The Drilled Guide to Global Climate Disinformation

How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot

Could Guyana’s Exxon ruling scare big oil off risky exploration?

Guyana High Court: EPA and ExxonMobil Put Country At Grave Risk

Debunking the "Moral Case" for Fossil Fuels

[00:00:11] Oh does that mean we're close to getting there?

[Music, nature sounds, truck on a dirt road]

[00:00:18] The first time I ever heard anything about Guyana was years ago, in a pirate bar. Yes, a pirate bar in San Francisco. Drinking aged rum for the first time while a friend of mine told me about this new gig he'd gotten promoting a small South American country as an eco tourism destination. Conservation efforts and eco tourism have been a big thing in Guyana about as long as they've been a thing, period. But now the country is known not only for its pristine rainforest and hundreds of species of native birds, but also for its burgeoning oil industry. I wanted to know whether the eco tourism folks were annoyed by the oil folks. Are they worried that having to fly into an oil boomtown might dampen the eco tourism experience for people or whether they can just sort of ignore it all? So I planned a trip to Cayman House. Or as Americans might say, it Cay-men house. Cayman House is an eco lodge and research center in the heart of Guyana's Rupuni region. Unlike the rest of the interior of the country, which is mountains and forest, the Rupununi is savanna. There are cowboys there and wide open spaces. And it's way closer to Brazil than it is to Georgetown. I was excited to explore a different part of the country. And then I messed up my flight plans and our producer Sarah had to go alone. First on a tiny plane to a city called Letham, and then on a two hour drive in a pickup truck over dirt roads.

[00:02:04] Oh, hi. Hi. I'm Billy. I'm Sarah. Nice to meet you!

[00:02:07] I'd like to Welcome to you to Cayman House

[00:02:14] Cayman House is primarily staffed by members of various local indigenous tribes, which is quite common with eco tourism destinations in Guyana. The country has provided a model for eco tourism that can offer Indigenous locals an income and visitors an immersive experience. Sometimes eco lodges double as research stations, and that's definitely true of Carmen House, where they research. Yes, Caiman specifically Black Caiman. If you've never seen one before during the same family as alligators, a lot of Cayman are small, but the Black Cayman can be up to 14 feet long. So a little bit terrifying. The boat, a small metal one with a motor attached and some benches to sit on. Heads out at sundown. The guide brings snacks. And, of course, Guyana's famous Eldorado aged run. It's humid and sweaty, and there are tons of mosquitoes. But Sarah says it's so picturesque and gorgeous. Just you and all these animals around you that none of that really matters.

[00:03:20] A look at the area. And then as night falls, we will come shining. If he has a bright dart will come shining. Looking for birds or animal or whatever we can see on the water top.

[00:03:31] Can I have some water before you get on the boat?

[00:03:33] Yes, you are. If you want to have your urination. I'm sorry. You can use the bushes.

[00:03:39] Okay. No, I'm actually okay. But thank you.

[00:03:43] And it's not just cayman you'll see from the boat. Guyana's forests and rivers are teeming with life.

[00:03:51] Right here. It's just the monkey bar. I'm lucky enough to see the otters swimming across and the capybara. They're common here.

[00:04:02] When they do spot a cayman, they pull them up to tag or check them, and sometimes they take guests along for the ride.

[00:04:16] Keep looking where I'm shining and you'll see an eye.

[00:04:19] Yeah. That's how we catch them, you know?

[00:04:21] Along the way, guides like this one, who referred to himself interchangeably as Josie and Jose ID birds by their call and tell visitors all about the local area and customs. The founders of Cayman House are an American couple who lived in Guyana for a number of years because one of them was a researcher studying, you guessed it. The black cayman. They developed relationships with community members and created a library for local schoolchildren. They even started to look after the area's stray dogs who now called, came and house their home and give the staff some extra mouths to feed. Diana has about a dozen of these sorts of eco lodges all across the country, and people come from all over the world to visit them. In 2019, Guyana was named the planet's top eco tourism destination at ITB Berlin, the largest tourism trade show in the world, 2019. That's the same year the country shipped its first barrel of oil. That honor of top eco tourism destination is one that Guyana had been working really hard to win for close to 20 years. So I thought surely there would be some concerns about how becoming one of the world's largest oil producers could impact that. But it turned out none of that was true. That's our story today. I'm Amy Westervelt. And this is Light, Sweet Crude.

