COP 27 versus Leonora -one great big joke, hoax

Nov 20, 2022 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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…Encouraging events, disturbing developments (use header)

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – The first thing to be said about the new great (oil) game is that it is serious: all the big powers are in it.  Those Guyanese thinking, hoping, wishing for either riches, or safety, or some say in this oil wealth of ours lose on all counts.  Oil companies have seen to it, and influential global leaders are part of the pretence, this great big hoax.  Guyana’s leaders are pleased to go along for the ride, content to be bit players.  Thinking about this, there are many things to say.

As global leaders assembled in Egypt for COP27, there was a gathering of corporate powers for a “Suppliers’ Forum” right here in Leonora.  Two sides of the apple.  COP27 is about dire concerns for the planet, the devastations inflicted on poorer countries, action to ease the burdens of injured societies, how to wean away from fossils, and how to strike a balance with economic objectives and human safety.  Meanwhile, Guyana’s Suppliers’ Forum at Leonora was of the revivalist frenzies of oil companies worshipping fossil fuels.  Two sides of the oil apple, with leaders stringing the world along.

America’s Joe Biden, the UK’s Rishi Sunak, and China’s Emperor XI went through their solemn paces with serious faces, played word games, engaged in choreographed oil ballets, about where things are, and what to do.  These are nothing but the worst of hypocrites, utter frauds, and pathological deceivers without equal.  The first side of their split personalities wring hands, shed tears, and take fervent oaths.  It reflects the depths of their cleverness and deviousness, their delicate balancing act that leaves with pants falling down.  They propagate the right things about climate change, but failed to execute the right remedial things that they had promised.  It takes Barbados’s Mia Mottley to sound the gong of where the world is heading (especially poor, vulnerable ones), the deficits they face, what is demanded, what must be done.  That is, a favorable field grassed by these key fertilizers: money, fairness, delivering on commitments.

Further, the UN Secretary General was armed with a report about “empty pledges”.  His clarion calls about “the world is on a highway to hell” and “tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible” emphasize the need for urgent, authentic action.  Those chosen phrases compress into grim, apocalyptical proximity.  They are real.  Unreal are Joe Biden with doing part to avoid “climate hell”, Rishi Sunak speaking of “room for hope” amid rapid transitioning to renewables, while China’s XI settled for ‘climate cooperation’.  These leaders must be congratulated for articulating the right platitudes with accompanying correct degree of smooth-faced, silver-tongued piety that only politicians can muster.  I dismiss them and their deeds as the usual “greenwashing” by powers, which endangers the world, and Guyana experienced with last year’s flooding.

In Formula I Guyana, there was that “Suppliers’ Forum” at Leonora.  It is savagely ironic, a drill in the nose, by the oil companies operating here as to the peculiar timing of the Leonora gathering, a bona fide oil producers’ summit.  It was a deliberate spitting upon COP27 and its objectives.   In Lenora, ExxonMobil, Tullow, CNOOC (check their origins) gathered to speak with religious fervor of oil, while their leaders were in Egypt solemnly pontificating about the need to do more, to transition, and to respond timely to the wakeup calls resonating globally.  Somebody is playing a game here.  Oil sheiks in Guyana have made their position clear: we are racing forward, COP27 or COP35, Paris Agreement, Kyoto, and all.  Their response to Sharm El Sheik is one big middle finger.

Placing Leonora next to Sharm-El Sheik, it is either that world leaders are hallucinating, or they are the greatest pretenders in all of civilization.  It is more than greenwashing, but the gaping, widening black hole in which the planet finds itself being enveloped.  Guyana is victimized by circumstances, helpless before the invaders of our shores.  I think the PPP Government was in order to send who it sent to Egypt, given its own ambitions, priorities, and arrangements.

In sum, I detect this paradox, this contradiction: there is COP27 with serious visions and empty objectives; then there was Leonora which was of the ecstasy and effervescence of fossil fuels.  Economics, too.  Taken in tandem, oil powers and oil companies are ruthless exploiters, with eyes on economics, hegemony on resources, and the eternal domination of the advanced over the backward.  Locals get sucked into the vortex, gladly contribute their treacheries.  As aside, I understand that the gathering at Leonora was financed by Exxon.  It must be cost recoverable.  Government and President may fool themselves and Guyanese that they have found the right balance, but unless done right, we are digging our own graves, with the crumbs thrown our way to stifle the barks.  Climate change, what’s that?

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