Dear Editor,

Let me tell you a story. A government receives tens of billions of US dollars in oil revenues over the past few decades. They use this money to pay their debts and invest in their people and improve their standard of living.
That government even has enough money to fund charities that seem to do good work around the world. But then one of those charities decides to oppose oil and gas development for environmental reasons everywhere it finds it.
That message doesn’t sound so good to countries that want to use their own resources to help their people. So instead, this group portrays their campaign against oil and gas as a way to help people get more value for their resources.
They criticise governments for not getting absurdly high values for unknown resources. They involve themselves in elections—publishing studies that call out governments for not signing “better” deals that were never offered. They claim they don’t oppose all developments, just this one, just here, just now.
And then one day, they decide to drop the charade. They retract the study they published because it didn’t go far enough in opposing all oil and gas development everywhere and anywhere.
I speak, of course, about the much-publicised decision by non-profit group Global Witness to withdraw their controversial 2020 study on Guyana’s oil, “Signed Away.”
MP Raphael Trotman put it best in his own scathing letter to the editor, saying, “Global Witness finds it convenient to withdraw the report, not in part, but entirely and clumsily use the fig leaf of environmental causes…It is now established, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Global Witness allowed itself to be used to further political and economic interests prior to Guyana’s 2020 elections.”
Now Global Witness finally admits openly that their aim was never to help Guyana get the most for its resources. Instead they now say it’s now up to poorer countries to cease all oil development and lead the way towards cutting oil and gas use in half over the next five years.
Where does that leave a country like Guyana? A country on the cusp of a higher standard of living and a better future and certainly more than five short years away from generating all power from renewables?
They don’t really seem to care. But at least now they’re honest about that.

Sincerely,
Clement Smith