Step by step, we’re finally moving towards securing electrical power cheaply enough to facilitate our manufacturing sector to take off. If nothing else, the war in Ukraine should’ve opened our eyes to the critical importance of cheap energy. It runs those factories competitively, producing the goods that provide employment, while bringing in forex. Imagine, when the Nordstrom gas pipeline from Russia was sabotaged, the powerful German industrial juggernaut was brought to its knees!! Forget everything you heard – it’s cheap energy that makes the world go round!
But here, in our dear mudland – where Britain refused to build even a single sugar refinery for the product that we slaved to produce – some are protesting the construction of a power plant that would HALVE the cost of our electricity!! And the gas to run the generators for the 200MW will be FREE, since it’ll be produced as a byproduct from our offshore oil fields. Now, if we want to bring that gas ashore to the generating plant, don’t we have to run a pipeline?? Yet there are protests about the pipeline!!
And if you’re going to bring the gas ashore, and you have excess over what it’ll take to run the Power Plant, doesn’t it make sense to liquify that excess so that it can be sold – whether to the Guyanese public to cook their food, or to industries that can convert it to plastics, or fertilizers, or the hundreds of products that are produced from natural gas?? Wouldn’t these also create jobs?? But no!! We have the woke brigade who’d save the planet while dooming us to poverty by not using the “gas in the hand” for our development. Even as the countries that are ALREADY developed are returning to coal – the most polluting fuel on planet earth!! And our pollution wouldn’t just be a comparative piddling amount, but we’d still be net carbon negative – meaning we’d absorb more carbon than we’d emit!!
Anyhow, the Luddites’ – those who’d stop technological progress to have us live like “noble savages”! – final argument is the cost would be too high. Too high as compared to what?? Are they factoring the positive externalities mentioned above that would come from the project?? Isn’t this gonna give us the kickstart to diversify our economy to balance our agricultural thrust?? And in any case, we wouldn’t be taking any debt for the pipeline, since it would be financed by Exxon from the revenues and expensed. It’s like getting an interest-free loan that doesn’t even show up on your balance sheet!!
And the amount?? As Pres Ali explained, since it would be determined by a transparent bidding process, it would be the cheapest available in the world!! Go gas!!
…to the people
The world has taken centuries to get democracy accepted as the dominant form of government. After all, as that arch imperialist Churchill had to concede, “Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried”!! And how democracy works is by political parties putting their plans for the country in a manifesto, and convincing the majority of voters that THEIR plans would benefit them better than the others’ plans.
So, when the winning party get into office, they should execute their plans!! And if successful, more will select them in the next elections. No secret here, is it?? But amazingly, as the PPP Government try to do just that, the PNC in Opposition incredulously insist they mustn’t develop villages that had voted for them in the past!!
Well, this confounded nonsense must stop!! And it can only be stopped by the residents of those villages announcing clearly that development is their right!!
As is which party they vote for!!
…to say no!
It’s clear that, in Guyana, men don’t accept that when a woman says, “No”, it means no!! And that she has the power to say no under ANY circumstance – even in marriage!!
The religious bodies gotta get with the programme!!
