LOS ANGELES — The secretary-general of the 15-member Caribbean Community opened talks Thursday with the Biden administration over a new partnership to tackle climate change and the region’s energy crisis by making it clear that Caribbean nations were not quite ready to give up fossil fuels.
Carla Barnett, who heads the Guyana-based secretariat that represents a 15-member coalition of Caribbean nations, including Haiti and Suriname, also emphasized that the region’s economic recovery from the devastating COVID-19 pandemic remains a top priority.
“Our member states are heavily dependent on fossil fuels for our energy needs; oil and gas reserves are concentrated in a few of our countries, but we are predominantly energy importers and therefore for us, energy security is a critical matter even as we seek to transition our energy systems to more modern, clean and reliable supplies of renewable energy,” Barnett said. “Our position is to optimize our indigenous sources as we make that ... transition to renewable sources.”
Barnett’s comments reflect the power of Caribbean nations that are fuel importers. They came as she, along with representatives of the regional bloc known as CARICOM, prepared to sit down with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris during the penultimate day of the Ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. The president of the Dominican Republic, which is not a CARICOM member, also attended the gathering.
Harris, who previously met with the bloc as a group in a virtual call on April 29, was to announce a series of new initiatives to help Caribbean nations better tackle climate change and make the move to alternative energy sources.
“As neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, the United States shares common bonds and interests with Caribbean nations. As I said when we convened six weeks ago, our partnership is key to our shared prosperity and security,” Harris said during her opening remarks. “Today, our main focus will be the climate crisis, which, of course, is an existential crisis for our entire planet, and the Caribbean is on the front line of this crisis.”
Harris went on to announce the launch of the United States-Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis, also known as PACC 2030. Through the partnership, the U.S., she said, will support energy infrastructure and climate resilience projects at every stage of development, from beginning to end. The U.S. is also committing to help countries identify and launch clean energy and climate projects, access financing for climate initiatives and facilitate investments by connecting Caribbean nations with American companies and technologies like climate-smart tools.
“When we accelerate the transition to clean energy, I think we all believe that we unlock great economic opportunities for the entire region,” Harris said. “Regarding the climate crisis, it is one of our highest priorities. But there are other issues that are also very important that we can and must address together.”
Petroleum and the pandemic
The noticeable difference in how Caribbean leaders and the U.S. view priorities has as much to do with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the small, tourism-based economies of the region as it does the economies of three of its member states that are oil and gas producers. The countries of Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname and Guyana have all made it clear that they are not ready to give up fossil-fuel digging.
In the case of Guyana, which has come into vast reserves of oil deposits offshore, the English-speaking country on the tip of South America has been aggressively emphasizing the rights of Caribbean nations to produce their resources and pushing back on what one of its leaders has described as an “anti-fossil fuel lobbying” targeting the country.
In a call with journalists late Wednesday, a senior administration official emphasized that the Caribbean region, which is already vulnerable to hurricanes, sea-level rise and other environmental disasters, relies heavily on imported fossil fuel and the U.S. wants to help.
“We all know that energy prices have been high and this is a strain on their economies in the wake of the COVID crisis, which was already a strain,” the administration official said about the Caribbean region. “And so one of the core pillars of this initiative is to strengthen their energy security and the second is to promote climate adaptation and resilience. Again, these are countries particularly vulnerable to the climate crisis, whether it’s rising sea levels, or mega storms that affect them, even more than many others.”
While the goal is to help Caribbean nations meet their obligation under the Paris Agreement on climate change, the new commitments are also part of President Joe Biden’s larger economic framework and goal during the summit, where he’s vowed to have the U.S. mobilize private investments, create clean energy jobs and help the region become more resilient.
The United States’ Caribbean commitments, the administration official said, came out of a virtual meeting that Harris had on April 29 with leaders of the Caribbean bloc and the Dominican Republic.
“She heard directly from them on their concerns and priorities, and what she told them is that we intended to respond by launching new initiatives to be responsive to those concerns and priorities,” the official said.
The U.S. declined to put a dollar figure on its package of offerings, saying efforts to work with multilateral development banks to get additional financing to Caribbean nations is “going to be a process.”
Low-rate financing is key, experts say
During her remarks, Barnett said CARICOM was pleased to have the conversation with the U.S. about clean energy and climate change, but leaders also planned to “continue our advocacy for global solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The pandemic, she said, has “created a situation that has set many of our countries back.”
“There is overwhelming evidence that the pandemic disrupted every segment of society and it brought inequalities to the forefront, and among these of course, are issues of energy and resilience and the impact of climate, which also impacts our countries differently,” Barnett said.
While Biden administration officials mentioned COVID in the walk-up to Thursday’s meeting between Harris and Caribbean leaders, they overwhelming focused on the climate and energy crises, which Harris descried as “an urgent threat.”
“It benefits the people of the United States and the people of the Caribbean. And all of us, of course, benefit by reducing emissions,” she said.
This is not the first time that the U.S. has sought to address the energy dilemma in the region.
As vice president, Biden in 2015 sought to reduce the Caribbean’s dependence on subsidized oil from financially struggling Venezuela and the sway of China’s influence in the region as Beijing became the source of funding for major infrastructure projects such as new roads and bridges.
He hosted the first Caribbean Energy Security Summit in Washington, where the U.S. moved to put in place a new institutional framework to help the region take steps toward renewables by setting up meetings with private-sector investors. Despite some initial interest, the enthusiasm waned.
Whether the new initiative will satisfy Caribbean leaders and stimulate the kinds of investments and job creations the U.S. hopes remains to be seen.
Before the pandemic devastated their economies, Caribbean leaders stressed that they needed access to concessional financing at below market rates. They argued that they were being excluded from low-interest development dollars because they were viewed as middle-income countries by international financial institutions even though their economies were struggling.
The low-rate financing remains key, regional experts say, in whatever plan or new sources of funding the U.S. is offering. This includes accessing climate and green funds, which regional leaders say need to be more user friendly to help them mitigate against disasters by strengthening infrastructure resilience, which cuts the cost of rebuilding post-disaster.
“What’s the cost and where’s the money’s coming from?” said Anthony Bryan, a leading energy expert and consultant who taught international relations at the Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. “That is the bottom line. Unless that is made very clear, I think the reception is going to be very lukewarm.”
Acknowledging that the middle- and high-income-countries designations have been obstacles for financing projects in the region, the administration official said, “We are going to work to promote concessional financing, even to countries that by some standards are considered high or middle income.
“And we’re going to be particularly focused on providing assistance when they are affected by hurricanes or other natural disasters, which doesn’t change the way they’re categorized by these multilateral institutions,” he added. “They can still sometimes be considered high income. But they don’t have access to the financing they need even though their economies have been significantly set back.”
------
____
