Uganda was hoping by now to be on the verge of oil production.

Instead, it is at the center of a global fight — involving governments, climate activists, energy companies and multinational banks — over the future of fossil fuels.

Uganda remains adamant that it will find a way to complete the project. But while both supporters and opponents of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) wield arguments about fairness and morality, they have radically different visions of what is most important: protecting the planet or maximizing economic opportunity.

Uganda, said NJ Ayuk, executive chairman of the Johannesburg-based African Energy Chamber, is “ground zero for climate politics in the world.”

The project, if fully constructed, will comprise a T-shaped pipe network running nearly 1,000 miles. The system originates with two feeder pipelines — the already completed part of the project — that run toward one another from a pair of drilling sites near Lake Albert. The plan is for those pipes to merge into a larger line that will continue through landlocked Uganda, then wind east through Tanzania toward an Indian Ocean port.

The project is a joint effort of France’s TotalEnergies, the China National Offshore Oil Corp. and the national oil companies of Uganda and Tanzania. With Uganda’s thick, waxy crude able to flow only at high temperatures, the system would be the longest electrically heated oil pipeline in the world.

More than 200 environmental and civil society groups — both African and global — have banded together in a coalition called StopEACOP. Rather than protest from the sidelines, they have worked to directly thwart funding of the deal by pressuring global banks and insurance companies. From London to New York to Tokyo, they have converged on bank headquarters with banners and crashed shareholder meetings. They’ve lobbied in private meetings with bank executives. Several activists even met with Pope Francis, leading the Vatican to denounce the project and call for investors to redirect funds to clean energy.

The pipeline has turned into a rallying point because activists see it as objectionable on so many fronts. The project has forcibly displaced scores of people. It involves drilling in a national wildlife park for giraffes and elephants. The groups’ most resonant accusation, though, is that the project would repeat the exploitative pattern of earlier centuries, with foreign companies leeching resources while the resulting greenhouse gas emissions devastate Uganda and the planet.

This is “one last burst of petro-colonialism on the continent suffering most from the climate crisis,” said Bill McKibben, an American environmentalist who co-founded the activist group 350.org.

Irene Batebe, the Ugandan Energy Ministry’s permanent secretary, said the protesters have “definitely impacted on the timeline.”

The British bank Standard Chartered had been conducting “due diligence” on the project, then backed away, according to a spokesman. Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., which had been reportedly advising on the project, also pulled out, according to activists who track bank activity. In a statement, SMBC did not address questions about any prior role and said it is “not currently involved in the project.” Dozens of other Western banks have vowed to stay away.

But those withdrawals have shifted the project into a new phase — in which proponents of the pipeline are arguing more forcefully for the project to plow ahead. Those proponents include TotalEnergies, continental Europe’s largest oil and gas company, which has released YouTube videos defending the world’s need for oil and given presentations to analysts and investors on the environmental precautions it is taking in Uganda.

Many involved in the project say the Trump-era backlash against climate goals will play in their favor. Without citing any particular project, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has described fossil fuels as the best tool for helping the world’s poorest people attain the privileges of modern life.

Although the pipeline is not fully financed, Ugandan authorities say they are working to line up banks in China and the Middle East — places less susceptible to activist pressure — to complete the project. In the meantime, they have taken aim at what they see as Western hypocrisy — people warning about the dangers of oil and gas projects elsewhere, even as their own countries continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels. Most of the oil produced in Uganda will end up being exported, probably to Asia.

“They don’t want to give us the money, but they’ll take the oil,” said Joseph Kobusheshe, the environment, health and safety director at Uganda’s petroleum regulation agency.

To the extent there’s any middle ground in the debate, it can be found in this village along one of the feeder pipelines, at a cow milk production factory, where the manager, Julius Kwesiga Karanzi, also happens to be a village administrator. He confers with his neighbors. He takes notes at local meetings. On nearby roads, flatbed trucks roll down the road carrying stacks of new pipes, 24 inches in diameter and 59 feet long. Kwesiga still isn’t sure what to think.

“Maybe with good leadership and good governance …” he said, trailing off.

Some have moved to Kyarushesha on the prospect of an oil boom, even though the town is merely situated alongside the pipeline, not near a drilling site. The village of 4,000 with metal-roof homes has a new pharmacy, a new hotel, a new doctor, as well as a freshly paved main road.

But then Kwesiga pointed to the images he often sees on social media: Of intensifying floods, fires. Of the changing rainfall patterns in this part of Uganda, which have grown more erratic in recent years, according to research, as temperatures have risen.

He sees the pipeline as both a danger and an opportunity — though, ultimately, it can’t be both. His question: Which one to believe?