[00:06:17]  Guyana has had a well-deserved global reputation for conservation for a long time. In 2009, it was one of the very first participants in a UN program called REDD, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. Basically, it lets high emitting global north countries pay low emitting global south countries to preserve their forests. So Norway, an oil rich country, committed to pay $250 million to Guyana, provided that Guyana could show certain conservation metrics along the way. That deal was signed by former President Barack Jagdeo. Yes, the same Jagdeo that's vice president today and the government's biggest supporter of the oil industry. The payments from the Norway deal were supposed to fund low carbon development. The idea was that the money could help Guyana develop, but do so in a way that would limit greenhouse gas emissions. It was heralded as this great example of how we could value ecological services, things like forests full of trees that capture and store carbon dioxide, for example, or the preservation of biodiversity. But it still had the whiff of colonialism about it. Norway, a country that is tremendously wealthy from oil with $1,000,000,000,000 sovereign wealth fund, telling Guyana how to preserve biodiversity. Mmkay.

[00:07:52] So you were saying you were going to get X dollars if you maintained deforestation rate at .05%, you would give me 50 million over five years.

[00:08:03] Dane Gobin is the CEO of the Iwokrama International Center for Rainforest Conservation and Development, the crown jewel of Guyana's conservation and eco tourism efforts.

[00:08:14] But at the same time, what you're saying is that you have to satisfy other criteria to get the money. Yeah. So. So you go into the shop to buy a pound of butter. And you pay for the butter. And the guy is saying, So before I give you the butter. You need to tell me if you are taking care of your children, if you wash your car.

[00:08:46] More than a decade before the Norway deal was signed, Guyana created a 371,000 hectare reserve called Iwokrama, in the middle of what's called the Guyana Shield, an area with tremendous biodiversity to the northwest of the Amazon rainforest. The government established the Iwokrama International Center there to research and pilot sustainable forestry and agriculture projects, and they opened the Iwokrama River Lodge as one of the country's first eco tourism destinations. Iwokrama has had loads of international donors over the years. Its current patron is King Charles.

[00:09:26] And I am saying hold on, the butter is a dollar. I'm paying you a dollar. What's this other stuff? So it's it's a challenge because to do in a country doing it, it's taxpayers money, so they have to do it on their best practice. Good governance, anti-corruption targets should be met and so on. It's a donation, right? And that's a challenge. So government is saying, hold on, you're paying for the forest. You've agreed that this is the rate of deforestation. We maintain it. What's this about the other stuff? No, this is a business transaction. Yeah. The people who want this have what they call steel ropes attached. It's not just well protected forests, and it's actually it's condescending because especially on the basis that you have destroyed your forests, but you're actually exceeding it. So you're giving me money to almost help to breathe the air that you breathe. But you're telling us how to spend it.

[00:10:28] Gobin says he's been on the other side of this sort of situation, too, with payments to local indigenous groups around Iwokrama.

[00:10:36] We have had that at the level of the communities, and I can understand from their perspective. So when the communities earn timber monies from us, we are worried about where this money is going to be spent. Will they go open a rum shop? What will they do? So, I mean, we'd like to see a school built, we'd like to see scholarships, but but the this is their wood. We are paying them for their wood. We can't tell them. So what we did with the communities and it's a model and I don't think it will work at the bilateral, but we work with them. We says, Look, you set up a committee to look at how the money will be spent.

[00:11:20] So in a way there is no clean money. It's always tied to something. Which begs the question, where do you draw the line? For Gobin, there's little difference between taking money from Norway or taking money from, say, Exxon. To date, the company has donated $7 million to Iwokrama through its foundation.

