July 2009

Wayne Kublalsingh
Friday, July 31st 2009

The human race is in peril. The imminent threats to our survival on the planet are twofold: communicable disease and carbon, or carbon equivalent gases. The Europeans, perhaps the greatest culprits in generating these perils, have taken the lead in finding solutions. They are off now, like a shot from the gun, running the race for survival. They are, for example, rushing like Bolt to find a vaccine for swine flu. They have been the first to establish clear laws and targets designed to delimit carbon. President Obama has also taken a lead in searching for the best health care formula for the human species in the United States. He has vowed to invest in renewable energy technology to put the brake on carbon. What is our nation's solution for survival? If smelter is it, then we already dead. We're not even off the starting blocks.

Michelle Loubon
Published: 30 Jul 2009

Leatherback turtles favour nesting along coastal regions like Toco, Grande Riviere, Matura, Fishing Pond and Manzanilla. Based on their choice of destination, Tourism Minister Joseph Ross says his ministry and the Turtle Village Trust had partnered to make T&T the premier turtle tourism destination globally. He made the comment in his feature address which was delivered on Tuesday by permanent secretary Melba Dedier.

Mary King
Monday, July 27th 2009
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161509390

Last week's article, "T&TEC thwarted?", raised the concern that subsidisation of the prices of petroleum and its products to local consumers, including electricity, was being accomplished at the expense of not providing a replacement asset with which we could build a new and sustainable economy.

Let us at least be clear that our present plantation economy, aggravated by the Dutch disease, depends on Foreign Direct Investment-driven export of the commodities-oil, gas and their products. This makes our economy, our foreign exchange earnings, very vulnerable to global price and supply swings.

Anthony Wilson
Published: 23 Jul 2009
http://guardian.co.tt/business/business-guardian/2009/07/23/are-tt-s-environmentalists-anti-people

I have used this space on a number of occasions to argue in favour of T&T’s natural gas industrialisation. In my view, the logic of using a country’s natural resources in order to develop its human resources and improve its standard of living is both obvious and ineluctable.

To a greater or lesser extent, all of the administrations in T&T since Independence — Chambers, Robinson, Manning, Panday and Manning again — have seen the logic of using the tax revenues from natural gas industries to build the wealth of the nation. In the 15 years of consecutive growth between 1994 and 2008, both the Panday and Manning administrations used the revenues from the local oil and gas sector to ensure that the wealth that the country generated trickled down to as many people as possible so that the majority of the citizens and residents of this country got the opportunity to participate in the boom.