Annette Arjoon has spent decades saving sea turtles that come to nest on Guyana’s Shell Beach. The 120-kilometre-long ecosystem in the country’s northwest includes mangrove forests, swamps and savannahs, and, for part of the year, it’s a crucial pit stop on the migratory route of four endangered turtle species: green, leatherback, olive ridley and hawksbill.
These sea turtles are an example of our interconnected natural world, with some travelling on to Brazil, Newfoundland and West Africa. Similarly, the conservation efforts on which their survival depends are woven together. “It’s a global effort,” says Arjoon, who founded the Guyana Marine Conservation Society.
The same, of course, could be said of the battle that is underway to stop catastrophic climate change. But as the world lurches toward increasingly dire environmental scenarios, vows for equitable climate action don’t materialize. As a result, fault lines are increasingly visible, including not far from the beach Arjoon has worked to protect, where ExxonMobil found deep-water oil in 2015. Now, Guyana is the newest petrostate at a time when the world is scrambling to limit global warming to 1.5°C. The tiny nation of 800,000 is already the fastest-growing economy, and by 2035, it may be the fourth-largest offshore oil producer on the planet.
“I want you to quote me as bluntly as you can,” Arjoon says. “If you want Guyana to leave its oil in the ground, you start leading by example.”
They are surprising words from a celebrated environmentalist and are indicative of a shifting dynamic that is seeing developing countries go unapologetically on the offensive when it comes to climate diplomacy – at a time when cooperation is desperately needed. Increasingly, voices from the Global South are pushing back against the “hypocrisy” of the Global North, which got rich in an industrialized world powered by fossil fuels and continues to profit from and drive their extraction. It’s the North – primarily the United States and Europe – that is overwhelmingly responsible for the historic emissions that are choking our planet. And it’s the South that has been paying the heftiest climate price, underdeveloped and locked in a vicious cycle of indebtedness that makes it impossible to properly respond to the climate chaos already battering it, let alone prepare for what is to come.
Mohamed Irfaan Ali, the president of Guyana, summed up the emerging dynamic neatly in a BBC interview that went viral earlier this year. He bristled at questions about his country’s decision to drill for oil and to reap immense economic benefits at a time when the world needs to wean itself off fossil fuels. “I’m going to lecture you on climate change,” a finger-pointing Ali told the interviewer, as he rattled off the efforts made by Guyana to protect its carbon-sequestering forest “that the world enjoys” and yet, he said, doesn’t value. “Guess what? Even with our greatest exploration of the oil and gas resources we have now, we will still be net-zero,” he claimed.
If you want Guyana to leave its oil in the ground, you start leading by example.
- Annette Arjoon, Guyana Marine Conservation Society
Climate experts have criticized UN forest accounting rules used by Guyana and other nations as a licence to extract fossil fuels. But aid organizations and nations on the front lines of climate change have long called out the double standards of wealthier nations, some of which have vowed to cut aid to fossil-fuel-producing countries, all the while continuing to spew emissions at rates several hundred times higher than their poorer counterparts.
Of course, the Global South is a diverse place, and its positions reflect that. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, has suspended new oil and gas contracts, a first for a major petroleum-producing country. In Guyana, there is also division, as evidenced by a 2021 lawsuit against fossil fuel production.
In fact, the Global South’s own contribution to climate change is not uniform. While the North is responsible for about half of all historical emissions, the South’s emissions have skyrocketed since 1990 and now make up 63% of all greenhouse gases, driven mostly by China, which has become the world’s factory for consumer goods. Still, Europe and North America continue to produce emissions that outstrip the share of their populations, while most Global South nations have a fraction of their climate footprints.
The increasing profile of voices rooted in the Global South is evidence of “a tectonic shift in power relations,” notes Glada Lahn, a senior research fellow at the United Kingdom’s Chatham House Environment and Society Centre. With the rise of China, along with Brazil and other middle powers in the Middle East, suddenly there are options for Global South countries when it comes to finance, trade and investment that embolden their voice. “This means governments feel they have more choice of partners and don’t have to fall in line with the U.S. or one or two former colonial powers,” Lahn says.
Breaking free of the debt–fossil fuel trap
And then there is the staggering issue of debt. Global South countries are paying five times more on debt payments than on addressing the climate crisis, according to a report by 35 aid organizations called The Debt–Fossil Fuel Trap. This, in turn, is fuelling a fossil-fuel-dependency cycle, the report’s authors found, making it virtually impossible for fossil-fuel-rich countries like Argentina, Uganda and Mozambique to shift to renewables.
While some in the Global South say these nations should be free to exploit their own resources while the wealthier nations with much larger carbon footprints phase them out, others say that what is needed are climate reparations and debt cancellation. Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, has been leading that charge on a mission to retool how the global financial system works so that it doesn’t punish southern countries like hers and allows them to prepare for climate change. Her proposals include reforming the lending policies of organizations such as the World Bank to allow for a massive cash infusion to vulnerable nations; taxing the profits of petroleum companies; and, more recently, cancelling the debt of climate-ravaged nations.
