Opinion
Queries about the purchase by Hess Corporation of jurisdictional carbon credits from the Government of Guyana
For the attention of Board chairman James H Quigley, Chief Executive Office John B Hess, and shareholders in the Hess Corporation Via Lorrie Hecker, Vice President for Communications, e-mail lhecker@hess.com Subject: Queries about the purchase by Hess Corporation of jurisdictional carbon credits from the Government of Guyana We refer to your Press statement dated December 2, 2022,…
The range of tenures (property rights) that underlie the jurisdictional carbon credits sold by Guyana to oil company Hess Corporation
On 1 December, Winrock International and The Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) published the news on their websites that Winrock’s Architecture on REDD+ Transactions (ART) had issued the world’s first TREES credits to Guyana, a total of 33.47 million carbon credits. The oil company Hess Corporation announced on the same day that it had purchased or intended to purchase 37.5…
Jurisdictional forest-based carbon credits
We Guyanese have been selling our natural assets to foreigners for five hundred years or more, from red annatto for dyeing cloth, now to oil for powering vehicles. On 01 December 2022, the government announced a new version of a scheme for monetizing our forests – ‘jurisdictional forest-based carbon credits’. This idea has been tried…
Gov’t and its partner Winrock have illegally arrogated to themselves the rights vested solely in Amerindian land title holders
Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr Lenox Shuman, listed some of the functions of the National Toshaos Council that are set out in the Amerindian Act 2006. He then writes, ‘the NTC, by the stroke of a pen and the endorsement by the entire NTC at the last conference, has endorsed one of the…
NTC must explain legal basis of their endorsement of government’s move to make decisions over Indigenous titled lands
On 01 December 2022, Winrock/ART (Architecture for REDD+ Transactions) announced that it has issued 33.47 million jurisdictional carbon credits to Guyana, representing saved carbon in the forests of Guyana. Closely following the Winrock/ ART announcement, the Hess Corporation oil company (30 per cent co-venturer in the offshore Stabroek Block, and so a co-generator of huge…
I invite AG Nandlall to comment on the unusually high 2020 voter turnout
In recent days, attentive readers of the “Letter to the Editor“ section of Stabroek News will have witnessed an exchange of opinions between Attorney General Anil Nandlall and Messrs. Sherwood Lowe and Vincent Alexander revolving around the question of possible voter impersonation during the General Elections of March 2, 2019. The story culminated on Wednesday,…
We demand that the terms of the new PSA be applied to the Stabroek Block contract
A foreign observer analyzing Guyana’s oil resource per citizen would guess that a baby born in the last few years in Guyana would be one of the luckiest of the 8 billion people in the world. But the observer would be mistaken. It is approaching 3 years since we started producing oil but one of…
Who feels it knows it
Just last week, the newspaper headline said “Exxon posts highest profit in its history: Guyana seen as pivotal part of its portfolio.” This is a company that has a history of over 150 years in the world. The Guyanese offshore oil wells (that international news stories are calling a “high return asset”) have been a…
The only culture that matters in business practices is the value placed on our assets
I write with reference to the letter titled ‘Culture is central to how we approach negotiations in an international setting.’ The writer posits that Guyana’s ‘cultural framework’ is somehow at variance with international, or at least North American/ European norms. Really? The briefest scrutiny of their supposedly ‘rigid business practices’ is instructive.