[00:11:45] Guyana is part of a very important landscape known as the Guyana Shield. It's actually one of the last remaining intact forest ecosystems in the world. This piece offers a great opportunity for conservation.

[00:11:59] Exxon's CEO may not have visited Iwokrama yet, but its marketing team sure has. They've been busy making videos there to promote the company's commitment to conservation in Guyana.

[00:12:11] We really need to nurture it and ensure that we have this for future generations to come, even while we use it in the ways we.

[00:12:20] Gobin is well aware of the optics and how people might be irked by a conservation organization receiving millions of dollars in donations from an oil company.

[00:12:30] And yes, the obvious question is, you know, should we be taking money from the oil companies? And my question to that is, okay, oil will be there. We continue to say, you know, if you read the papers, if you read Kaieteur, you will see, you know, Exxon is strip stripping the country. And the question is, if we've accepted that they're stripping out and for a moment they're giving you something back. It could be more, but they're giving you something back. And if you if they didn't give, they would get knocked for not giving something back. When they're giving, though, the question is, should you be accepting? We are not advocacy. We are not advocates. We don't ...we run a rainforest. We don't get involved in politics. But we we have to take care of our people. And if somebody is saying, here's a grant, you can do capacity building and training, You can improve the livelihoods of Guyanese. You could do all kinds of things. Why should we say no?

[00:13:39] Dane's not stupid, Dane just doesn't care as long as there's money.

[00:13:45] Remember Melinda Janki, the lawyer trying to stop the offshore drilling project in court? For Janki, there is no way to separate the money from its corporate influence. There are always strings attached.

[00:13:59] You'll find a lot of people in this conservation sector in this country is not that interested in conservation, but they are very interested in being given grants to do what they term conservation work, which generally conserves nothing.

[00:14:18] Wait, how does it conserve nothing?

[00:14:21] What did they do? WWF were, they did the thing offshore Guyana and came in rapturous about the wonderful marine wildlife we had and that it's possible to do oil and protect marine wildlife. I'm not entirely sure what planet we can do that on, but it's not this one.

[00:14:42] But Exxon is dropping more than just money.

[00:14:45] They are allowed to dump 4000 barrels of sewage into the ocean every day. So 4000 barrels of sewage every day adds up to, over the life of the project, 1.2 billion gallons of sewage in our pristine ocean. And there's 1.2 billion barrels of oil in that particular field. So we're getting roughly a gallon of shit for every barrel of oil they take out.

[00:15:11] Exxon's money has those same steel ropes attached as other international donors. But instead of requiring good governance and a crackdown on political corruption, they're asking Iwokrama staff to appear in marketing videos and say that Exxon is supporting important conservation efforts. Some might say they want to greenwash.

[00:15:37] This is not a personal benefit. This is a benefit to Iwokrama across its community partners and to the nation of Guyana. And as I said, we could probably get some more. But at the end of the day, you know, the recognition is I mean, it's something that I don't think people on average realize. ExxonMobil bet five or $6 billion without knowing what was there. Shell left. Shell was partner, and they left a few years after because there was nothing.

[00:16:10] Gobin is referring to the original contract that Exxon had with Guyana, which was signed in 1999. At the time, Exxon's exploration partner was Shell. But after the two started exploring in earnest in 2008 and didn't find anything for a few years, Shell left that partnership.

[00:16:28] Now, shouldn't they be given some kind of recognition for that investment in Guyana? Because if there was nothing there, they would have walked away with a $5 billion loss. They stuck it out. And I'm not advocating for them. I have no interest. Actually, I would not like to see oil out there. But the reality is, you look at the way health care system, look at our education system. Guyanese want to go to Harvard. Guyanese want to go with the year. Guyanese want better schools, better health care. So who is paying for that?

[00:17:08] We heard this from a lot of people in the conservation space. This idea that oil is obviously not great for the environment, but what's done is done and they may as well use the oil money to further conservation efforts. I really wanted to hear from the one person everyone I spoke with in Guyana told me to talk to you about conservation.

[00:17:31] I'm sorry I'm early. Okay. I'm very grateful.

