Climate change - confusing and confused

Julian Kenny
Tuesday, December 29th 2009

The signals come fast and furious, some with messianic zeal, others with stridency, some with disarming sincerity, a few with all the airs of intellectual superiority to us mere mortals, but few with any real understanding of the enormity of the challenge.

It is now almost a religion. In the past few years we have heard that there is a possibility that Trinidad may be ’drowning’; that there is accelerated coastal erosion; sea levels are rising faster in the south than in the north; a very precise erosion rate for the north coast has been reported; that the flavour of Blue Mountain coffee had changed; that by the year 2071 precisely 211.7 hectares of land on a particular part of the coast would be lost to erosion and inundation; that rainfall patterns on the island have changed; that carbon is to be sequestered by reforestation of parts of the Nariva Swamp; that Caribbean Sea fish would be migrating north; that there would be more and more devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean.

The precision of the 211.7 hectares being lost really got to me as did the nine minor storms in the past hurricane season, topped off by the Port of Spain Climate Change Consensus at CHOGM that so impacted the real players at Copenhagen.

The latest has been some videos seen on the Government TV channel, explaining the phenomenon and suggesting practical measures that we might take to ’fight’ climate change, the usual sort of things - turn off appliances, use a fan instead of air conditioning, buy local food instead of imported food, recycle where practicable, stop using plastic bags, replace incandescent bulbs with fluorescent bulbs and plant a tree.

This is all very well and the Buccoo Reef Trust and its presenters must be commended for their thoughtful and helpful suggestions. But, but, but - shouldn’t the Trust and all the other like-minded bodies and individuals joining the fight against climate change really consider the nature of the broader issue and address their advice to those who actually have the power to effect a response - the Government of Trinidad and Tobago?

The Government of T&T clear-felled about 800 acres of land at Union Village and burnt the logs, and the carbon sequestered in them, graded land and set about establishing an aluminium smelter, electricity generating plant and port. I have not seen any response to my estimate that if the smelter ever becomes operative the enterprise will emit annually approximately 800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (1.7 tonnes per tonne of aluminium from the smelting process and 5 tonnes per tonne of aluminium from the electricity generating process according to the literature).

Moreover the Government has effectively deregulated land clearing and quarrying, having amended the Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) Rules that it had previously passed to protect the environment against abuse. You can now clear-fell 150 acres without a CEC. And there was not a peep of comment, far less criticism, from any of the established NGOs or the cocktail party conservationists. Yet, they are all so motivated to tell us how to fight climate change, as if minor savings at personal levels can in anyway ever balance official environmental degradation.

B Joseph in a recent letter to the Editor about the general issue of air quality, draws attention to the official schizophrenia in tackling environmental problems. There was much debate and self-congratulation about the tobacco control legislation recently passed. But it is the same Government that has shied away from addressing the broader issue of wider national air quality legislation.

There is as yet - after the establishment of the Environmental Management Authority some 15 years ago - no national air quality standards in force! Although not explicitly stated by Joseph the asthma, emphysema or lung cancer that develops in a human being is no different when caused by pollutants in the air we breathe, whether generated in tobacco smoke, burnt garbage, burnt industrial wastes or burnt automobile fuels. They can all kill or require the most costly of medical treatment.

The country continues to be plagued by numerous and deep environmental problems, and Prime Minister Patrick Manning and his environment minister fly off to Copenhagen to save the world, his Tuvalu moment on the world stage, believing that his presence there was somehow more than a photo op of condescension by the real players seeking or defending their national interests.

All that Copenhagen achieved is a non-binding agreement amongst the main players to continue talking. And we will simply have to continue to live with the fact that we are seen by others, including the Yale University Consortium, as well as the intelligence arms of the Copenhagen delegations as being at the bottom of the ranks of the Environmental Sustainability and Environmental Performance indices in the Americas.

Living beside the sea is much like living on the flood plain. When the water rises the land floods and Canute is powerless. Tuvalu incidentally has a population of about 12,000 persons and absolute numbers are the key!

Source: http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161575273