THE ARSONIST AT THE TABLE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ EDITORIAL♦ENVIORMENTAL ACCOUNTABILITY

THE ARSONISTS AT THE NEGOTIATING TABLE

How the fossil fuel industry captured the world’s climate process — and what it means for everyone paying the price

I. The Heat Is Not Hypothetical Anymore
From late May 2026 onwards, Europe was struck by severe heatwaves that broke records in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom — with temperatures running 10 to 15 degrees Celsius above normal, causing deaths and arriving earlier than Central European summers have historically begun.
World Weather Attribution scientists found that fossil fuel-driven climate change made this heatwave the most severe and widespread in Europe’s recorded history. 
Spring 2026 was the hottest spring ever recorded in France since measurements began in 1900. In the United States, March 2026 was the warmest March on record for the contiguous 48 states.  These are not anomalies. They are trajectory.

The human cost compounds silently. A 2025 European analysis estimated nearly 63,000 heat-related deaths in Europe in 2024 alone. Heat-related deaths among older people have risen sharply according to the Lancet Countdown, and hundreds of thousands now die globally each year from heat. The United Nations Environment Programme reports that heat-related deaths among adults aged 65 and above have surged by an estimated 85% since the 1990s.                                                                   

This is what manufactured delay costs. Not in abstractions — in bodies

II. What Manufactured Delay Looks Like

The fossil fuel industry has not simply lobbied governments. It has embedded itself inside the very process designed to contain it.
Between 2021 and 2024, a minimum of 5,368 fossil fuel lobbyists attended UN climate talks, representing 859 different fossil fuel organisations, including 180 oil and gas corporations. Just 90 of those corporations produced nearly 60% of global oil and gas output in 2024 alone. 
At COP29 in Baku, more than 1,770 lobbyists — including the heads of major corporations — were granted access, many as guests of the host country Azerbaijan. Their numbers dwarfed almost every country delegation and threatened to drown out the voices of Global South nations, Indigenous peoples, youth, and those who disproportionately bear the brunt of climate impacts. 
ExxonMobil alone sent as many delegates to COP29 as Guyana — a country at imminent risk from rising seas and one where ExxonMobil itself is engaged in offshore oil extraction projects. 

The symmetry is not coincidental; it is structural.

At COP30 in Belém, approximately 599 lobbyists gained access through Party overflow badges that give behind-the-scenes access to the inner workings of negotiations. Major trade associations remained a primary vehicle for influence, with the International Emissions Trading Association bringing 60 representatives, including delegates from ExxonMobil, BP, and TotalEnergies.

As one physician put it bluntly: “When 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists are allowed to influence our nations’ policies, these are no longer negotiations. It’s an industry convention.

III. The Process Has No Immune System
The structural problem is not just the lobbyists. It is that the UNFCCC process was never designed to defend itself against them.
The UN climate process still lacks a formal conflict of interest policy governing fossil fuel participation.  There is no rule barring a coal executive from sitting in a Party delegation. There is no requirement that participants disclose their financial relationships with polluting industries beyond basic organisational affiliation. Proposals to address this — requiring the exclusion of fossil fuel lobbies from state delegations and mandating full public disclosure of affiliations — have been urged but not adopted.
The June 2026 climate negotiations in Bonn closed amid growing concern over the ability of the UN climate process to deliver action at the required scale, with governments failing to make meaningful progress and in some cases pushing back on already established agreements. 
Decision-making rules allow a small number of states to block progress; representatives from climate-vulnerable communities continue to face obstacles to participation; and the absence of robust safeguards against corporate influence remains unaddressed. 
Meanwhile, the UN climate agency and the UK Met Office project a 75% chance that average global temperatures between 2026 and 2030 will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the very threshold the Paris Agreement was built to defend.

IV. The COP31 Test


COP31 convenes in Antalya, Türkiye in November 2026 under an unusual co-presidency between Türkiye and Australia, marking what is intended to be a critical transition from negotiation to implementation following the mandates of the Global Stocktake. 
The architecture of previous COPs has created real building blocks. COP30 produced a Global Implementation Accelerator, a Just Transition Mechanism, a climate finance work programme, and Presidency-led roadmaps on forests and transitioning away from fossil fuels. But as analysts observe, COP31 will need to move from frameworks to delivery — and that transition cannot happen while the actors most invested in preventing it are seated at the table.

The co-presidency must publish full team lists, disclose all funding and partnerships, adopt strict conflict-of-interest rules barring sponsorships or consultancies tied to fossil fuel or other high-polluting industries, and release summaries of meetings with external stakeholders.                                       

These are not radical demands; they are basic safeguards that would strengthen legitimacy and set a higher standard for future summits.

 The geopolitical context makes this more urgent, not less. The start of 2026 has demonstrated again how dependence on fossil fuels is closely linked to geopolitical instability — from US energy diplomacy to the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz — and how fossil fuel dependency remains a structural source of instability for energy systems and national economies. 