[00:17:49] Annette Arjoon runs the Guyana Marine Conservation Society. She shared some similarly contradictory views while we were walking around her neighborhood near the coast in Georgetown, Oleander Gardens.

[00:18:04] Oleander plants, the oleander flowers and this area is called Oleander Gardens. But because of all the old homes being bought out and demolished and replaced by these high rising apartments, we now have Schlumberger, Exxon as our neighbors. So I always tell people, you are now coming into Oil-eander Gardens, which is, you know, a bastardization of our beautiful oleander flower. So welcome to Oil-eander Gardens.

[00:18:40] But. Well, Arjoon seems not so thrilled at the idea that her neighborhood has been turned into condo central for foreign oil execs, she's also happy that Guyanese property owners and developers are benefiting from that change.

[00:18:55] Yeah, it's 12 going up. No, these are three. Each apartment has its own pool in the bath. Wow. So those go for 5,000 USD for a month. Wow. And they're all Guyanese businesspeople.

[00:19:14] And then renting out mostly to, you know.

[00:19:17] All oil and gas, but that's what I was saying that they carve back in terms of local content. It gave again these opportunities in the real estate market, you know. Yeah. So this is Tracey's um. Oh, ten apartments here and another five here.

[00:19:35] All of them are already rented out. Wow. And I went to school at her.

[00:19:43] Uhhuh. So lots of young people like our age as well are getting opportunities to become, you know, food caterers, service providers, logistics providers.

[00:19:55] Right. Because they have to hire local...

[00:19:58] They have to hire locals, yeah.

[00:19:59] Arjoon says when she first heard Exxon was coming to Guyana, she was worried.

[00:20:04] I didn't know much about Exxon other than when there was that New Yorker article that basically was, you know, exposing their culture and reality of funding climate change denial, denial campaigns. That was the first time Exxon came on my radar. And and to me if you are your you know top tier of your company is doing something as insidious as that it was it was terrible. It was terrible for me because if you're, you know, funding climate change denial campaigns, how could you be considered environmentally responsible? So having all this technology is one thing, but that technology is useless if your culture is one of of deceit.

[00:20:57] She's also very clear eyed about the climate impacts Guyana is already experiencing and the role that fossil fuels play in exacerbating those impacts.

[00:21:08] In a period that's supposed to be a dry season, you're still having torrential downpour. You're having short, torrential downpour that will flood your city. And in minutes, you know all of that, you're seeing that that that was never what our weather conditions to be like in the past. Shell Beach where I worked, we had and in cases parts of the beach, we we were losing like 90 feet of beach per month. That is sort of unprecedented erosion in terms of the rapidity of that. As it actually as a result of that, that that effect the community of 280 members, 90% of them had to relocate inland to higher ground. So that was, in my opinion, I always refer to it as my first experience of climate change refugees.

[00:22:09] But she doesn't necessarily see any of that as a reason not to drill for oil offshore. She believes Exxon can and will do better in Guyana with respect to environmental protections.

[00:22:21] So for sure, I think Exxon has an opportunity, a golden opportunity to do what is right by the environment. And if they don't, well, you know, we call them out. And I think as well, too, that the government also has to call Exxon accountable because Exxon gets away with...with slackness if it's allowed by the administration.

[00:22:48] And she sees whatever environmental degradation oil drilling might bring as an acceptable tradeoff for money that could lift Guyanese out of poverty. Although she was eventually sent to boarding school and taught to fly planes by her father. Argent grew up in the indigenous village that her mother was from, and she saw there up close the poverty that a lot of Guyanese citizens still deal with today.

[00:23:15] Guyana was a very poor country and growing up with my AmerIndian grandmother and a riverine community where there was a lot of poverty as well, including working on Shell Beach, where, you know, people had to eat sea turtle meat and eggs to exist. Seeing poverty was a part of my reality.

[00:23:38] Shell Beach became the first place Arjoon's organization worked to conserve. Today, she works with local residents there to protect the turtles that they once had to eat to survive. But she's also seen poverty force young people in the area into sex work just to access daily necessities.

