ExxonMobil, Guyana & Global Science Misunderstandings
Thanks to Guyana, I now know that there is such a thing as World Science Day for Peace and Development. Birthed by UNESCO on November 10th 2001, the 2017 theme is “Science for Global Understanding” (see flyer in Figure 1). According to UNESCO, “Global Understanding is key to peace and sustainable development in that it promotes the commitment of individuals and local communities in sharing knowledge for actions and behavioral change.”
My father was the first scientist I ever met and the one who opened my eyes to its complexities. Throughout this piece I will weave him into my discussion as I, like many Guyanese I am sure, try to grapple with the recent discovery of oil in Guyana and the contractual agreements signed on behalf of Guyanese with the world’s largest multinational currently accused of misleading the public about what it knew about climate change. According to Harvard researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, after assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications from 1977–2014, “83% of peer-reviewed papers and 80% of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81% instead expressing doubt. We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science — by way of its scientists’ academic publications — but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.”
In March 2009, I visited the Iwokrama rainforest in Guyana as a part of an interdisciplinary course I was teaching at the University of South Florida (USF), “Sustainability Concepts: Mercury in Guyana.” As a part of a Sustainable Healthy Communities initiative at USF that was funded through the state of Florida, my colleagues and I received a grant that helped us develop this new course with students from civil and environmental engineering, public health, and geosciences (interdisciplinary work and assistant professors is a blog of its own that soon come). Needless, thanks to the graduate students enrolled, we included two nights at the Iwokrama International Center for Rain Forest Conservation and Development since they wished to experience a place that was committed to sustainability versus traveling only to the gold mining community of Mahdia as I had intended. Iwokrama was indeed special, a pristine rainforest area ~9 times the size of Barbados, 1/2 the size of Puerto Rico, or just as big as Delaware, that is surrounded by gold mining concessions and Amerindian communities. Under its strategic policy direction, Iwokrama conducts, “up to date scientific research into the impacts of climate change on the forest.”
Iwokrama was “gifted” to the world as a biodiversity reserve by President Desmond Hoyte at the 1989 Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My father was the Director of the Institute of Applied Science and Technology (IAST) in Guyana at the time, and was engaged with the development of this “gift”. Based on conversations with him on his involvement, I continually remind him that it lacked public consultation and the presence of any women. Luckily, he is around to share this developmental history with me and his unedited Facebook Messenger clarification to what I wrote above is included below, love you’s and all (Figure 2).
Of course I first learned about this idea of stakeholder engagement and Guyana while taking a graduate course with Prof. Len Ortolano way back in 1994. We were studying big dams and development, and I read about the Upper Mazaruni Basin hydroelectric dam proposal for Guyana. Our context was based on the example made of it for lack of stakeholder engagement for a World Bank funded project, especially that of indigenous populations, many of whom would lose their lands. Unfortunately, I lacked the intellectual maturity at the time to use that proposed 1,500–2,000 MW project for my paper and learn more about a people-energy-water project made public in April 1973, some two months after I was born in a place I still call home (Figure 3). I chose instead the Cahora Bassa Dam in Mozambique, a country and culture that I knew little of, and which today is ranked the 8th lowest on the Human Development Index (HDI) with a life expectancy of 55.5 years. That 1920 MW hydroelectric dam was built between 1974 and 1979. Same timeframe as that planned for Guyana.
Compared to Mozambique, Guyana ranks higher on the HDI. Today, Guyana’s mean number of years of schooling is 8.4 years compared with 3.5 years in Mozambique. While some countries considered to have Very High Human Development have lower mean years of school completed than Guyana, they all have higher expected years of schooling. In the United Kingdom that number is 16.3 years. In Guyana it is 10.3. The gap is likely much larger if one disaggregates data by discipline. This difference translates into who gets invited to speak of science.
In 2016 I was asked to be a member of the Chancellor’s Transformational Task Force for the University of Guyana (UG). At the one meeting I attended, Jean La Rose, Executive Director of the Amerindian Peoples Association, stressed the importance of providing educational opportunities for and with the country’s Amerindian populations. This included the facilitation of students when they travelled to the coastal campuses, the delivery of courses in Amerindian communities, the inclusion of research projects situated in, and on, Amerindian communities, and the inclusion of Amerindian students in education and research projects that resonate with needs of their communities. Some 20 years after the Iwokrama International Center was established in partnership with the Commonwealth Secretariat, the country’s university had still not figured out how to properly promote sustained and long term partnership with Amerindian communities.
This brings me back to 1989 when it was “gifted” to the Commonwealth. You see, Guyanese born Sir Shridath “Sonny” Ramphal served as the Secretary General of the Commonwealth Secretariat from 1975–1990. During that time the Secretariat supported the Commonwealth Science Council. It even had a Science Advisor, a role held by my father from 1991 to 1997. By 2003, under Prime Minister Tony Blair’s leadership, funding for the Commonwealth Science Council was discontinued. The Secretariat’s oganogram shows no scientific advisor today. This defunding of science also happened in Guyana with the staff of IAST dwindling from 200 in 1989 to 7 in 2005. In the 80s there was much Commonwealth support for training, with many of IAST’s staff supported to complete degrees, including PhDs, at the neighboring University of Guyana or elsewhere. The state of the university’s labs when I visited in 2009 with our USF class, was also telling of the status of science education in the government’s development strategy. On the bottom rung.
