VIDEO: Guyana’s president lectures BBC’s Steven Sackur on Climate Change, tells the developed world to stop the hypocrisy

President of Guyana, Mohamed Irfaan Ali turned a BBC interview into a lecture on Climate Change when his interviewer, Stephen Sackur, accused the South American country of polluting the environment with billions of carbon emissions.

Carbon emissions are the chief pollutants contributing to climate change.

Sackur, during the interview, asked Irfaan Ali: “Over the next decade, it is expected that there would be billion dollars’ worth of gas extracted off your coast. It is an extraordinary figure. But think of it in practical term. That means, according to many experts, more than two billion tons of carbon emission will come from your seabed from those reserves and be released into the atmosphere. I don’t know if you as a head of state went to the COP in Dubai…(Irfaan Ali interrupted.”

The Guyana president said: “Let me stop you right there. Do you know that Guyana has a forest forever that is the size of England and Scotland combined. A forest that stores 19.5 giga tons of Carbon. A forest that we have kept alive (Steve Sackor interrupts.)

Sackur asked: “Does that give you the right to release all of these carbon?”

Irfaan continued the lecture: “Does that give you the right to lecture us on Climate Change? I want to lecture you on climate change because we have kept this forest alive that stores 19.5 giga tons of carbon that you enjoy, that the world enjoy, that you don’t pay us for, that you don’t value, that you don’t see a value in. That the people of Guyana have kept alive.

“Guess what, we have the lowest deforestation rate in the world. And guess what, even with our greatest exploration of the oil and gas resource that we have now, we will still be net zero. Guyana will still be net zero.”

Stephe Sackor attempts to interrupt, but the Guyana’s president refused. He continued the tutorials: “I am not finished yet because this is the hypocrisy that exist in the world. The world in the last 50 years has lost 60 per cent of all its biodiversity. We have kept our biodiversity. Are you valuing it? Are you paying for it? When will the developed world going to pay for it? Or are you in the pockets of those who have damaged the environment through the industrial revolution and now lecturing us? Are you in their pockets, are you paid by them?”