Basjit Mahabir won’t let me in.
I’m trying to persuade Mahabir to open the padlocked gate of the Wales Estate, where he guards the ramshackle remains of a factory surrounded by miles of fallow sugar cane fields. The growing and grinding of sugar on this plantation about 10 miles from Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, ended seven years ago, and parts of the complex have been sold for scrap.
I plead my case. “I lived here when I was a little girl,” I say. “My father used to manage the field lab.” Mahabir is friendly, but firm. I’m not getting in.
The ruins are the vestiges of a sugar industry that, after enriching British colonizers for centuries, was the measure of the nation’s wealth when it achieved independence.
Now the estate is slated to become part of Guyana’s latest boom, an oil rush that is reshaping the country’s future. This nation that lies off the beaten track, population 800,000, is at the forefront of a global paradox: Even as the world pledges to transition away from fossil fuels, developing countries have many short-term incentives to double down on them.
Before oil, outsiders mostly came to Guyana for ecotourism, lured by rainforests that cover 87% of its land. In 2009, the effort to combat global warming turned this into a new kind of currency when Guyana sold carbon credits totaling $250 million, essentially promising to keep that carbon stored in trees.
Six years later, Exxon Mobil discovered a bounty of oil under Guyana’s coastal waters. Soon the company and its consortium partners, Hess and the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corp., began drilling with uncommon speed. The oil, now burned mostly in Europe, is enabling more global emissions — and producing colossal wealth.
The find is projected to become Exxon Mobil’s biggest revenue source by decade’s end. The deal that made it possible — and that gave Exxon Mobil the bulk of the proceeds — has been a point of public outcry and even a lawsuit, with a seeming consensus that Guyana got the short end of the stick. But the deal has nonetheless generated $3.5 billion so far for the country, more money than it has ever seen, significantly more than it gained from conserving trees. It’s enough to chart a new destiny.
The government has decided to pursue that destiny by investing even further in fossil fuels. Most of the oil windfall available in its treasury is going to construct roads and other infrastructure, most notably a 152-mile pipeline to carry ashore natural gas to generate electricity.
The pipeline will snake across the Wales Estate, carrying the gas to a proposed power plant and to a second plant that will use the byproducts to potentially produce cooking gas and fertilizer. With a price tag of more than $2 billion, it’s the most expensive public infrastructure project in the country’s history. The hope is that with a predictable, plentiful supply of cheap energy, the country can develop economically.
At the same time, climate change laps at Guyana’s shores; much of Georgetown is projected to be underwater by 2030.
Countries like Guyana are caught in a perfect storm where the consequences for extracting fossil fuels collide with the incentives to do so. “We’re obviously talking about developing countries here, and if there’s so much social and economic development that still needs to happen, then it’s hard to actually demand a complete ban on fossil fuels,” said Maria Antonia Tigre, a director at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. Still, she insisted, “we’re in a moment in the climate crisis where no one can get a pass.”
For centuries, foreign powers set the terms for this sliver of South America on the Atlantic Ocean. The British, who first took possession in 1796, treated the colony as a vast sugar factory. They trafficked enslaved Africans to labor on the plantations and then, after abolition, found a brutally effective substitute by contracting indentured servants, mainly from India. Mahabir, who worked cutting cane for most of his life, is descended from those indentured workers, as am I.
Fifty-seven years ago, the country shook off its imperial shackles, but genuine democracy took more time. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that Guyana held its first free and fair elections. The institutions of democracy, such as an independent judiciary, began to emerge. And the legislature passed a series of robust environmental laws.
Now that Exxon Mobil has arrived to extract a new resource, some supporters of democracy and the environment see those protections as endangered. They criticize the fossil fuel giant, with global revenue 10 times the size of Guyana’s gross domestic product, as a new kind of colonizer and have sued their government to press it to enforce its laws and regulations.
Vickram Bharrat, the minister of natural resources, defended the government’s oversight of oil and gas. “There’s no evidence of bias toward any multinational corporations,” he said. Exxon Mobil, in a statement, said its work on the natural gas project would “help provide lower-emissions, reliable, gas-powered electricity to Guyanese consumers.”
The world is at a critical juncture, and Guyana sits at the intersection. The country is a tiny speck on the planet, but the discovery of oil there has cracked open questions of giant significance. How can wealthy countries be held to account for their promises to move away from fossil fuels? Can the institutions of a fragile democracy keep large corporations in check? And what kind of future is Guyana promising its citizens as it places bets on commodities that much of the world is vowing to make obsolete?
The ghosts of the past
A year ago, a Georgetown hotel, hustling like so many to take advantage of the new oil money, staged a $170-a-head rum-tasting event. I’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to interview Exxon Mobil’s top brass in Guyana. When I heard rumors that its country manager would attend, I bought a ticket and, although he was a no-show, I found a seat with his inner circle.
One of the event’s hosts gave a speech that invoked a time when “BG,” the insider’s shorthand for British Guiana, the country’s colonial name, also stood for Booker’s Guiana. Now, the speaker observed matter-of-factly, “it’s Exxon’s Guyana.”
Booker McConnell was a British multinational originally founded by two brothers who became rich on sugar and enslaved people. At one point, the company owned 80% of the sugar plantations in British Guiana, including the Wales Estate. The Exxon Mobil executive sitting next to me didn’t know any of this. His face reddened when I told him that the speaker had just placed his employer in a long line of corporate colonialism.
Independence came in 1966, but the U.S. and British governments engineered into power Guyana’s first leader, Forbes Burnham, a Black lawyer whom they deemed more pliable than Cheddi Jagan, a radical son of Indian plantation laborers, who was seen as a Marxist peril. But Burnham grew increasingly dictatorial as well as, in a twist of geopolitical fate, socialist.
