‘We can’t eat a new road’: Guyanese voice fears over true cost of Exxon’s oil bonanza
Annette Arjoon is not anti-oil. The marine conservationist calls the vast new oilfields off Guyana’s coast a “blessing” that will earn billions of dollars for one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean, even as she recognises that pulling yet more fossil fuel from the ground will deepen the climate crisis.
But Arjoon does have a problem with who is drilling the oil. She has seen firsthand what happens when the US’s largest petroleum company descends on a small country bearing the promise of riches.
As ExxonMobil began drilling a vast oilfieldoffshore two years ago, the Guyanese government called in the Amerindian marine conservationist to help monitor the environmental impact of what is expected to become the company’s biggest source of petroleum by 2025, outpacing even its wells sprawled across Texas.
Arjoon, who leads the Guyana Marine Conservation Society, was not impressed. In time she grew to believe that Exxon was indifferent to the dangers of an oil spill to the coast and rivers of one of the best preserved parts of the Amazonbiome, and of misleading her about its preparations to deal with such a disaster. She found the company’s behaviour “thuggish and disrespectful”.
“I can only judge Exxon by my direct and deeply personal relationship with them so far. They are not an honourable company,” Arjoon says.
Suspicion about the oil firm does not stop with environmentalists. Guyanese politicians have accused Exxon of fleecing the country of billions of dollars by bouncing an ill-experienced government into a contract that pays far less than other countries earn from their oil.
Then there is the pressing question of the future of the planet. With Guyana increasingly threatened by rising sea levels, Arjoon is conscious of
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