Transcript
[Guyana night sounds ambi]
Melinda Janki: Guyana is absolutely incredible. You can hear the frogs at night in the middle of the city. Before the rain comes, you can smell it coming. It’s magnificent.
I'm Melinda Janki. I'm a lawyer. And I'm leading the fight in Guyana to protect Guyana from dangerous deepwater drilling.
When I was growing up in Guyana, it was extremely clean, there was no litter, the streets were very quiet. To come back about 20 years later, the country had deteriorated significantly.
I went to Oxford, and to London University, and I read law, and then I started to work. At the time, the oil industry was the place to be. It was very exciting, and you could travel, and so I went there. It was one day, I was doing a refinancing deal—it's one of those deals where you raise money in one currency in a bond, and then you swap it into the currency that you really want—and one of my colleagues turned to me and he said, “Oh, this is really sexy work.” And at that moment, I said to myself, I have to get out before I get so stuck that I think this is what life is about. And I did leave and returned to Guyana.
When you fly over the country, it's like looking into broccoli—the forest is that dense. But every so often now you see these scars across the landscape, and that's from mining. Because the government's attitude is that everything is natural resources, and natural resources must be converted into money, so it's become a very dirty society, a society that doesn't care about the environment. We're getting major floods in-country. We're seeing droughts that are worse than we have had before. We're seeing higher spring tides. But I suppose the real thing is that we can no longer tell what the weather is going to be like.
In 1996, the government of Guyana decided that they would bring in legislation on the environment, and they decided that they would hire me to do the legislation. And so everything that we now rely on is the law that I drafted.
CGTN News: “ExxonMobil says it has made a significant oil discovery off the coast of Guyana…” (:09)
About five seconds after the announcement that Exxon Mobil had discovered oil off the coast of Guyana, I thought to myself, This is the worst possible thing that could happen to us. If, God forbid, there is a well blowout, it will be an unmitigated disaster, because nobody can cope with it.
YouTube: ABC Action News: “...the worst man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on Louisiana’s southern coast….” (0:07)
The Macondo well blowout happened in much shallower water in the Gulf of Mexico, in an area that is saturated with expertise on what to do with oil. The United States has the experts, the United States has the resources, it has the boats, has equipment, has the technology and yet look how long it took the cap that well, and 4 million barrels of oil went into the Gulf of Mexico. Come to Guyana; the government has absolutely no idea what to do if there's a well blow out. The Environmental Protection Agency has nothing, no equipment, no boats.
So at the moment, I have two court cases. The second case was against the Environmental Protection Agency. And that one we won, and we cut Exxon's environmental permit down to five years. So that permit expires in May this year, instead of in 2040. And that gives people in Guyana the chance now to really demand environmental protection.
Within the oil sector, one of the things that you learn immediately is that the purpose of the company is to make money. And that's really all the company cares about. I would not be able to do what I do as a lawyer if I had not had that experience. You must know the industry if you're going to go up against it.
What sort of person would I be if I just sat back and let the government convert Guyana from a carbon sink rich in wildlife to a carbon bomb that will contribute to killing life on earth?
The fossil fuel sector is destroying the earth. I simply could not go back and work for any industry that was doing that. Either the fossil-fuel sector survives, or life on the planet survives, and that one is a no-brainer.