Booker still owned Wales at independence. But in the mid-1970s, Burnham took control of the country’s resources, nationalizing sugar production as well as bauxite mining. Like other former colonies, Guyana wanted to make its break with imperialism economic as well as political.
Burnham pushed the idea of economic independence to the breaking point, banning all imports. But Guyana didn’t have the farms and factories to meet demand, so people turned to the black market, waited in ration lines and went hungry.
Burnham’s death in 1985 touched off a series of events that began to change the country. Within seven years, Guyana held its first free and fair elections. Jagan, by then an old man, was elected president. Soon, a younger generation of his party took office and embraced capitalism. Private companies could once again bid for Guyana’s vast resources.
Then came proof of the dangers of unchecked extraction. In 1995, a dam at a Canadian-owned gold mine gave way. The 400 million gallons of cyanide-laced waste it had held back fouled two major rivers. Simone Mangal-Joly, now an environmental and international development specialist, was among the scientists on the ground testing cyanide levels in the river. The waters had turned red, and Indigenous villagers covered themselves in plastic to protect their skin. “It’s where they bathed,” Mangal-Joly recalled. “It was their drinking water, their cooking water, their transportation.”
The tragedy led to action. The next year, the government passed its first environmental protection law. Seven years later, the right to a healthy environment was added to the constitution. Guyana managed to enshrine what the United States and Canada, for instance, have not.
For a moment, Guyana’s natural capital — the vast tropical rainforests that make it one of the very few countries that is a net carbon sink — was among its most prized assets. Bharrat Jagdeo, then president, sold the carbon stored in its forests to Norway to offset pollution from that country’s own petroleum production in 2009. Indigenous groups received $20 million from that deal to develop their villages and gain title to their ancestral lands, although some protested that they had little input. Jagdeo was hailed as a United Nations “Champion of the Earth.”
And then Exxon Mobil struck oil.
The vision of a green Guyana now vies with its fast-rising status as one of the largest new sources of oil in the world. Jagdeo, who is now Guyana’s vice president but still dictates much government policy, is a fervent supporter of the Wales project.
But a small, steadfast, multiracial movement of citizens is testing the power of the environmental laws. David Boyd, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, describes the country as a front line for litigation using innovative rights arguments to fight climate change. It includes the first constitutional climate change case in the region, brought by an Indigenous tour guide and a university lecturer.
‘The rule of law is the rule of law.’
Liz Deane-Hughes comes from a prominent family. Her father founded one of Georgetown’s most respected law firms, and in the 1980s, he fought against repressive changes to the constitution. She remembers her parents taking her to rallies led by a multiracial party battling Burnham’s rule. When she was 13, she came home one day to find police officers searching their home. “I lived through the 1980s in Guyana,” said Deane-Hughes, who practiced at the family firm before quitting the law. “So I do not want to go back there on any level.”
I talked to Deane-Hughes, now an artist and jewelry designer, on the veranda of a colonial-style house built on land that has been in her family for five generations. The government has claimed part of it for the natural gas pipeline, which crosses private property as well as the Wales Estate. But the issue, she said, is bigger than her backyard.
Last month, Deane-Hughes joined other activists, virtually, at a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, making the argument that oil companies have compromised environmental governance in Guyana. This coterie of activists has spoken out and filed suits to bring the corporation under the scrutiny of the country’s laws and regulations.
Mangal-Joly, who responded to the cyanide disaster that prompted those environmental laws, said the government has failed to fulfill its oversight duties. As part of her doctoral research at University College London, she found that Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency had waived the environmental assessments for every facility treating toxic waste or storing radioactive materials produced by offshore oil production.
The gas plant, too, has been given a pass. In January, the EPA waived the environmental assessment for the proposed Wales plant because Exxon Mobil, although it isn’t building the plant, had done one for the pipeline.
The EPA defended the decision. “It is good and common practice” to rely on existing environmental assessments “even when done by other project developers,” wrote an agency spokesperson on behalf of its executive director. The agency asserted its right to waive assessments as it sees fit and noted that the courts hadn’t overturned its exemptions, saying, “This no doubt speaks to the EPA’s high degree of technical competence and culture of compliance within the laws of Guyana.”
Mangal-Joly notes that the power plant sits above an aquifer that supplies drinking water to most of the country. “Our water table is shallow,” she said. “There’s a generation, and generations to come, that will not inherit clean water. We are despoiling a resource far more valuable than oil.”
The waiver infuriated Deane-Hughes. And the independence of the board that hears citizen concerns struck her as a sham. Its chair, Mahender Sharma, heads Guyana’s energy agency, and his wife directs the new government company created to manage the power plant. At a hearing of the board, Deane-Hughes cited the mandate against conflicts of interest in the Environmental Protection Act and asked Sharma to recuse himself. “I would like you not to make a decision,” she told him.
Six weeks later, the board did make a decision: It allowed the power company to keep its environmental permit without doing an impact statement.
Sharma dismissed the critics as a privileged intellectual elite sheltered from the deprivations that have led many Guyanese to welcome the oil industry.
At the Inter-American commission meeting, Bharrat, the minister of natural resources, argued that it is his government’s right as well as its responsibility to balance economic growth with sustainability. “Our country’s development and environmental protection are not irreconcilable aims,” he told them.
To Melinda Janki, the lawyer handling most of the activists’ suits and one of the few local lawyers willing to take on the oil companies, the question is whether Exxon Mobil can get away with doing whatever it wants. She helped shape some of Guyana’s strongest environmental laws. “Even though this is a massive oil company,” she said, “they still have to obey the law. The rule of law is the rule of law.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.