Opinion
The Caribbean: A Clean Energy Revolution on the Front Lines of Climate Change
At the World Environment Day event in Bridgetown, the prime minister of St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, called climate change “the most serious existential threat in the world today.”
That is certainly true for St. Vincent & the Grenadines. Successive storms ripped through the islands in 2010, 2011, and 2012, leading to a yearly loss of up to 17 percent of the developing country’s gross domestic product (GDP), as well as destroying hundreds of homes and killing dozens of citizens.
“If my people do not get flooded out on the coast,” the prime minister observed ruefully, “they will be washed away in landslides.”
Barbados’ prime minister, Freundel Stuart, echoed his counterpart’s sense of urgency. “Since the issue involves our very survival,” Stuart told the crowd, “capitulation is not an option.” Stuart said he believes that the Caribbean should set “a shining example” for the world to follow.
His administration recently commissioned a Green Economy Scoping Study, prepared in partnership with UNEP and released in Bridgetown in June, which includes recommendations on how to make the island-nation’s agriculture, fisheries, transportation, and energy systems more sustainable.
It makes sense: these island-nations are on the front line for climate change’s destructive forces, so they should also be on the front line in cutting their own carbon emissions. They need to demonstrate how seriously they take the threat, as an example to the rest of us.
A Marshall Plan for the Caribbean
Right now, energy production in the Caribbean is anything but sustainable. Venezuela’s late socialist president Hugo Chavez offered many island-nations long-term loans and concessionary rates for cheaper oil. His successor has done his best to maintain the modest subsidies.
