MARC DE VERTEUIL
What is the morality of Trinidad and Tobago drilling deepwater oil and gas wells? T&T starts drilling deep sea wells in 2016.With everything that we know about climate change today, it is impossible to justify the extraction of new oil and gas. Scientists tell us that we have to keep it in the ground.
As a small island developing state, T&T is among the countries most at risk from climate change.
Pumping more heat-trapping CO2 in to the atmosphere is like a heart patient smoking one last cigarette. It is a bad idea.T&T was one of the signatories of the ambitious COP21 agreement goal to limit climate change to 1.5C. That goal is incompatible with continued and increased fossil fuel extraction.
Deepwater drilling is risky. Working at thousands of feet depth is like working in space. It is an alien and dangerous environment.Accidents happen. There is nothing to prevent another Gulf of Mexico disaster. T&T was unable to cope with the small breach of a transmission line, on a jetty, during the 2013 Petrotrin oil spill. Imagine what will happen when there is a spill at thousands of feet depth.
I have no doubt that some hydrocarbons will be found in the deep-sea blocks. Many citizens will breath a sigh of relief at this.
One fossil fuel analyst says that there could be enough to increase T&T's production five-fold. He called it "transformational". Transformational means something new. It means an evolution. He cannot have much grasp of T&T's history because another oil boom is nothing new. We have known nothing else. It is a sign of our failure to develop as a nation that we still think of time as "before the 1st oil boom" "when the 2nd oil boom ended" and now, possibly "after the 3rd oil boom starts".
T&T is trapped in the resource curse, and we don't know how to get out. If the deepwater wells are successful it will be a curse manifested as a blessing. It will be a third chance to do what we did not do the first two times: build a sustainable economy.There is nothing in our history, or present philosophy, to suggest that we will put this wealth to good use.
We will fritter away a third oil boom in exactly the same way that we did the first and the second.Our cross-party leadership has never shown that it has the guts or the brains to rise above populist politics, except when faced with the direst economic straits. We let economic circumstances dictate decisions for us. It is in our political DNA.
Based on per-capita GDP, T&T was declared a developed state by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2010.That did nothing to solve the crime hotspots, persistent poverty, and dysfunctional institutions that plague our nation. What kind of developed state sees its university graduates make emigration their first career move?
Oil royalties assure the government easy money, independent of economic policy. Economic results are unimportant. It doesn't matter what your tax base is once the oil companies pay your fees. A bloated government, absolved of having to create results, has only to keep the royalties flowing and hold enough voters in blissful bondage through make-work programs. Productivity is unimportant so it doesn't matter that the state outcompetes the private sector for labour.
Oil and gas has created a political-economic caste system that consolidates power in the hands of the political class and the party financiers. The result is the country that we see today. It is a fearful country that lacks confidence, wracked by crime and corruption and characterised by an inflationary and consumerist economy.
There is nothing about this system that deserves continuation. It is the enemy of the people.Diversification is the only way forward. It will require constraint and vision on the part of the political class, but what hope do we have that they will voluntarily cease to feed the system on which they depend?
The government has been a true reflection of the electorate, which has always had small hands that are easily filled. The people will not hold them to account.Our best hope is that the oil and gas wells run dry and that the exploratory wells fail. It is the only way that our people can move forward.
We are ruled by circumstances, not by facts or vision, so fossil fuel depletion will force upon us the societal and economic change we need to thrive.