For­eign in­vestors, pe­tro­le­um com­pa­nies, have dis­cov­ered large de­posits of pe­tro­le­um off the coast of Guyana. Guyana with a pop­u­la­tion of few­er than one mil­lion peo­ple is poised to be­come the rich­est plan­ta­tion in the re­gion, as we pre­side over the de­ple­tion of these nat­ur­al re­sources in Trinidad and To­ba­go (T&T), a coun­try which now has to im­port nat­ur­al gas from Venezuela to keep its petro­chem­i­cal plants run­ning. The ex­port of fos­sil fu­els gives eco­nom­ic hope to a de­vel­op­ing neigh­bour coun­try, Guyana, in our hemi­sphere!

While on the oth­er side of the plan­et, in Bei­jing, Chi­na, we see the use of fos­sil fu­els, pe­tro­le­um and coal, has re­duced that city to one that en­dan­gers very life it­self. The dead­ly fog/smog that en­com­pass­es the city forces the res­i­dents to keep out the dead­ly city air from their homes by tap­ing all crevices in win­dows and doors, as the room air-pu­ri­fiers strug­gle to keep the air breath­able.

Face masks are now a nor­mal part of out­door ap­par­el. The max­i­mum safe pol­lu­tant lev­el is 25 mi­cro­grammes of par­ti­cles/cu­bic me­tre of air, while in that city streets the pol­lu­tant lev­el ranges are 250-290 mi­cro­grammes.

How­ev­er, there is some con­sen­sus in the world that the burn­ing of fos­sil fu­els, the re­lease of car­bon diox­ide in­to the at­mos­phere, is caus­ing glob­al warm­ing, cli­mate change, sea lev­el rise; a threat to life on the plan­et as we know it. Hence, there are agree­ments among some coun­tries to lim­it the use of fos­sil fu­els and in­crease the use of non-car­bon re­new­ables–so­lar, wind, tide etc, now cheap­er than pe­tro­le­um even at the cur­rent low prices–to re­strict the rise in tem­per­a­ture of the plan­et.

This is the con­text in which Guyana and its in­vestors cel­e­brate the dis­cov­ery of large de­posits of pe­tro­le­um, the use of which, cou­pled with the mas­sive de­posits in the Arc­tic, sim­ply adds to the dread­ed im­pact of glob­al warm­ing, cli­mate change. Is it that eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits via a plan­ta­tion econ­o­my in our de­vel­op­ing coun­tries trumps the re­sult­ing dam­age to the glob­al en­vi­ron­ment? Even we in T&T are look­ing for­ward to, hop­ing for new lo­cal oil and gas finds.

If the ex­plo­ration and sub­se­quent pro­duc­tion of pe­tro­le­um fields, as op­posed to the ag­gres­sive use of re­new­ables, are not bad enough, the state­ment and plans of the new Pres­i­dent of the US, Don­ald Trump, are them­selves a threat to the lives of many on this plan­et.

Mr Trump tells us that he does not be­lieve that the world is warm­ing up (though 2016 was the hottest year on record) ie cli­mate change is a di­rect con­se­quence of the large car­bon emis­sions from burn­ing fos­sil fu­els. He claims that this is just a big hoax per­pe­trat­ed by Chi­na to in­crease its eco­nom­ic com­pet­i­tive­ness.

This is the phi­los­o­phy he ped­dled to the coal min­ers who were put out of jobs when their mines were closed, sup­pos­ed­ly in the quest to re­duce car­bon emis­sions in the US. Mr Trump promised these min­ers that as Pres­i­dent he would re­open the mines and put them back to work. He al­so used his ob­jec­tion to glob­al­i­sa­tion to promise oth­er sec­tors that he would bring jobs back to the US that had ap­par­ent­ly gone over­seas–ig­nor­ing the im­pact of the fourth in­dus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion on job loss­es.

Though the Pres­i­dent ap­pears to have mod­i­fied his po­si­tion on oth­er is­sues he is main­tain­ing that glob­al warm­ing is a Chi­nese hoax and that the US will opt out of any agree­ment it has made to re­strict car­bon emis­sions by re­duc­ing its use of pe­tro­le­um and coal–frack­ing then in the US would un­leash on the world more sources of un­con­ven­tion­al pe­tro­le­um.

Eu­rope, on the oth­er hand is mak­ing rapid strides in re­plac­ing fos­sil fu­els by what ap­pears to be cheap­er non-car­bon re­new­ables, which on suc­cess will make the ex­is­tence and new dis­cov­er­ies of pe­tro­le­um not as eco­nom­ic as in the past. The Stone Age did not col­lapse be­cause we ran out of stone!

Guyana then has to recog­nise that its new-found wealth gen­er­a­tor can be time-bound and the pri­or­i­ty ob­jec­tive should be to use part of the rents ac­crued to di­ver­si­fy its econ­o­my away from the im­pend­ing plan­ta­tion.

Mary K King,

St Au­gus­tine