[00:23:57] Seeing young girls who had no economic opportunities and would have to have survival sex to be able to buy an underwear or buy a bra or to eat is part of my reality. So in terms of seeing, you know, this country being blessed with so much natural resources, including the recently discovered and produced oil, it it made me it makes me realize that, look, if you have, you know, abundant natural resources and you could use those natural resources in a very responsible manner to help to help lift your people out of poverty, that's what I support.

[00:24:49] It makes a lot of sense. The looming question, of course, is whether it will actually lift people out of poverty and whether it will do so before it destroys any of the other natural resources that Guyanese people depend on. That's where Janki, the attorney we heard from before, thinks a lot of Guyanese people are engaging in magical thinking.

[00:25:12] The Global North has basically broken the global climate system as a result of greenhouse gas pollution. And I think we should stop talking about emissions and call it what it is, which is pollution from fossil fuels. It is incredibly stupid for anybody to say, well, because you did something bad and broke it, we now have a right to do something bad and break it even further. The global climate system is precisely what it says. It's a global climate system. The idea that more money is going to make things better in Guyana is also false. Guyana is not a poor country, Guyana is an extremely rich country. It's the people who are poor and they're poor because the same set of people that have governed this country and run it into the ground. So the idea that more money will make any difference is not based on any evidence whatsoever. All the evidence points to the government. Whichever government is is whichever party is in power. It doesn't really matter. What it points to is squandering of national income. And I think it's disingenuous to be claiming to be a conservation organization and at the same time trying to make allowances for the fossil fuels sector, which is destroying the planet. Now, Marine Conservation Society supposedly cares about turtles. They actually started off as the Guyana Marine Turtle Conservation Society.

[00:26:56] That's the organization that Annette Arjoon runs.

[00:26:59] You only have to look at what oil does to a turtle to realize that saying on the one hand that you want to protect turtles and saying on the other hand that fossil fuels can be beneficial in some way are two completely contradictory positions, it's one or the other. Either you protect the ocean or you support fossil fuels. There isn't any middle ground.

[00:27:28] At Iwokrama, Dane Gobin is still hopeful that selling ecosystem services both to oil companies and to other international buyers is a potential path out of poverty for Guyana. That keeps the focus on conservation. When he talks about it, he sounds very similar to Janki, actually.

[00:27:47] So ecosystem services will be as very common as carbon, which people speak of, as tourism. It's a service from the ecosystem, the forest, the environment. But then you get into the carbon hydrology, water, major ecosystem services. They say the next wars will be fought over water. Unfortunately, a lot of people recognize forests for these ecosystem services, but no one can put the value in. So if I got a loan from the bank, I would say we have arrived as far as managers and I've always believed we are in the conservation business. This is not any fluffy thing. This is a business. You have a car business, you have a stationery business, You sell hardware. I sell ecosystem services.

[00:28:36] Give Guyana the respect and admiration for being a carbon sink and starting that dialog about how do we actually make sure that this country stays as a carbon sink, because that's the most important thing for the planet. If every country was a carbon sink, we would not be in the mess we are in now. All right. This is where people need to stand up and say there is a better future for Guyana and we can help you to do that. Get rid of these loans, get rid of the debt, Stop lending money to governments who then squander it and burden the population with it, but simply pay us the people for that carbon sink service. Pay us the people to create a marine protected area over our exclusive economic zone and protect everything that's there. That's good enough.

[00:29:41] The key difference between the two is that Gobin sees no problem with selling those services to Exxon or its partners to offset the emissions they're generating by drilling for oil offshore. But for all of his faith in Guyana's valuable ecosystem services and his acceptance of the oil industry as a sort of necessary evil, Gobin also realizes that a catastrophic oil spill would ruin all of it.

[00:30:07] Is there any concern that something like an oil spill, for example, if it was big enough, could impact the ecosystem services?

[00:30:16] Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. And that's the worry. You know, the thing is, I wouldn't sit here and say it wouldn't. I also wouldn't sit here and says, it can't happen. Yeah. Because chances are it's going to happen. I mean.