Developing nations have been clamouring for rich countries to help them on these issues for decades. Finally, in what was heralded as a “climate justice milestone” at the COP27 climate conference in 2022, wealthy nations – including the United States and 27 countries in the European Union – agreed to pay into a “loss and damage” fund. The fund is meant to provide financial assistance to countries most vulnerable to climate change. Last year, at COP28 in Dubai, countries pledged around $700 million toward that promise, a tiny fraction of the billions needed every year. More than $100-billion in climate financing has also been mobilized and provided in recent years, according to a report released by the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation.
Last year’s UN climate conference also saw countries draft, for the first time, “a roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels.” But for all their commitments, and grave acknowledgements that time is running out for meaningful climate action, leaders of the Global North continue to bet on fossil fuels. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who may be ousted in an upcoming snap election, has said he intends to “take every last drop” of oil from the North Sea. The United States is pushing for new oil exploration, despite President Joe Biden’s decision to freeze new export permits for gas. Canada’s own oil production is slated to increase as emissions continue to inch up.
Meanwhile, Uganda’s minister of energy and mineral development said that telling the country not to drill for oil was condemning it to poverty and that it would accept a phase-out of fossil fuels only if “wealthy long-time producers quit first.”
“This is a signal of really an unwillingness of world leaders, both in developed and developing nations, to abide by what they promised to do,” says Claudio Angelo, with the Brazil-based Observatório do Clima.
He says that while rich nations have “failed humanity” for not providing climate finance and for not assisting developing countries to leapfrog from fossil fuels into clean technologies and a green economy, developing nations “have no excuse to think their product won’t kill us all, because that’s precisely what it will do to humankind.”
“It’s not a question of being rich or poor,” he says. “It’s about frying or not frying.”
The right to develop
Omar Elmawi, a Kenyan lawyer and environmentalist with the Don’t Gas Africa campaign, applauds many of the points made by the president of Guyana but differs on his defence of oil extraction. “What’s wrong is wrong,” he says on a call from Washington, D.C., where he attended the World Bank’s annual spring meetings in April. The question, in his mind, is not about fossil fuels. “The question is the right to development.”
Most of the Global South, excluding China, is not as developed as the North, and its carbon footprint reflects that. The average person in a high-income country generates about 30 times more emissions than those in low-income countries. “We still need to develop, but how do we develop in a way that is climate compatible?” Elmawi asks. “The best way to do it is renewable energy – cheap, cleaner, easier to deploy.” But it must be leveraged to generate true value for Africans, he argues, which means selling a complete product, not just cheap labour. Even now, the burgeoning green hydrogen development on the continent is intended not for African consumption but for export, to Europe and the rest of the world.
It’s not a question of being rich or poor. It’s about frying or not frying.
- Claudio Angelo, Observatório do Clima
For Africans, oil, gas and coal are still being sold as the best and quickest way to get the millions of people who are energy-poor on the continent crucial power, Elmawi says. And yet, the numbers don’t add up. He points to Nigeria, the ninth-largest oil exporter in the world and a major gas producer – all of which is exported. So Nigeria imports nearly all of the fuel used by its own citizens and ends up paying more. “The system is already designed to make sure that we don’t benefit and the Global North does,” says Elmawi, who notes that less than 2% of the global investments in renewables went to Africa in the last two decades.
Radical action on emissions, biodiversity and equality requires North–South cooperation, Lahn, the Chatham House expert, says. The truth is that it should all go together, because if action on climate and the environment is not improving inequality, it will continue to face opposition, she notes. “Vested interests in the environmentally damaging economy we have will inevitably manipulate this schism in their favour,” she says. “I’ve seen [the BBC Guyana] interview being used to polarize the issue of climate on social media. And polarization and loss of trust harms efforts at cooperation.”
Brazilian leadership could be vital
Still, Lahn is hopeful that some positive things can come out of Brazil’s leadership of the G20 this year, as President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva pushes for more South–North cooperation through issues such as taxing wealth and carbon more equitably. In a speech at COP28, Lula said that Brazil was joining the OPEC+ group of petroleum-producing nations in a bid to convince those countries that the end of fossil fuels is on the horizon. “Preparing means using the money they make to invest so that continents like Africa and Latin America can produce the renewable fuels they need, especially green hydrogen,” he added.
A voice like Brazil’s, which carries considerable clout as a member of the BRICS group of countries, “would send a signal,” Lahn says, “and one free of the burden of colonial history.”
The future depends on it. In Guyana, the weather patterns are less predictable and more intense. “So we have flooding where we didn’t have flooding,” Arjoon says, and extreme droughts that are parching a country known as the “land of many waters.”
She sees in the Exxon oil project a chance to address the rampant poverty that disproportionately affects Indigenous communities and to generate wealth that will keep young Guyanese from leaving their country, in search of better economic opportunities abroad. She believes it has to, and can be done in an environmentally responsible way.
“I’m seeing very visible evidence of the revenues of oil and gas. I’m seeing communities that never had water, never had lights, never had schools, never had health centres being given those basic facilities,” she says. “Why should the onus be on Guyana to save the world? This needs to be a global effort.”
Photo: People wait at the Stabroek Market to ferry across the Demerara River, near a container ship in Georgetown, Guyana, in April 2023. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)
Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and associate editor at Corporate Knights.
