Basjit Mahabir won’t let me in.
I’m trying to persuade Mr. Mahabir to open the padlocked gate of the Wales Estate, where he guards the ramshackle remains of a factory surrounded by miles of fallow sugar cane fields. The growing and grinding of sugar on this plantation about 10 miles from Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, ended seven years ago, and parts of the complex, its weathered zinc walls the color of rust, have been sold for scrap.
I plead my case. “I lived here when I was a little girl,” I say. “My father used to manage the field lab.” Mr. Mahabir is friendly, but firm. I’m not getting in.
The ruins are the vestiges of a sugar industry that, after enriching British colonizers for centuries, was the measure of the nation’s wealth when it achieved independence.
Now the estate is slated to become part of Guyana’s latest boom, an oil rush that is reshaping the country’s future. This nation that lies off the beaten track, population 800,000, is at the forefront of a global paradox: Even as the world pledges to transition away from fossil fuels, developing countries have many short-term incentives to double down on them.
Before oil, outsiders mostly came to Guyana for eco-tourism, lured by rainforests that cover 87 percent of its land. In 2009, the effort to combat global warming turned this into a new kind of currency when Guyana sold carbon credits totaling $250 million, essentially promising to keep that carbon stored in trees. Guyana’s leadership was praised for this planet-saving effort.
Six years later, Exxon Mobil discovered a bounty of oil under Guyana’s coastal waters. Soon the company and its consortium partners, Hess and the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, began drilling with uncommon speed. The oil, now burned mostly in Europe, is enabling more global emissions — and producing colossal wealth.
The find is projected to become Exxon Mobil’s biggest revenue source by decade’s end. The deal that made it possible — and which gave Exxon Mobil the bulk of the proceeds — has been a point of public outcry and even a lawsuit, with a seeming consensus that Guyana got the short end of the stick. But the deal has nonetheless generated $3.5 billion so far for the country, more money than it has ever seen, significantly more than it gained from conserving trees. It’s enough to chart a new destiny.
The government has decided to pursue that destiny by investing even further in fossil fuels. Most of the oil windfall available in its treasury is going to construct roads and other infrastructure, most notably a 152-mile pipeline to carry ashore natural gas, released while extracting oil from Exxon Mobil’s fields, to generate electricity.
The pipeline will snake across the Wales Estate, carrying the gas to a proposed power plant and to a second plant that will use the byproducts to potentially produce cooking gas and fertilizer. With a price tag of more than $2 billion, it’s the most expensive public infrastructure project in the country’s history. The hope is that with a predictable, plentiful supply of cheap energy, the country can develop economically.
At the same time, climate change laps at Guyana’s shores; much of Georgetown is projected to be underwater by 2030.
Countries like Guyana are caught in a perfect storm where the consequences for extracting fossil fuels collide with the incentives to do so. Unlike wealthy countries, they aren’t responsible for most of the carbon emissions that now threaten the planet. “We’re obviously talking about developing countries here, and if there’s so much social and economic development that still needs to happen, then it’s hard to actually demand a complete ban on fossil fuels,” says Maria Antonia Tigre, a director at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. Still, she insists, “we’re in a moment in the climate crisis where no one can get a pass.”
This struggle between the existential threats of climate change and the material gains dangled by fossil fuels bedevils rich countries, too. The International Energy Agency predicts that oil demand will peak in five years as big economies transition to renewable sources. But it is a transition of indeterminate length, and in the meantime, the Biden administration approved drilling in the Alaska wilderness just last year, and the United States is producing more oil than ever in its history. A country like Guyana, with an emerging economy, has even more reason to jump at temptation.
The country has already been transformed. Next to its famously elegant but decaying colonial architecture, new houses, hotels, malls, gyms and offices of concrete and glass crop up constantly. Trucks carrying quartz sand for all this construction judder along the highways. While nearly half of Guyanese still live below the poverty line, the country is bustling with possibility, and newcomers arrive from around the world. During a five-month stay there, I met a logistics manager from Sri Lanka, a nightclub singer from Cuba, a Briton developing a shrimp farm and a Nigerian security guard who joked that a sure sign that Guyana had become a hustler’s paradise was that he was there.
As I survey the stranded assets of the sugar works on the Wales Estate, imagining the steel pipes to come, the gleaming future Guyana’s government promises feels haunted by its past as a colony cursed by its resources. The potential for the petroleum boom to implode is in plain sight next door, where Venezuela — which has recently resurrected old claims to much of Guyana’s territory — is a mess of corruption, authoritarian rule and economic volatility.
For centuries, foreign powers set the terms for this sliver of South America on the Atlantic Ocean. The British, who first took possession in 1796, treated the colony as a vast sugar factory. They trafficked enslaved Africans to labor on the plantations and then, after abolition, found a brutally effective substitute by contracting indentured servants, mainly from India. Mr. Mahabir, who worked cutting cane for most of his life, is descended from those indentured workers, as am I.
