Barbados on Tuesday made a plea for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to create a global brand in resilience building and planning, renewables and sustainability as it renewed calls for global moral leadership in dealing with issues of climate change.
“We are conscious that small states like Dominica have already started on that journey and as a Caribbean region we need to work together because more than any other region we are in a position to tell the world about resilience and what resilience means,” Prime Minister Mia Mottley told the opening day of the three-day International Energy Conference and Expo Guyana.
The theme of the conference is Charting a sustainable energy future and Mottley told delegates that included Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo and Suriname’s President Chandrikapersad Santokhi that the global brand in resilience provides an opportunity for further development.
She said as the region looks forward to a sustainable energy future, there is also the understanding that there are substantial hydrocarbon resources “deep below” the Barbados seabed.
She said in November last year, the Australian-based oil and gas company, BHP, completed a 2,700 square kilometre 3D seismic survey within two offshore blocks under the terms of its exploration licences.
“These surveys will help Barbados de-risk exploration and hopefully will lead to the discovery of hydrocarbon resources offshore, in particular, we hope, natural gas which we still see as a potential bridge in the energy transition.
“We have a number of other blocks that have been there and were it not for the (COVID-19) pandemic we would have moved forward with greater alacrity to recognise that the transitioning has to be carefully managed, the conversations have to be carefully had.
“Barbados is therefore looking at ways of accelerating the launch of new offshore oil and gas blocks later this year recognising that there is a need for us to be able to make decisions as to what we do,” she said, acknowledging that this will not be an easy discussion.
“It is one that….like in most things in life we are not a single issue people or single issue nation,” she noted.
Mottley said that the complexity of the “conversation” requires maturity and a commitment to frankness.
“We are a people who have been the victims of colonisation and exploitation. Regrettably in the efforts to close the gap what we have done is to perpetuate the disparity. If we are to remove that disparity and offer to the people of the world the opportunity to live in peace and hope for a bountiful future, then it requires difficult conversations that do not perpetuate the inequity of the world of 1945 for that is what we have done.”
Mottley told the conference that the world is matched by a failure to appreciate what is meant when we say net zero.
“We have a climate crisis. There’s no two ways about it, and we must fight to ensure that that climate crisis does not make migrants of us all. But at the same time, net zero does not mean no fossil fuels,” she said, “net zero means that we have to produce enough to offset the impact of the fossil fuels.”
Mottley said that the mix that the international energy associations sees at 80 per cent today of fossil fuels to 20 per cent flips by 2050 to 20 per cent fossil fuels.
“The question is who should provide that 20 per cent of fossil fuels? Will the world make the same mistake of 1945 or will the world accept that equity demands of us now and respect demands of us, conversations that allow those whose poverty has been cemented by centuries of extraction and exploitation by a few, to catch with those whose per capita income is multiple times that found in Ghana, Guyana, Suriname and Barbados and others.”
She asked whether the world would just “simply ignore the reality of that disparity and perpetuate a hypocrisy that regrettably has become too familiar with our condition as people across this world”.
Mottley said the absence of that global moral leadership means that “it is okay for a few advanced countries to continue to provide the 20 per cent that will be needed in 2050 while at the same time refusing to accept the responsibility of financing the consequences of the climate crisis”. (CMC)
