Jagdeo is out of touch with reality
Kaieteur News – Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo, continues with this charade that oil production has a narrow window of 20 years. This narrow window; has become the PPP/C’s justification for effectively allowing Exxon and its partners free licence to determine the rate at which and the volume of oil extracted in Guyana.
It is also the excuse for not having a National Hydrocarbon Depletion Policy. Such a policy usually dictates how much and how fast oil is extracted. In the absence of any such written policy, the oil companies are free to determine Guyana’s production levels. This is not only reckless but it is also outsources Guyana’s sovereign right to dictate such levels.
Jagdeo is not fooling anyone, except himself, that fossil fuels have a limited shelf life. He now narrows this down to 20 years which would be by 2040. It is said that if you repeat something over and over people will eventually believe it. Jagdeo will find it a difficult sell however to have people accept the nonsense he is peddling about a narrow window for oil production before it is displaced by renewable energy.
In his desperation to make his non-case, fingers are pointed to the decisions made by US President, Joe Biden. No doubt, Jagdeo takes his cue from Washington’s to rejoin the Paris Agreement, halt the Keystone pipeline project and stop oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge. He no doubt infers from these developments that the days of oil are numbered. Or it simply provides him with the justification for his outrageous belief that Guyana should adopt the slogan “Drill Baby, Drill! As fast and as much as you can!”
What Jagdeo omits to mention is that Biden has not debarred fracking. This is a method which is used to release shale gas from rocks. The gas is not considered as a clean energy source. Therefore, while Jagdeo may have been conned into believing that America is on a great push towards replacing fossil fuels, Biden policies are just a smokescreen.
Biden is not on the mission to put the oil companies out of business. The oil companies wield tremendous influence and it would be foolish of Biden to risk the oil companies becoming his enemies.
Jagdeo forgets or does not know that it was the oil industry more than the environmentalists that raised a firestorm about the Keystone project, which it feared would have led to job losses in the industry. Biden’s Executive Orders earlier this year was merely an attempt to reverse Trump’s anti-environmental stance rather than a major push for renewable energy. But that is a distinction that Jagdeo will never understand.
Jagdeo must have forgotten how the very US Administration under which Biden served, which jettisoned his hopes for an agreement at Copenhagen. If what Jagdeo hoped had materialized at Copenhagen, he would have been walking in air since his imperialist-styled forest accord with Norway would have made him a global superstar. That star however pitched after Copenhagen, reducing Jagdeo to obscure environmental champion.
He ought to know that the targets under the Paris Agreement are not going to be achieved. And he should ask himself where is the promised funding which the developed countries promised for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
If the backsliding on those commitments is anything to go by, it should force Jagdeo to be cautious to accept on face value any commitment or target made by the US in relation to the global climate crisis. If anything, the US backtracking on its financial commitments to support reduced emissions, does not sit well with the present promise to use its influence to reduce and to put the Paris Agreement back on track.
The Paris Agreement is dead and buried. The world is not in the mood to revive the Paris Agreement. And if Jagdeo does not understand this, then he is at odds with reality.
The United States by itself cannot force the agreement back on track. It requires cooperation with other major emitters, especially India and China.
At present the United States is locked in vicious exchange of words with China. But the key to reducing emissions has to involve an agreement with China. Without China on board, there is little chance of any real impact on global emission levels.
As ambitious as Biden’s climate policy may appear, it will not affect fossil fuel production. It is a pipe dream for anyone to assume that the thrust towards renewables threatens fossil fuels.
By the way, why would Jagdeo, who feels that there is only a narrow window of 20 years for oil production; want the country to be investing in a gas-to-shore plant which will require natural gas to be sourced from the very oil which he believes is going out of business in 20 years’ time? What is Guyana building, another white elephant?
