Dear Editor,
The passing of Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine and the impending passing of Stabroek News came together in my mind as I read a report about the visit to Guyana by ExxonMobil’s top brass during Guyana’s 56th Republic Anniversary celebrations. Said Guyana’s Presi-dent: “You cannot manage a sector like this if there is no trust … this [visit] is a vote of confidence in the relationship and trust that we have built over the years.”
As the convenor of a proposed global engagement on the topic “Trust and Cooperation in an Age of Polycrisis” on behalf of the International Panel on Social Progress (https://ipsp.org/[1]), and as an expert on the economics of interpersonal trust in my own right, I was immediately fascinated by the President’s use of the word trust. Did he know, I wonder, that trust is actually a double-edged sword? High trust enables cooperation for societal good—but also for plunder, as in the “honour among thieves” that enriches elites at our expense.
Then there was the reply by ExxonMobil’s CEO: “[We are] committed to ensuring that the oil and natural gas produced offshore creates opportunity for progress onshore.” There are at least two serious sets of issues that come to mind. First, didn’t Woods himself baulk at partnering with President Trump to drive real progress in desperately needy Venezuela?
The other issue has traditional “Stabroek News” and “Rupert Roopnaraine” emphases that often come together. Some time ago, SN kindly published a letter of mine which stated that “the choice of what to do with our oil wealth is being made by the government [alone], and not by private citizens or even by the market.” With weak accountability in Guyana’s politics, this risks costly errors; and furthermore, the government’s exclusive purview over the use of oil revenues suggests “a deeper concern – the distortion of choice, the implied dirigisme that seeks to choose for us the things that are good for us.”
Mr. Woods, will ExxonMobil’s trusted position with our executive bypass market signals, feasibility studies, and Guyanese agency? The Rupert Roopnaraine concern was that we must be wary of new forms of colonialism, which, free of the formal trappings that moored us to the empire, might persist with informal moorings that deliberately capture local elites and, in the process, subtly deny Guyanese their agency. Maybe ExxonMobil needs a reminder that it always does what’s in the best interest of the company and its shareholders, as when it adopts the hard-nosed position that its interest in reduced emissions is limited by the incentives it receives?
We might be more inclined to trust ExxonMobil’s utterings about pro-gress for us (and the world) if it had not retreated from publicly supporting a carbon tax. Putting aside its suspension from the Climate Leader-ship Council over this matter, however, ExxonMobil’s top brass has a fantastic opportunity now to reassure us (and the world) that it is serious about carbon pricing and reduced emissions. All it has to do is to partner with Guyana on a “climate club” whose basis would be an upstream carbon tax at the wellhead (https://www.stabroeknews.com/2022/11/06/opinion/letters/consider-extending-co2-emissions-charge-from-excess-flaring-to-carbon-sequestered-in-every-barrel-of-oil-produced/).Long[2] live the spirits of Rupert Roopnaraine, and Stabroek News!