and subsequent development, which would require hundreds of millions of foreign dollars pouring in every year.
This then raises the obvious question: LCDS or no LCDS, if the President sticks to his promise and does not seek a third term, who will replace him as the PPP candidate in 2011? With about two years before the pivotal 2011 elections, and assuming Guyanese defy logic again and vote along ethnic lines, the nation should not be kept in the dark until the last minute on who is the leading PPP candidate and where he/she stands on the issues facing our country, including providing a compass for our economic journey from the valley of the shadow of death.
There is no other ranking PPP executive who has been part of the LCDS promotions, and so we don’t know if the President’s successor will make LCDS the main item on the party’s manifesto or come up with a new plan of action of which we may know nothing until after elections. We need to have leaders who will bare and share their vision for our future and not hope they do well.
According to former cabinet minister, Dr. Henry Jeffrey, before returning to power in 1992, Dr. Cheddi Jagan did not want to repay Guyana’s foreign debt and had hoped to take Guyana into the socialist bloc. This means Dr. Jagan did not come back to power with a concrete economic plan and explains why it was left up to President Jagdeo to hatch an economic plan out of thin air that we now know as the LCDS gamble.
Given Guyana’s rocky history but awesome potential, its future is way too important to be left to the secret selection of leaders who are then foisted on the nation with no previously shared vision of where we are heading, how we are getting there and when we plan to get there. This robot politics is not working for Guyana!
For the sake of Guyana’s silver-lined future, therefore, I think 2011 should be a year in which Guyanese discard the other political shoe that the nation was forced to walk in for over 50 years by voting for a third alternative that could force the PPP and PNC to do their homework and entertain genuine reforms reflective of the thinking and aspirations of the people and not the leaders and members of the party.
Meanwhile, even if Copenhagen yields surprisingly good results for Guyana , I still think we need a change in political leadership, because LCDS is but one issue Guyana has had to deal with in the Jagdeo presidency.
For someone who got his big break in government when he joined the State Planning Secretariat under the PNC regime on returning from the USSR, the President never foresaw himself being President, and his inexperience that led to many disturbing problems has shown why he should indeed step down and allow those outstanding problems to be resolved.
There is no way a successful LCDS can ever do away with many of the unsolved problems of his presidency. If anything, they may be a drag and distraction.
Emile Mervin

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