Fifty-seven years ago, the country shook off its imperial shackles, but genuine democracy took more time. On the eve of independence, foreign meddling installed a leader who swiftly became a dictator. Tensions between citizens of African and Indian descent, encouraged under colonialism, turned violent at independence and set off a bitter contest for governing supremacy that continues to this day. Indigenous groups have been courted by both sides in this political and ethnic rivalry.
It wasn’t until the early 1990s that Guyana held its first free and fair elections. The moment was full of possibility. The institutions of democracy, such as an independent judiciary, began to emerge. And the legislature passed a series of robust environmental laws.
Now that Exxon Mobil has arrived to extract a new resource, some supporters of democracy and the environment see those protections as endangered. They criticize the fossil-fuel giant, with global revenue 10 times the size of Guyana’s gross domestic product, as a new kind of colonizer and have sued their government to press it to enforce its laws and regulations. The judge in one of those cases has rebuked the country’s Environmental Protection Agency as being “submissive” toward the oil industry.
Addressing some of these activists at a recent public hearing, Vickram Bharrat, the minister of natural resources, defended the government’s oversight of oil and gas. “There’s no evidence of bias toward any multinational corporations,” he said. Exxon Mobil, in an emailed statement, said its work on the natural gas project would “help provide lower-emissions, reliable, gas-powered electricity to Guyanese consumers.”
The W.H.O.’s New Findings on Aspartame
Card 1 of 5 A possible link to cancer. A W.H.O. agency has classified aspartame, an artificial sweetener widely used in diet drinks and low-calorie foods, as possibly carcinogenic to humans. It is the first time the prominent body has weighed in publicly on the effects on aspartame, which has been a contentious ingredient for decades. Here is what to know:
How much aspartame is too much? Despite the announcement raising the alarm on aspartame, a second W.H.O. agency said that people can still safely consume the artificial sweetener in moderate amounts. It is safe to consume up to 40 milligrams of aspartame per kilogram of body weight per day (equivalent to more than a dozen cans of diet soda for a 150-pound person by some estimates), according to the W.H.O.
How much evidence is there of the link between aspartame and cancer? The new classification for aspartame is based on limited evidence that has linked the artificial sweetener to liver cancer in humans. Not enough evidence is available to show that aspartame can cause other types of cancer, and experts don’t know exactly how the sweetener might contribute to cancer.
What else does the W.H.O. consider a possible carcinogen? The W.H.O. labeled aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” a group that includes hundreds of foods, viruses, chemicals, occupational exposures and more. Certain pickled vegetables, being infected with some types of human papillomavirus and working in dry-cleaning all fall into the same W.H.O. category.
The world is at a critical juncture, and Guyana sits at the intersection. The country of my birth is a tiny speck on the planet, but the discovery of oil there has cracked open questions of giant significance. How can wealthy countries be held to account for their promises to move away from fossil fuels? Can the institutions of a fragile democracy keep large corporations in check? And what kind of future is Guyana promising its citizens as it places bets on commodities that much of the world is vowing to make obsolete?
A land of new possibilities
Oil has created a Guyana with pumpkin spice lattes. The first Starbucks store appeared outside the capital last year; it was such a big deal that the president and the American ambassador attended the opening. People still “lime” — hang out — with local Carib beer and boomboxes on the storied sea wall, but those with the cash can now go for karaoke and fancy cocktails at a new Hard Rock Cafe.
The influx of wealth has introduced new tensions along economic lines in an already racially divided country. Hyperinflation has made fish, vegetables and other staples costlier, and many Guyanese feel priced out of pleasures in their own country. A new rooftop restaurant, described to me as “pizza for Guyana’s 1 percent” by its consultant chef from Brooklyn, set off a backlash on social media for serving a cut of beef that costs $335, as much as a security guard in the capital earns in a month.
This aspirational consumerist playground is grafted onto a ragged infrastructure. Lexus S.U.V.s cruise new highways but must still gingerly wade through knee-deep floods in Georgetown when it rains, thanks to bad drainage. Electricity, the subject of much teeth-sucking and dark humor, is expensive and erratic. It’s also dirty, powered by heavy fuel, a tarlike residue from refining oil. In 2023, 96 blackouts halted activity across the country for an average of one hour each. A growing number of air-conditioners taxing aging generators are partly to blame, but the system has been tripped up by weeds entangling transmission lines, backhoes hitting power poles and once, infamously, a rat.
The country’s larger companies — makers of El Dorado rum, timber producers — generate their own electricity outside the power grid. Small companies, however, don’t have that option. This year, the Inter-American Development Bank cited electrical outages as a major obstacle to doing business in Guyana.
The government’s investment in a natural gas pipeline and power plant offers the prospect of steady and affordable power. The gas, a byproduct of Exxon Mobil’s drilling, tends not to be commercialized and is often flared off as waste, emitting greenhouse gases in the process. But at the government’s request, Exxon Mobil and its consortium partners agreed to send some of the natural gas to the Wales site. The consortium is supposed to supply it without cost, but no official sales agreement has been made public yet.