V. The Deeper Indictment
There is a phrase that deserves to be retired: “the energy transition.” It implies an orderly technical process, as though the world is simply upgrading its infrastructure. What is actually happening is a political confrontation between industries whose survival depends on continued extraction and a planetary system that cannot absorb it.
Over three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. High energy prices push up food costs. Inflation fuels political instability. Debt burdens deepen. The fossil fuel crisis has become a development crisis. 
The Caribbean, the Pacific, the Global South broadly — these are not bystanders to a crisis playing out elsewhere. They are its most concentrated victims. When fossil fuel lobbyists overwhelm the delegations of the most vulnerable nations in the negotiating rooms of Baku, Belém, and soon Antalya, they are not merely influencing trade policy. They are, in the most literal sense, determining the survivability of communities that did not cause the crisis.
This is what accountability journalism must name clearly: the delay is not failure. It is outcome. An industry that has operated with impunity inside the process designed to constrain it has extracted exactly what it came for — time.
COP31 is not another chance. It may be among the last ones that matter.

The 592 Guardian holds that verified facts must be stated as facts. The data cited here is publicly available, peer-reviewed, or sourced from credible intergovernmental bodies. The editorial position is our own.

THE GUIANA SHIELD IS BEING REORGANIZED

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 The 592 GUARDIAN♦EDITORIAL♦ENVIORMENTAL ACCOUNTABILITY

The Guiana Shield Is Being Reorganised — And Guyana Is Watching From the Sidelines    What is happening in Venezuela’s mining belt is not Venezuela’s problem alone– JUNE 2026

The arrest of Nicolás Maduro by American special forces in January 2026 was treated in Guyana largely as a geopolitical curiosity — the end of a neighbourhood nuisance, perhaps even a quiet relief given the years of Essequibo belligerence his government sponsored. That reading was dangerously shallow. What has unfolded since in Venezuela’s Bolívar state is not the tidying up of a failed state. It is the reorganisation of the Guiana Shield — the same ancient geological formation that underlies Guyana’s gold and uranium frontier — under American strategic and commercial direction. Guyana is not a spectator to this process. It is a participant whether it chooses to be or not.

 On June 8th, army helicopters swept into Las Claritas, Venezuela’s ground zero for illegal gold mining in Bolívar state. Thousands of freelance prospectors fled. Days later, the United States launched an air strike killing Héctor “Niño” Guerrero Flores, the boss of the Tren de Aragua crime group. President Trump announced the operation was “co-ordinated closely with our friends in Venezuela.” Within weeks, Western mining executives were on the ground at El Callao, one of Venezuela’s most famous gold complexes. In April, Venezuela’s National Assembly had already passed a mining-reform bill cutting royalties, prolonging concessions and allowing international arbitration of disputes. 

The message was unambiguous: the Orinoco Mining Arc, a Portugal-sized stretch of rainforest and mineral wealth that Chávez nationalised and Maduro surrendered to criminal syndicates, is now open for Western business under American military cover.

 This should command the full attention of every Guyanese citizen who has followed this news—outlet coverage of the GGMC’s nine-year audit backlog, the U92 Energy Corp. uranium play at Kurupung, the G2 Goldfields/GMIN merger and Guyana’s failure to enforce change-of-control provisions, and the gold laundering vectors through the Guiana Shield into Brazil and beyond. 

 What The Economist describes from the Venezuelan side of the Shield is the mirror image of what we have been documenting from the Guyanese side: the same unregulated extractive frontier, the same absent regulatory infrastructure, the same criminal networks, the same geological wealth being approached without the governance architecture to manage it responsibly.

 The Shield Does Not Recognise Our Border

 The Guiana Shield is one of the oldest geological formations on Earth, stretching across Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and northern Brazil. It holds some of the world’s most significant deposits of gold, diamonds, bauxite and — as the Kurupung case makes plain — uranium. The criminal networks that have exploited it do not organise themselves around the borders drawn by colonial cartographers. Tren de Aragua, whose leadership the Americans just eliminated in Las Claritas, has been documented operating across the Shield. The FARC dissidents and the National Liberation Army, whom The Economist identifies as still active in Venezuela’s mining belt despite the American air strikes, are not going to demobilise. They are, as one Venezuelan mining industry source told the magazine plainly, going to move. “If you clean up one area, they are going to move somewhere else. It’s that simple.”

 Where do they move? Deeper into national parks, says The Economist. Venezuela’s Imataca and Canaima national parks border Guyana. The Pakaraima mountains straddle the frontier. The same jungle that conceals illegal mining operations at Mazoa Hill and along the Cuyuni river system on the Guyanese side connects without interruption to the zone the Americans are now attempting to clear on the Venezuelan side. The displacement of criminal mining networks from Bolívar state is not a solution to the problem of unregulated extraction on the Guiana Shield. 

It is a pressure valve that will push those networks toward the path of least resistance. Guyana needs to be asking right now whether it is that path.

 The Regulatory Vacuum Is the Real Security Risk

 The government of Guyana will point to the Guyana Gold Board, the GGMC, the Environmental Protection Agency and the various bilateral security arrangements with the United States as evidence that the country is not defenceless. These institutions exist. The question this newspaper has been asking for months — and which events in Venezuela now make urgent — is whether they function adequately for the moment we are in.