On this World Science Day 2017 many are meeting in Bonn Germany to discuss the next steps for governments to implement the Paris Agreement. According to Mr. Frank Bainimarama, Prime Minister of Fiji and COP 23 president, “The Paris Agreement calls for concerted action to hold the increase in global average temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels. But scientific research is revealing more about climate change each year, and we now know that change is occurring at a faster rate than we believed when the Paris Agreement was forged. That means that we must embrace the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 at the latest.”
Amongst those in Bonn, by now you might guess it, is my father. He is the science advisor for the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center (5Cs), a regional body accredited by the Green Climate Fund (GCF). The GCF, with initial pledges of 10.3 billion USD, was established to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries, and to help adapt vulnerable societies to the unavoidable impacts of climate change. The Government of Guyana received $300,000 in readiness funding from the GCF in 2015. Raphael Trotman, Minister of Governance of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment, signed on behalf of Guyana while the Executive Director of the 5Cs, Dr. Kenrick Leslie, also attended.
Iwokrama falls under Minister Trotman’s ministry and Dr. Leslie serves on its board of directors. He is actually one of 3 PhDs who serve on that board, none of whom are Guyanese. While I certainly don’t think a PhD is needed to serve on a board, I am fully aware of the access it provides to those who have it and I am fully aware of the dynamics set up where tradition, wisely or unwisely, associates science expertise with those who have higher levels of formal training. I think of Dr. Karletta Chief, someone I mentored as a graduate student the same time I was taking Prof. Ortolano’s class, who is now an Assistant Professor & Extension Specialist in the Department of Soil Water and Environmental Science at the University of Arizona. She is Navajo and has powerfully taken her work back to indigenous communities in the US, seamlessly going between the language of her grandmother and that of the 21st century university classroom. Similarly, she is helping to change the environmental and conservation rhetoric in the US to see beyond a white male lens and bring voice to how brown people value the earth.
So, on a day when representatives from CARICOM nations are in Bonn pushing a 1.5oC to stay alive agenda, something championed by small island and low lying states, Iwokrama hosted a World Science Day talk to discuss its role in Guyana’s green development. ExxonMobil sponsored the talk and Iwokrama received a $310,000 USD check from them to relaunch its science program. Iwokrama’s mission clearly states that it is, “To promote the conservation and the sustainable and equitable use of tropical rain forests in a manner that will lead to lasting ecological, economic and social benefits to the people of Guyana and to the world in general, by undertaking research, training and the development and dissemination of technologies.”
The 5Cs is accredited to submit proposals on behalf of Caribbean entities to the GCF for grants of up to $50 million USD. For a company with revenues of $246 billion USD in 2016, especially one whose business is built on increasing greenhouse gas emissions, one might do a quick budget:grant comparison (GCF budget 10 billion: 50 million grant vs ExxonMobil 246 billion budget: 24.6 x 50 million grant) and come up with a number of $1.23 billion USD needed to match just one of the potential climate change adaptation or mitigation projects in Guyana. A far cry from $310,000 USD given to relaunch a science program. Imagine the headlines, “ExxonMobil offsets carbon emissions associated with oil from non-transparent deal with Guyana by protecting the world’s last standing Amazonian rainforest, rehabilitating mercury contaminated mined out sites, and supporting the education of the next generation of indigenous peoples.” Corporate Social Responsibility has a price if indeed one wishes the association with good causes.
Under the current US administration, the US has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, actually believes climate change is real and was pushing for a carbon tax when he was the CEO of ExxonMobil. He was also CEO for 7 of the years covered by that Supran and Oreskes study that concluded that ExxonMobil misled the public. Under the current US administration, legislation passed rescinding requirements for U.S. natural resources firms to disclose overseas government payments. ExxonMobil lobbied for this, meaning that there is no requirement for them to disclose whether or not they gave, for example, a million dollars to Guyana’s Minister of Governance of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment. Unfortunately, the Guyanese government seems to be thinking along the lines of ExxonMobil with this belief of non transparency in what the oil deal looks like and whether any monies have been transferred to date and how they will be used to benefit one or all Guyanese.
Given the devastation caused by hurricanes Irma and Maria recently in the Caribbean, we are witnessing this global begging by our leaders to rebuild their countries, many with infrastructure designed and implemented prior to their independence. Why are Caribbean people begging for this aid and not demanding reparations from Britain for their black debt? Are European scientists working in the Caribbean and giving lectures on Caribbean natural resources not pressuring their governments to pay back for slavery? Or do they, like Guyanese born Baroness Valerie Amos, believe: 1) that since the slave trade was not “illegal” under British law until 1807, it was not technically a crime, and could not be subject to legal restitution; 2, that the slave trade was a “joint venture” between Europeans and African leaders, limiting British culpability; and 3, that even if the slave trade could be termed a crime, it was a crime whose reparation was “too large to be imagined” (see Matt Karp’s piece Slavery and Reparations: A Voice from Barbados and a Report from Ghana). With Iwokrama tied to the Commonwealth Secretariat, and therefore tied to the UK, it stands as one Guyanese institution for which support should be easy through this targeted “investment.” Convincing coastal populations who actually are descendants of slaves and indentured laborers, would probably require that science for peace and development theme touted this World Science Day. At the end of the day, the potential of our rainforests, like that of the biodiversity of our deep seas, is yet to be explored.
