As Paramaribo, Suriname, flooded with shin-high water during a rainstorm in June, hundreds of taxis jostled for space on a recently paved street on the outskirts of the capital city. Passengers in suits disembarked alongside an overgrown canal. The visitors, some of whom had come from as far away as Texas and Malaysia, were there to commemorate this small country’s entry into the ranks of the world’s major oil producers.

Paramaribo sits on the northeast coast of South America, at the edge of a relatively undisturbed section of the Amazon rainforest. This massive jungle covers more than 90 percent of Suriname’s landmass, making it the world’s most forested country by percentage. It also allows Suriname to claim itself as “carbon-negative,” meaning that the nation absorbs more greenhouse gases than it emits.

As Paramaribo, Suriname, flooded with shin-high water during a rainstorm in June, hundreds of taxis jostled for space on a recently paved street on the outskirts of the capital city. Passengers in suits disembarked alongside an overgrown canal. The visitors, some of whom had come from as far away as Texas and Malaysia, were there to commemorate this small country’s entry into the ranks of the world’s major oil producers.

Paramaribo sits on the northeast coast of South America, at the edge of a relatively undisturbed section of the Amazon rainforest. This massive jungle covers more than 90 percent of Suriname’s landmass, making it the world’s most forested country by percentage. It also allows Suriname to claim itself as “carbon-negative,” meaning that the nation absorbs more greenhouse gases than it emits.

This article is co-published with Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate change, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

As a result, Suriname is one of the few countries that can make an unimpeachable claim to being on the right side of the climate crisis. But all that is about to change. In 2028, the country’s first offshore oil platform will begin pumping almost a quarter-million barrels of crude each day, roughly enough to supply the daily needs of all the drivers in the state of Colorado. In its first year alone, this project from the French oil major TotalEnergies is expected to generate billions of dollars of revenue for the government and billions more in private spending, causing the country’s economy to grow by more than half. More offshore rigs are expected to follow.

The air at the fifth annual Suriname Energy, Oil, and Gas Summit in June buzzed in anticipation of this coming prosperity. Hundreds of oil industry figures and Surinamese politicians crowded into the conference tents. They drank rum cocktails and sampled canapes, gabbed at trade show booths with representatives from drilling companies and construction firms, and then they took taxis to after-parties where DJs shouted out conference sponsors such as the consulting firm EY.

All the while, they celebrated what they saw as a global shift away from aggressive climate policy. A speaker from Shell praised the emergence of a “balanced energy transition” approach, while those from development banks and market analysis firms spoke about a new emphasis on “energy addition,” rather than “transition.” As the attendees saw it, there was nothing odd about the spectacle of a carbon-negative country hosting a celebration of new oil extraction—amid damaging floods only likely to become more frequent with more global warming.

From one angle, the launch of Suriname’s oil industry is a retelling of a familiar story: A massive oil company wins over a country with the promise of riches, enlisting it in an effort to produce more of a commodity that is destroying the world. But from another, it’s the story of a country seeking to balance its economic growth with the welfare of the planet, in the absence of global infrastructure to help it develop in other ways.

To hear Suriname’s leaders tell it, the oil project would allow the nation to uplift its citizens without harming the climate.

“The new dawn … means that Suriname is given a new chance for sustainable development,” said Chandrikapersad Santokhi, the country’s outgoing president, in his opening remarks at the conference. “The development of the oil and gas industry and carbon offsets go hand in hand in our country. We are not pursuing growth at any cost.”

Up until now, Suriname’s coveted “carbon-negative” status has been inextricably linked to its underdevelopment. Its slice of the Amazon sequesters more carbon than the country can emit only because its citizens by and large cannot afford the energy-intensive lifestyles that much of the world take for granted. The average resident earned less than $500 per month in 2024.

Now, Suriname’s leaders want to alleviate that poverty without becoming a net source of carbon. The plan is not just to make money and employ people, but also to use oil as a financing mechanism to build an economy that will someday become independent of fossil fuels, according to senior government officials who have served across the country’s recent administrations.

This means a host of new infrastructure projects and social welfare programs that check the boxes of sustainable development: Suriname will seed green industries such as ecotourism and climate-smart agriculture, build mangrove sea barriers and storm drain systems to stop flooding, and transition away from the use of imported bunker fuel and toward solar and hydropower.

But it also means allowing Total, the world’s sixth-largest oil company by market capitalization, to pump around 750 million new barrels of oil—more than will come from a massive oil development such as ConocoPhillips’s Willow project in Alaska. And that’s the bare minimum, assuming that no other multinationals strike crude and drill their own rigs.

“We have to diversify,” said Marciano Dasai, Suriname’s former environment minister. “We can say, ‘OK, we’re going to do the oil and gas,’ or we can say ‘OK, let’s do the oil and gas … to get us out of debt, and do the transformation to a green economy.’”

Workers at a bauxite mine in Suriname in 1975.Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Suriname’s history reads like an argument against the idea that exploiting natural resources can bring about prosperity. When the country gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975, the U.S. aluminum firm Alcoa had been mining a mineral known as bauxite in the country for decades, but it offshored most of the profits. Since independence, the government has helped develop gold mines and two small onshore oil fields, but living standards are still low and inequality high.

In the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, Suriname sank into a debt spiral, the result of excessive household power subsidies and low prices for commodities such as gold that are its main source of export revenue. The country owed around half a billion dollars to China, $88 million to the Paris Club, and another half-billion to private bondholders that had lent money to the government to help it prop up public budgets. In 2020, the government defaulted on its sovereign debt, leading the International Monetary Fund to step in with strict curbs on government........

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