Pompous, posh bespectacled BBC state media hack Stephen Sackur — who wears his glasses down on the end of his nose for some inexcusable reason as any run-of-the-mill Cambridge douche might — clearly went into this little propaganda session fully expecting the Guyanese president to cuck himself at the altar of Climate Change™, only to find himself besieged in return by a torrent of righteous indignation at the unmitigated gall of this person to dictate to Guyana what it is and is not permitted to do with its own natural resources — as if the current year is 1864, and overt colonialism is still raging strong.
Related: LGBTQ+™ Neo-Colonialism: Your Taxes Fund Ecuador Drag Show, Transgenderism Confuses Africans
What follows is what the psychoanalysts call “schadenfreude” (relevant part commences at 4:09):
Via The Telegraph:
“The president of an oil-rich South American country has scolded a BBC reporter for ‘lecturing’ his nation over climate change.
Irfaan Ali of Guyana sat down with host Stephen Sackur of the BBC HardTalk show for an interview that has now gone viral.
The country has seen a rapid growth in its oil reserves over the past decade. But Mr Sackur was quick to challenge the president on the potential environmental impact of this industry.
He said: ‘Over the next decade or two, it’s expected that there will be $150 billion worth of oil and gas extracted off your coast.
‘It’s an extraordinary figure. But think of it in practical terms. That means – according to many experts – two billion tons of carbon emissions will come from your seabed from those reserves and released into the atmosphere.’
But the 43-year-old head of state was quick to jump in with a rebuttal.”
At this turning point in the exchange, I could hear the Mortal Kombat “Finish Him” soundbite in my mind (apologies for the millennial reference), and it titillated me something fierce.
FATALITY.
Continuing:
“’Let me stop you right there,’ he said. ‘Did you know that Guyana has a forest that is the size of England and Scotland combined, a forest that stores 19.5 gigatons of carbon, a forest that we have kept alive?’
Guyana sits on the northern coast of the South American continent, bordered by Venezuela to the west, Suriname to the east and Brazil to the south. Much of the country’s landmass is covered by the Amazon rainforest.
When the reporter asked Mr Ali whether the rainforest gave him the ‘right’ to release the carbon, the Guyanese leader retorted: “Does that give you the right to lecture us on climate change?
‘I’m going to lecture you on climate change. Because we have kept this forest alive that you enjoy that the world enjoys, that you don’t pay us for, that you don’t value.
‘Guess what? We have the lowest deforestation rate in the world. And guess what? Even with the greatest exploration of oil and gas we will still be net zero.’”
I would be remiss not to note that Guyana likely has the lowest deforestation rate in the world not because of a commitment to environmental conservation but rather historical underdevelopment. Nonetheless, the validity of the point remains.
Continuing:
“Mr Sackur noted his words were ‘powerful’ and tried to jump back in, but the president did not allow the interruption.
‘This is the hypocrisy that exists in the world,’ he said. ‘The world in the last 50 years has lost 65 per cent of the biodiversity. We have kept ours.’”
FLAWLESS VICTORY.
Remarkably, this is hardly the first time in recent history that a BBC hack has gotten totally annihilated by the elected leader of a Latin American country.
Consider this recent exchange between another BBC hack and El Salvador president Nayib Bukele over “human rights.”
Via BBC:
“I asked him if, now that he had turned the security situation around, he would concentrate on the next stage of the security policy – specifically the legal process of the thousands of people with no gang affiliation who, according to human rights organisations, have been unlawfully jailed.
‘I find it somewhat amusing when people say ‘Oh, in El Salvador, they arrest people and some of the arrested are innocent,’ President Bukele said.
‘I’m a little baffled because I wonder if in the UK all of the arrests are of guilty people or if sometimes your police arrest innocent ones?,’ he continued.
He conceded that police in El Salvador had made ‘a couple of mistakes’ but said that some 7,000 of those arrested had already been released.
There followed a long answer in which Mr Bukele argued that he was applying a unique solution to El Salvador’s unique problem of having long been the murder capital of the world.
Furthermore, he added, El Salvador had tried countless solutions put forward by Washington, the European Union and the Organization of American States but none of them had worked. The answer, he said, was his policy.
‘El Salvador was turned from the most dangerous place in the world to the safest in the Western Hemisphere. That’s not a small feat. That’s not done easily. No-one in the world has done it before so fast and so clean as we’ve done it here with no civilian casualties.’”
The audacity of a criminal government like the UK, or the U.S. for that matter, which has imprisoned and tortured Julian Assange for years now for the alleged crime of exposing the state’s crimes (an act called “journalism”) lecturing any foreign leader on the arrest of innocents!
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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