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We speak with Guyanese environmental lawyer Melinda Janki about how she’s taking on the oil giant ExxonMobil to stop the company from developing an offshore oil field that would turn Guyana into a “carbon bomb.” Guyana is currently a carbon sink, but Exxon plans to produce more than 1 million barrels of oil a day, which could transform the South American country into one of the world’s top oil producers by 2030. Janki is suing the Guyanese government and Exxon under the constitution’s guarantee of a healthy environment to both current and future citizens. Her legal battle is profiled in a new article in Wired, “The Quest to Defuse Guyana’s Carbon Bomb,” written by independent journalist Antonia Juhasz, who also joins us.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we end today’s show looking at “The Quest to Defuse Guyana’s Carbon Bomb.” That’s the title of a new piece in Wired magazine by investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz which details an effort to block ExxonMobil from drilling off the shore of Guyana, where more than 11 billion barrels of oil have been discovered.

Guyana is a coastal nation on the north Atlantic coast of South America. It shares a border with Venezuela, Brazil and Suriname. Critics of the plan say the drilling could be a disaster for Guyana and the world as the climate emergency intensifies. Today, Guyana is considered to be a carbon sink, thanks to its dense rainforests and low emissions. But if Exxon has its way, Guyana could soon become what’s known as a “carbon bomb.”

We’re joined by two guests. Melinda Janki is a Guyanese environmental lawyer based in Georgetown, Guyana, who helped draft many of Guyana’s national environmental laws, including Guyana’s Environmental Protection Act. She filed a landmark lawsuit against Exxon and the Guyanese government in May 2021 to stop the offshore oil drilling. We’re also joined by longtime, award-winning investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz, author of the cover story of Wired, “The Quest to Defuse Guyana’s Carbon Bomb.”

Antonia, talk about why you felt this was so important to bring to the world.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, thank you, Amy. And thanks so much for having me. And good morning to Melinda Janki in Georgetown.

This is just such a critically important case. It’s a landmark lawsuit that Melinda has launched against Exxon’s operations in Guyana. And these are brand-new operations — Exxon started producing in 2019 — making Guyana one of the few countries in the world — when the rest of the world or much of the world is trying to get off of fossil fuels, Guyana is one of the few countries that’s entering anew into the fossil fuel era, and in a really big way, if Exxon has any say in it. Exxon wants to produce, by 2030, 1 million barrels of oil a day offshore Guyana, and that would make Guyana its single-largest source of daily oil production anywhere in the world. 2030 is also the year that much of coastal Guyana, Georgetown, where Melinda is joining us from, and where — the coastal area, where 90% of the population lives, is expected to be underwater because of the unchecked advance of the climate crisis.

And what Melinda has done — and she, of course, will talk about it — is launch a historic climate and human rights lawsuit to stop those operations, hopefully to try and stop them before they advance too far and, as you say, become one of the world’s leading potential carbon bombs, operations that are capable of releasing so many emissions that they are disastrous, over a gigaton emissions, to the global climate and to Guyana itself.

And these operations are also critically important to Exxon. It’s hard to overstate how important they are to Exxon, which is also why this lawsuit is so important to be coming from the Global South. Seventy percent of climate lawsuits are from the United States. Ninety percent are from the Global North. So, to have a country that’s experiencing some of the worst impacts of climate change, about to become one of the largest energy producers, also launch this historic lawsuit that could become a precedent to try and stop those operations is just so important, that I wanted to help bring this story to a broader audience.

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