Guyana has become an environmental prostitute

Dec 03, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – Imagine that you go the Doctor and he tells you that you are terribly overweight and that your body is diseased. He sounds a warning to you that unless you shed fifty pounds you are going to die.

So you decide to go on an exercise plan. You decide that you will go into the park and exercise each day. One morning while doing your exercises, you come across someone who is looking physically fit and who is running ten miles around the park.

So the idea dawns on you to outsource your weight loss program. You offer to pay the fit person to lose weight for you. The more weight he sheds, the more you will pay him.

This is what the carbon credit scheme is all about. The rich countries and their companies are polluting the atmosphere. The rich countries took a decision to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; this places an obligation on their companies to cut their emissions. But instead of doing so the companies in the developed world are paying countries like Guyana to do so for them.

This is what the carbon credit schemes are about, whatever way you twist them or turn them. They allow for the polluters to continue to pollute while paying poor countries like Guyana to keep their forests intact.

Guyana has become a victim of environmental prostitution. We are selling our eco-system services to the rest of the world so that they can continue polluting the world. And for this act of environmental prostitution, Guyana is being rewarded with the sale of its carbon credits.

It is absolutely sickening that, under the banner of arresting climate change, Guyana is earning carbon credits for the eco-system services of its standing rainforests.

Guyana is not a major polluter of the environment. Guyana therefore should try to sustainably exploit its forest resources.

It should not allow itself to be conned into keeping its forests intact in return for funds, since all this does is unethically shift the responsibility for the offending emissions from the developed world to poor countries.

This idea that we should be rewarded for keeping our rainforests intact is morally reprehensible, since it is simply a way in which the developed world can pay us for their failure to avoid their responsibilities to reduce greenhouse emissions.

This is what the carbon credit scheme is all about. It is about the rich countries, which need to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases, luring countries such as Guyana with significant forest cover, to accept payment for keeping our forests intact, so that the rich countries can avoid their responsibilities towards reducing greenhouse emissions.

If Guyana wants to be champion of the environment it should demonstrate to the world that it is willing to protect the environment from ethical position. It should not be used by the rich countries to avoid their responsibilities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, with each passing day it is becoming clear that Guyana’s national emissions strategy is being driven more by financial considerations than by concern for the environment. Having put forward a pitifully Low Carbon Development Strategy which forced low rates of deforestation on the country, Guyana last year announced another related scheme: a plan to earn carbon credits from reforestation.

It was reported that Guyana is looking to reforest some 6,000 acres of mined-out lands in return for carbon credits. The reforestation is supposed to be undertaken by two foreign firms.

By investing in the reforestation projects in Guyana, the foreign companies will earn carbon credits which they will then use to offset their emission targets in their own country.

This is the vulgarity of the emissions trading markets which Guyana has entered. It is concerned with the commodification of environmental services and its outsourcing of emission cuts to the developed world.

Emissions-trading is not the answer to the climate crisis. It is not the answer to cutting global emissions, and it is unethical for countries like Guyana to entertain foreign companies to override their domestic emission-cuts obligations through offsets.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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