The GGMC has not produced audited financial statements in nine years. That is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. In a context where criminal networks are being actively displaced from one part of the Guiana Shield toward another, it means that Guyana’s primary regulatory body for gold and mineral extraction cannot account for what has been extracted, by whom, under what conditions, and where it went. The Mazoa Hill controversy and the Cataratas vector we have previously documented are not isolated incidents. They are evidence of a structural gap between the extractive activity occurring on 

 Guyana’s territory and the state’s capacity to govern it.

 The G2 Goldfields/GMIN merger is a related symptom. When the ownership of a major mining concession changes hands through a corporate restructuring and the state’s change-of-control provisions are not enforced, the message sent to the extractive industry — legitimate and otherwise — is that Guyana’s regulatory framework is a formality, not a constraint. That message travels. It is heard in Caracas, in São Paulo, in the offices of commodity traders in Geneva and Singapore who are now making decisions about the post-Maduro Guiana Shield.

And then there is uranium. The U92 Energy Corp. Kurupung project sits in a jurisdiction with

→no domestic regulatory framework for uranium extraction.

→no specialised inspectorate.

→no established environmental liability regime 

→no parliamentary oversight mechanism with the technical capacity to evaluate what is being proposed.

 We have made this argument before on purely governance grounds.                                                                                                    We make it again now on security grounds: a uranium frontier on the Pakaraima border, adjacent to a zone from which armed criminal networks are being displaced by American military operations, is not a situation that a functioning state should approach with a nine-year audit backlog and an unstaffed Data Protection Commission.

 Washington’s New Architecture and Guyana’s Position

 The broader regional picture demands clear-eyed assessment. The Economist documents what it calls the “Trumpification” of Latin America — seven consecutive right-wing presidential victories since January 2025, an ideological convergence around Washington’s priorities on crime, migration and extractive industry, and a network of direct American military co-operation from Ecuador to Venezuela. The PPP government has historically cultivated a careful non-alignment, maintaining relations with Washington, Beijing and Caracas simultaneously. That triangulation is now under structural pressure.

The US-Venezuela arrangement is revealing in its terms. Venezuela under Rodríguez is supplying mineral access, security co-operation and political compliance in exchange for American recognition, sanctions relief, oil export waivers and military protection. Maduro’s Essequibo aggression — the December 2023 referendum, the military mobilisation, the maps redrawn in Caracas — was a product of that previous regime’s political economy. The Rodríguez government, operating under American supervision, has different incentive structures. The Essequibo claim has not been formally withdrawn. But the regime that was prepared to mobilise it militarily has been replaced by one whose survival depends on American goodwill.

This creates a narrow diplomatic window that Guyana should be exploiting with urgency and precision.

 The International Court of Justice case proceeds on its own timeline. But the political conditions that made Venezuelan adventurism possible have shifted significantly. “A Guyanese government with the strategic literacy and institutional capacity to engage this moment could consolidate real security gains. A government that treats it as background noise while managing oil revenues and managing elections is leaving an opening”.

The question of how Georgetown engages Washington in this new regional architecture is not separable from the question of whether Guyana’s extractive governance is adequate to the moment. 

American capital is rushing into the Guiana Shield. American military presence is reorganizing its security environment. American strategic interest in the region’s mineral wealth — gold, uranium, rare earths — is not abstract. 

If Guyana cannot demonstrate that it governs its portion of the Shield with the transparency and accountability that Western investors and institutions nominally require, it will find itself not as a partner in this new architecture but as the next ungoverned frontier to be reorganised by someone else.

What Needs to Happen

This new outlet does not traffic in alarm for its own sake. We state what the evidence requires:                                                                                               
→The GGMC audit backlog must be cleared as a matter of national security, not administrative housekeeping. The government should be asked in Parliament, specifically and on the record, when audited financial statements for 2017 through 2025 will be tabled. No answer is itself an answer.

→The U92 Kurupung uranium project must be paused pending the establishment of a fit-for-purpose regulatory framework. This is not anti-investment. It is the condition for investment that does not create liabilities the Guyanese state cannot manage.

The Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services, reduced from monthly to quarterly meetings in the same period that these extractive governance questions have intensified, must be restored to regular function and given the technical support to conduct meaningful oversight of the mining sector.

 The Guyana government must make a formal public assessment of the security implications of the displacement of criminal mining networks from Venezuela’s Bolívar state toward the Pakaraima border region. If that assessment has been made internally, it should be shared with Parliament and the public.

And the PPP government must decide, clearly and on the record, what Guyana’s strategic posture is in the new regional architecture that:                                                                            American policy is constructing. Non-alignment was a coherent position when the region was genuinely multipolar. It becomes incoherence when the Shield on which your economy depends is being reorganised under the military and commercial direction of one power, on your border, right now.

The Guiana Shield does not belong to Washington.

 It does not belong to Caracas. 

A significant portion of it belongs to the people of Guyana.

It is time to govern it like it does.

 The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet. We accept no government advertising and carry no political affiliations.