[00:30:32] There's a lot of evidence around that. Yeah, the data speaks for itself. Yeah.

[00:30:38] So, you know, again, the best the next best thing to that is what? Planning and planning plan ahead. Mm hmm. So this is going to happen. It has happened before. It will happen again. So if it happens, So. So I know government is very actively working with the companies to look at planning to put put in place mechanisms, emergency mechanisms to save the coastline. And I'm comfortable that both government and the and the companies are, you know, spending enough resources to be able to deal with it.

[00:31:14] But even as the country starts to build the skills and resources required to deal with oil, another environmental danger is looming.

[00:31:24] We are outlining the gas to shore project and what it will bring to our country.

[00:31:31] That's Guyana's president, Irfan Ali, announcing a new project, one that's separate from the offshore drilling and governed by different contracts and arrangements entirely the Gas to Energy Project. Now, remember, managing gas has been something of a problem for the oil companies since the beginning of their production in Guyana. It's a waste product. They're supposed to be managing. Up until late 2022, that mostly meant burning it off --what's called flaring. But now that they've redesigned their gas compressor, Exxon says it's back to re injecting the gas underground. However, the company has also repositioned gas from a byproduct to another revenue stream. Now it's being presented as a huge gift to Guyana.

[00:32:20] The gas in this phase comes to the government and people of Guyana free. Costs free of cost.

[00:32:29] And as both oil companies and even some large environmental groups have done all over the world. The gas is being presented as a bridge to energy transition, a key part of the president's low carbon development strategy.

[00:32:44] We are taking the issue of environment and climate seriously. Natural gas is far less polluting than fossil fuel in a supply of energy. So this project also is part of our climate resilience plan. Structural transformation. This project allows us to have structural transformation.

[00:33:13] And now it's time to talk about paltering again. Because, of course, if your problem is methane emissions, it's helpful to focus everyone's attention on carbon emissions. And it's true gas does emit less CO2 than coal or oil, but it emits a whole lot of methane, which is a greenhouse gas that's about 80 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years. And methane isn't just released when people burn gas, it's emitted all along the way. When it's extracted, when it's refined, it's transported and when it's burned. The industry refers to this as methane leaks, which sounds like an accident. Whoopsie. But studies are piling up that show it's just par for the course when you're using gas for energy. In the past decade, scientists have discovered not only that all of our existing gas infrastructure emits a lot more methane than anyone previously thought and a whole lot more than the industry has ever admitted, but also that it's worse for the atmosphere. It's also really short lived, which is good news. That means if we can dramatically reduce methane emissions now, it would buy us some time to reduce all of the other greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of doing any of those things, the industry is pushing the world in the opposite direction, most recently using the shortage of gas in Europe caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine as justification to lock in gas for decades. Gas often gets talked about as being a bridge to renewable energy, something we can just use until there's enough renewables on the grid, or that can help to stabilize solar and wind sources. But what we've seen in reality over the past 20 years is gas being baked in as the dominant energy source. It's a bridge to nowhere. And on top of all that in Guyana, there's the fact that there's actually a lot more gas being produced than the country could ever possibly use for energy.

[00:35:12] The 50 million cubic feet of gas that they're bringing, we only need for our electricity. We only need about 30. But that's the first phase 50. They're going to be bringing 120 million.

[00:35:30] So that's four times what you actually use.

[00:35:33] And they are insistent. Well, we need to do something with the gas because if we don't do anything with the gas, then Exxon would have no choice but to flare it.

S3, Ep6 Transition

When we first started reporting this story, people unfamiliar with it would suggest talking to local environmental groups. Surely they would have something to say about a massive new polluting industry springing up in the country! But every group we could find operating in Guyana had taken money from Exxon or one of its partners. Several have made promotional videos praising the project. They argue that oil money is no dirtier than any other source of funding, and if it’s there, they may as well take it to do good conservation projects.

New Oil Colonialism

S3, Ep7 | The Global Oil Rush