A carnival of emissions

Julian Kenny
Tuesday, February 16th 2010

I can only accept that I have a very modest knowledge of the sciences and their ways, and even less of official uses of accepted science knowledge especially in places like T&T. It becomes even more confusing each day when we read the print media and look at the coverage on local television.

At least in the international media coverage of scientific matters is well developed and generally well managed by professionals who may not even be scientifically trained. It is highly unusual to see a particular matter reported in such a way that the reader of viewer can have different interpretations of it.

Yet I continue to be startled at the stream of ’missteps’ generated by senior cabinet ministers, accepting of course that they are extremely busy managers dealing with complex issues and must necessarily have to rely of aides for their briefings. After a recent energy conference in a comment to the media as reported in the February 3 Business Express Minister Mariano Browne is quoted to have stated, ’The emission standards which have been used and were the standards to establish the Alutrint plant are more robust than the world standards by at least three’.

Assuming that these were his actual words it only tells the reader a part of the story. My guess is that the Minister was merely referring to the emissions standards for the known dangerous toxic emissions of the processes of smelting aluminium from alumina, fluorides and others.

And at a conference that seemed preoccupied with carbon emissions and climate change he made no reference to the carbon dioxide produced in the smelting process as well as the considerable volumes generated by burning natural gas to produce the enormous quantities of electricity used.

He seemed totally unaware of the fact that the aluminium smelting process has an enormous carbon footprint in its carbon dioxide emissions? Perhaps he is aware of some mitigating measures such as carbon capture at the Alutrint plant, possibly injection into the strata of the old wells at Union Village offering some prospects for further recovery of oil from depleted strata. But if this is so we really must be told for the smelter with its clean emissions will continue otherwise to spew out several hundred thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year for the next few decades. Will the ministers categorically deny that the smelting process alone will produce 1.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of aluminium?

But coming out of the same conference was the remarkable quotation by Minister Dick-Forde of our annual emissions of carbon dioxide in ’gigagrams’! Now the metric system which was adopted by this country many years ago is an orderly system of measures of lengths and weights from the smallest to the largest by leaps of 1,000. In science it has totally eclipsed all other systems.

Scientists are familiar with the range of the prefixes for the word gram. There are no less than 20 of them. But the ordinary citizen will only possibly be familiar with much used ones such as the gram, milligram, possibly microgram of the breathalyser and the kilogram of the larger ranges, but totally unfamiliar with the nano or pico or the extreme yocto at one end and mega, giga and tera or the extreme yotta at the other.

The ordinary reader will by now accept that one kilogramme of fish is roughly the equivalent of about two and a half pounds. The world, except of course the United States, has accepted the metric system and the terms tonne or metric tonnes, the equivalent of the mega gram.

If however you asked some the weight of a compact car you might get the answer of a tonne. Or the power of American or Russian nuclear warheads you might hear kilotonnes or even megatonnes. But as far as I have seen in the literature carbon emissions are given in measures of tonnes, millions or billions of tonnes. Possibly her advisors have been taken in by computer memory of megabytes and gigabytes and even terabytes after reading too many computer magazines.

Trinidad and Tobago produces over 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and the figure rises and will rise with each natural gas consuming enterprise. Yet the Business Express reports the minister to have claimed that T&T will have ’low carbon future’. Utter nonsense! If the country is to have this it will not be through unplugging cell phone chargers, turning off appliances or using more efficient light bulbs, but only through drastic reduction of burning of natural gas or petroleum derivatives, and incidentally, in accordance with sustainable development, leave some for future generations.

As for the warming of T&T over the past 40 years the minister, or her advisors should really read Chapter 16 of the last IPCC report, written by I think no less than 14 ’Nobel Laureates’ that states, ’Projected global temperature increases are not expected to have widespread adverse consequences on the terrestrial ecosystems in tropical SIDS’.

Source: http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161596216