“Either we’ll benefit or we’ll lose what we have,” he said.

‘A generational opportunity’

Officials who argue for the pipeline tend to do so in economic terms. Chinese President Xi Jinping, the highest-profile backer, described the project as capable of boosting East Africa’s “socio-economic development.” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni made the oil industry central to his plans of lifting one of the world’s 25 poorest nations to “upper-middle” income status by 2040.

But for Ali Ssekatawa, the pipeline is a more personal issue — one he calls a “cause in my heart.”

Long before he started wearing contrast-collar dress shirts, before he was a lawyer for Uganda’s Petroleum Authority, Ssekatawa was a child in a family of “peasant” farmers outside the capital, Kampala. He read books at night by candlelight. He excelled in school, so relatives pitched in money for a boarding program — where he again ranked highly and earned a government scholarship to study law.

Because of that, he considers himself a product of Uganda’s public system. But he also saw how little space that system has — how much must go right — to help people rise. And now Uganda had a chance, with oil, to raise its annual revenue by 30 percent, according to internal estimates. To build education, health care — all in a country with an average age that’s the second youngest in the world. A country of elementary school students.

“A generational opportunity,” Ssekatawa said.

After seven years helping draft regulations for the oil industry, Ssekatawa says Uganda is ready. This will not, he said, be another example of the resource curse — in which an African country exports its natural treasures and remains in poverty. Ugandan officials say they’ve sought guidance from oil-rich Norway on how to manage wealth. They’ve visited Nigeria, a place where revenue was squandered, to learn what mistakes to avoid. They’ve insisted on constructing a refinery, to ensure that some of the oil can be used domestically for homes and industry. They are expanding domestic training programs, so that now, of nearly 15,000 oil jobs, 90 percent are being held by Ugandans.

What Ssekatawa couldn’t understand was why so many people didn’t share his perspective. So several years ago he expanded his job to make it more public. And along with several other officials, he drew up a strategy: to go where the climate activists go. Uganda’s Petroleum Aauthority started sending executives, including Ssekatawa, to the world’s annual climate conference so they could hold panel discussions about the benefits of oil.

At the COP28 climate conference in Dubai in December 2023, he and Uganda’s energy minister met with about 40 critics from climate groups, and he recalls asking them: “Can you at least decommission half of your fossil fuel plants before you target ours?

He had started with the goal of understanding their perspective. But his experiences only made him angrier, he said. Did the EACOP opponents not understand how little choice Uganda has? Developing large-scale clean energy sounds great — but wealthy countries, including the United States, have been unwilling to provide the necessary funding to make it happen.

A century had passed since a Ugandan geologist had documented oil seepages along the shores of Lake Albert, but decades of turmoil had followed British colonialism and put exploration on hold. So how could the West, so complicit in that period, say the window for oil in Africa had closed?

Yes, he said in an interview, the project would produce emissions. But that pollution would amount to less than 0.1 percent of the world’s historical total.

“The people who lecture us — they’ve been exploiting their resources for 100 years,” Ssekatawa said. “So when I find a person in New York who grew up with power, has a refrigerator, and he says ‘Stop EACOP,’ to me, he’s telling my 45 million brothers that they can continue reading with a candle.”

‘Harassment and fear’

Four thousand miles away, two dozen of the people arguing against the pipeline were putting on their scarves and gloves and gathering in London’s financial district. The city’s morning commuters were filing into office buildings — including the sleek glass headquarters of Marsh, a broker company that StopEACOP says is arranging insurance for the pipeline.

The members of Extinction Rebellion — a global environmental movement — were aware of the other side’s criticisms. And, yes, they were mostly White middle-class Brits — a high school geography teacher, a former scuba diver, a self-described “concerned grandmother.”

But they saw themselves as just one part of a vast effort involving American financial research groups, Netherlands-registered bank watchdogs, South African campaigners organizing huge Zoom calls, as well as many Ugandan environmental groups operating at great risk. Dickens Kamugisha, one of Uganda’s foremost activists, said Ugandan authorities have worked to dismantle local nongovernmental organizations, arresting dozens of workers in a campaign of “harassment and fear.”

“Stop EACOP is a Ugandan idea,” he said. “But we are asking global groups for support.”

Now, one form of that support was unfolding inside the atrium entrance of Marsh, where an otherwise normal Thursday was starting with a wave of Extinction Rebellion activists, disguised as workers, unfurling a sign saying “Ensure Life, Stop EACOP.”

