Modelling Doom?

Unpacking Uncertainty, Narrative, and Extractivism Politics in Climate-Risk Scenarios

The Guyana-Suriname basin, an emerging oil frontier in South America, embodies a paradox at the heart of the global climate crisis. On one hand, massive offshore oil discoveries have positioned Guyana and Suriname as significant players in the global energy market, promising unprecedented economic growth. On the other hand, these very activities threaten to accelerate one of the region's greatest environmental dangers: sea level rise.

Oil extraction in the basin contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions, both directly through the combustion of fossil fuels and indirectly by promoting continued reliance on oil-based economies. The irony is stark! While the oil boom provides short-term financial gains, it deepens the climate crisis that endangers the region’s long-term survival. Rising sea levels, driven primarily by global warming, pose a particularly severe threat to the low-lying coastal zones of both Guyana and Suriname, where the majority of their populations and infrastructure are concentrated.

These countries are already experiencing the early impacts, including coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion into freshwater systems, and more frequent flooding. Projections suggest that even moderate sea level rise could submerge significant portions of their coastal plains, displacing communities and undermining food security. This is especially concerning given the weak coastal defences and limited adaptation infrastructure currently in place.

While often framed as objective, climate models are also deeply political artefacts. They shape international negotiations, define what constitutes “scientific evidence,” and help determine what futures are considered possible or legitimate. But they often privilege certain perspectives—especially techno-economic worldviews—while marginalising indigenous knowledge, local data, or non-quantifiable risks.

But! embracing complexity and uncertainty—rather than simplifying it—can lead to better democratic outcomes. Simplistic models may be easier to communicate, but they risk ignoring vital social and ecological dynamics!

“How accurate are the predictions on climate change? When is doom going to happen?”

The biggest misunderstanding about climate modelling is that uncertainty means “we don’t know anything.” In fact, we know a lot. There is overwhelming consensus that human emissions are warming the planet, sea levels are rising, and extreme events are increasing. What’s uncertain are the specifics: how fast, where, and what social systems will break or adapt.

This distinction matters. Treating uncertainty as ignorance undermines climate policy. The right approach is not to eliminate uncertainty but to diversify strategies.

By the edge of the Atlantic, where the dark brown rivers meet a warming sea, a quiet violence is unfolding. In the Guyana-Suriname basin—an overlooked fringe of the global map now redefined by ExxonMobil's cartography—billions of barrels of oil have been found, and so, unsurprisingly, billions of dollars have begun to flow. This is how empires remember the forgotten: by drilling holes through them.

In the short term, it seems rational. Guyana’s GDP is exploding. A country long dismissed as peripheral has now been granted what the economists call “an opportunity.” There will be highways and towers and symbols of “development.” Guyanese children may one day attend conferences in glass buildings named after the same companies that once ignored their existence. Suriname, burdened with debt and a weaker oil portfolio, watches uneasily from the sidelines, a familiar tale of uneven benefit distribution in capitalist modernity.

But let us not be deceived by the promises of the petroleum age. This is not development—it is debt in disguise. It is a bet placed on the continued extraction of value from the future, an agreement to mortgage not just ecological stability but social imagination. We are taught to believe that this is progress, but what kind of progress leaves us submerged beneath rising seas? This new petro-state form acts under the illusion of legibility and control. Its engineers and planners chart coastlines and build sea walls, believing that the ocean can be kept at bay with enough spreadsheets and poured concrete. But the delta does not listen. The soil subsides. The tides rise. Georgetown, like so many other port-cities caught between global capital and climate disaster, becomes a battleground between the mapped future and the lived present.

The process is not linear or neat—it is messy, negotiated, contested. Social worlds are always in the making, entangled in multiple trajectories and practices. In Guyana, the oil boom has already begun to reorder social life: indigenous communities debate compensation, middle-class dreams are tied to offshore contracts, protest and celebration coexist. These are not passive recipients of extraction; they are actors in a complex choreography of aspiration, precarity, and resistance. The central question remains: how do we scream? How do we refuse a future being sold to us through oil rigs and banknotes? The logic of extraction—be it of oil, labour, or imagination—is the logic of capitalism itself: endless accumulation, indifferent to its ruins.

We have seen this story before. Dubai rose from the sand on the back of oil and migrant labour, a shining example of petro-modernity. But beneath the glitter lies an empire built on dispossession and surveillance. Capital gives power, yes—but only to those willing to reproduce its logic. And that logic is one of doom. Because oil is not just energy. It is destiny. It locks us into infrastructures of death—pipelines, highways, combustion engines—that make alternative futures unthinkable. And when the seas rise and the storms come, as they are already doing, no amount of wealth will save the levees.

The real tragedy is not just environmental—it is ontological. It is the reduction of the earth to resource, the reduction of life to growth metrics, the reduction of imagination to GDP projections. The Guyanas are not alone; they are just early. This is the fate prepared for all of us in a world that cannot imagine value beyond extraction.

So let us not cheer this oil rush as progress. Let us name it for what it is: the deepening of a system that must end, if we are to begin.

This piece is a product of my presentation, after invitation at the “Energy transition and resource extractivism in the Americas” conference, organised by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology / VU and the Amsterdam Sustainability Institute.
https://vu.nl/en/events/2025/energy-transition-and-resource-extractivism-in-the-americas