Geopolitics, in First Person

When The New York Times sent me to report on a transformative oil discovery in my birthplace, Guyana, they asked for, and got, a first-person narrative. The opening scene places me at the gates of an old sugar plantation where I lived as a child, imagining the ExxonMobil gas pipeline that would soon snake through its abandoned cane fields. When the piece ran this past spring, I had some explaining to do to my journalism students at Rutgers-Newark. I tell them to scour “I” from their copy. So, why was it okay for me to write myself into the story?

The story needed a character to connect its complicated parts, to give it color and voice. But the primary reason to bend the rule, as I told my students, was about content, not style. Guyana has lost a greater share of its people to migration than any other country, and I’m part of the diaspora that the country arguably needs to help it profit from and manage the risks of its newfound oil. The story is partly about how this nation of 800,000, until recently the second poorest in the Western hemisphere, can and will navigate the costs and the benefits of extracting fossil fuels. 

But it is also, more deeply, about how the fates of developing and developed countries are morally interconnected. I’m an example of that. My family immigrated to the United States to escape a regime installed by the CIA, which feared the rise of Soviet-style communism in Latin America and the Caribbean during the Cold War. Like many immigrants, we lived the adage, “We are here because you were there.” Geopolitics taught its lessons in very personal ways. I know how superpowers can change the destinies of tiny countries. But what happens in small places can also matter for the world. The oil discovery in Guyana is showing us that.

Historically, Guyana has contributed little to global carbon emissions. Because rainforests cover nearly the entire country, it’s also a net carbon sink. Although its share of guilt for global warming is minuscule, the Guyanese capital, Georgetown, might be underwater by 2030 because of climate change. The country is suffering the consequences of emissions produced elsewhere, in big economies –– which have pledged to transition to renewable energy at the very moment Guyana might become rich from fossil fuels. By the decade’s end, it’s expected to become ExxonMobil’s largest revenue source. 

Currently, the oil pumped in Guyana, burned mostly in Europe, accounts for less than 1% of global emissions. If it preserves its rainforests, which store 20 billion tons of carbon, Guyana will continue to be a net carbon sink. Even if it depletes all the oil in its seabed by 2050, as projected, releasing as much as 4.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates, it will still be net zero. But how will those greenhouse gases affect the world as a whole? And what does the high-carbon-emitting world owe countries like Guyana? Should it pay through carbon markets to preserve Guyana’s trees? Should it deliver on a promised “loss-and-damage” fund to compensate developing countries for the environmental harms they’ve experienced? Should it restructure international lending to support renewable energy projects to make them more worthwhile than fossil fuels? 

No matter who’s responsible for the wrongs of the past, there’s a shared responsibility for what comes next. What happens there matters here. The consequences will cross borders, like I did, like rising sea levels do, and they will be lived in the first-person. Because history had already written me into the story, using “I” was perhaps the most layered and transparent way to report the future.