At international conferences, rich countries have pledged to help poorer, lower-emitting ones to raise their living standards sustainably with renewable energy, but the money has fallen short. Natural gas is cleaner than the heavy fuel Guyana now uses, and the country’s leaders claim that it will serve as an eventual bridge to renewable energy. The fact that it’s not as clean as solar or other renewable sources seems, to some local manufacturers, beside the point because the status quo is so challenging.
During blackouts, Upasna Mudlier, who runs Denmor Garments, a textile company that makes uniforms, fire safety jackets and lingerie, has to send home the two dozen seamstresses she employs. That means a big hit in productivity. A chemist in her late 30s, she inherited the company from her father. Ms. Mudlier was nervous about networking in the burly crush of the male-dominated local business elite, but she nonetheless attended an event hosted by a business development center funded by Exxon Mobil. She leaned in, and it paid off: She won a contract to make a thousand coveralls for workers building an oil production vessel headed for Guyana’s waters.
It was a bright spot nonetheless dimmed by her electric bill. An astounding 40 percent of her operating budget goes to paying for power. Ms. Mudlier is eager for the natural gas plant. Cheaper, reliable energy could allow her to price her products to compete internationally.
Textiles are a tiny niche in Guyana, but hers is the kind of manufacturing that experts say Guyana needs to avoid becoming a petroleum state. Ms. Mudlier agrees with the government’s messaging on the gas project. “It will create more jobs for people and bring more investments into our country and more diversity to our economy,” she said.
Widespread anxiety that the best new jobs would go to foreigners led to a law that sets quotas for oil and gas companies to hire and contract with locals. Komal Singh, a construction magnate in his mid-50s, has benefited from the law. Mr. Singh, who directs an influential government advisory body on business policy, works as a joint partner with international companies building the Wales pipeline and treating toxic waste from offshore oil production.
“We say to them, ‘It’s you, me and Guyanese,’” he told me. “If Guyanese are not part of the show, end of conversation.”
Guyana has lost a greater share of its people than any other country, with two in five people born there living abroad. So the oil boom and the local partner requirement have set off something of a frenzy for passports and have fueled debate over who, exactly, is Guyanese. I met a British private equity manager with a Guyanese mother who obtained citizenship shortly after his second visit to the country. One local partner’s contested citizenship became a matter for the High Court.
With the value of land and housing skyrocketing, some local property owners have profited by becoming landlords to expats or by selling abandoned fields at Manhattan prices for commercial real estate. But to many Guyanese, it has seemed as if “comebackees,” the term for returning members of the diaspora, or the politically connected elite are the most poised to benefit from the boom.
Sharia Bacchus returned to Guyana after two decades living in Florida. Ms. Bacchus, who has family connections in the government and private sector, started her own real estate brokerage. She rents apartments and houses to expats for as much as $6,000 a month.
I shadowed her as she showed a prospective buyer — a retired U.S. Marine of Guyanese descent — a duplex condo in a coveted new gated community. She eagerly pointed out amenities that comebackees want: air-conditioning, a pool and, of course, an automatic backup generator.
“If you lose power at any time, you don’t have to worry about that,” she said, reassuringly.
The ghosts of the past
As glimpses of this new Guyana emerge, the ghosts of the past linger. A year ago, a Georgetown hotel, hustling like so many to take advantage of the new oil money, staged a $170-a-head rum-tasting event called “Night at the Estate House.” I’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to interview Exxon Mobil’s top brass in Guyana. When I heard rumors that its country manager would attend, I bought a ticket and, though he was a no-show, I found a seat with his inner circle.
As we sipped El Dorado rum in the garden of a colonial-style mansion, one of the event’s hosts gave a speech that invoked a time when “B.G.,” the insider’s shorthand for British Guiana, the country’s colonial name, also stood for Booker’s Guiana. Now, the speaker observed matter-of-factly, “it’s Exxon’s Guyana.”
Booker McConnell was a British multinational originally founded by two brothers who became rich on sugar and enslaved people. At one point, the company owned 80 percent of the sugar plantations in British Guiana, including the Wales Estate. The Exxon Mobil executive sitting next to me didn’t know any of this. His face reddened when I told him that the speaker had just placed his employer in a long line of corporate colonialism.
Independence came in 1966, but the U.S. and British governments engineered into power Guyana’s first leader, Forbes Burnham, a Black lawyer whom they deemed more pliable than Cheddi Jagan, a radical son of Indian plantation laborers, who was seen as a Marxist peril. But Burnham grew increasingly dictatorial as well as, in a twist of geopolitical fate, socialist.
Booker, which would later give its name to the Booker Prize in literature, still owned Wales at independence. But in the mid-1970s, Burnham took control of the country’s resources, nationalizing sugar production as well as bauxite mining. Like other former colonies, Guyana wanted to make its break with imperialism economic as well as political.
Burnham pushed the idea of economic independence to the breaking point, banning all imports. Staples from abroad, such as cooking oil, potatoes, wheat flour and split peas, had to be replaced with local substitutes. But Guyana didn’t have the farms and factories to meet the demand, so people turned to the black market, waited in ration lines and went hungry.