After security set up a gate and checkpoint outside the revolving-door entrance, another wave of activists took up posts outside the barrier, playing drums, recording video, and offering pamphlets — portraying Marsh’s U.K. chief executive as complicit in climate damage — to the lanyard-wearing workers trying to pass through.

Marijn van de Geer, 42, one of the campaigners, said she feels uneasy about protests that interfere with everyday life. “But there are only so many times you can stand in a voting line for your Green Party,” she said.

The workers continued filing in for 30 minutes. The drumming continued. A former British canoe Olympian with a loudspeaker said: “Rule out the EACOP!”

It wasn’t clear whether anything had been accomplished, other than making some noise.

A Marsh spokesman would not comment on the protest and said the company has an ongoing policy of not revealing possible clients.

Jamie Anderson, who is part of the London campaign team for Extinction, said these protests can work in curious ways. He said the group had been at another large insurance group, Zurich, a year earlier. Months later, the company pledged to stop underwriting oil and gas extraction projects.

The activists retreated to a coffee shop to warm up. The group has been part of one of the world’s most successful climate campaigns, but they didn’t sound like a triumphant bunch.

Van de Geer — who spent several years working in East Africa, including Uganda, on international development — worried about what might happen in that country if the pipeline was built. She talked about the country’s 80-year-old president, Museveni, who has been accused of sponsoring violence and torture.

“This is not a president interested in the well-being of his people,” she said. Little revenue would trickle down, she said, to the villages in western Uganda.

But even if Uganda’s plans were sound, she said, there was still the planetary issue of megaprojects pumping greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Her group was co-founded by Roger Hallam, who said climate protests didn’t make sense unless you not only worked to understand the science of planetary warming but also emotionally “digested” the implications: The way quality of life would unravel as temperatures soared. The food shortages, starvation and wars. The fires, floods and general suffering.

Van de Geer saw this future so clearly that she’d chosen not to have children. To her, it made the argument over EACOP feel small. One nation’s ambitions for oil production, with a pipeline slated to run for 25 years, was a sign of the world still kidding itself.

“We as a society are so unprepared,” she said.

An uncertain opportunity

In Kyarushesha, some see danger, some see opportunity — but generally without a high level of certainty.

Baryamwihahi Mephas, a farmer, received $40 in compensation to surrender six of his 200 acres for the pipeline. He called the sum brutally unfair. But had the project not run through his land, he said, he would have supported it.

Jacqueline Kamuli, a fruit vendor, set up a stall here on the hopes of an economic boom. But now she’s worried the boom might pass the village by. Even locals picked for training programs didn’t find jobs.

“The people in this community — we don’t have enough knowledge about what’s going on,” said Kwesiga, the community administrator. “Even myself, a person in a position of power.”

At a school next to Kwesiga’s milking factory, a sixth-grade teacher thought there might be a way to get some firsthand knowledge. His students, Sabiiti Justus thought, should see one of the nearby drilling sites, called Kingfisher.

“It’s right down the road,” he said, and got to work calculating the cost of taking his class to Kingfisher on a field trip. A bus. Some money for the tour guides. A meal.

About $13 a student.

He wrote a letter to parents and called for a meeting.

The site was one of those places where the two perspectives on the project were clashing most fiercely.

Just months earlier, the California-registered group Climate Rights International had released a lengthy report describing a “catalogue of abuses” against the people living closest to the Kingfisher drilling area. Ugandan police, the report said, had forced some to leave with little warning, firing shots into the air, and burned fishing boats to intentionally ruin livelihoods. Authorities offered cash compensation for land, the report said, but it wasn’t enough for residents to purchase comparable land.

But Ugandan oil officials offer a much different picture of Kingfisher, where drilling is led by China’s national offshore oil company. They say fair compensation agreements have been reached with anybody who was asked to relocate. They say the community — reachable only by boat until the 1990s — is benefiting from greater connectivity. People swim and fish near the drilling site, even under the shadow of a 198-foot-tall rig. And so many people are hoping to gain temporary work in oil construction that fresh mud houses keep popping up right outside the facility’s gates.

When Justus gathered the parents, he described the idea of a “study tour.” It would be a way, he said, for the children of Kyarushesha to think in bigger ways about their futures.

But when Justus told the parents the price, they balked.

The field trip would have cost slightly more than the tuition for a trimester — and parents had been struggling to pay that.

The parents, Justus said, quickly quashed the idea.

“I was so disappointed,” he said.

The future of oil in Africa was 45 minutes down the road, and his students couldn’t get there.

He consoled himself by framing it as a postponement, not a cancellation.

From one perspective on the pipeline, conditions in a village where people lack so much — earnings, electricity — still had a chance to improve.