The Trinidad Guardian -Online Edition Ver 2.0

T&T ranks high for global warming

With all the talk about the Environmental Management Authority approving the smelter, despite the fact that we don’t need it, as we have lots of other alternative uses for our energy, I thought I should look at a matter that is concerning governments of the world and that is global warming. But before I get to that here are a few tit bits for your attention:

‘Full force’

Have you noticed that it has become fashionable to say, “The Police will be out in full force today?” So tell me what size force are we getting the rest of the time? Shouldn’t every part of the Government be out in full force every day?

Wrecking statistics

The police released statistics at the end of February that showed it had wrecked 500 vehicles to date. That’s 250 per month. And yet they also announced that in 2006 they wrecked approximately 11,000 vehicles, which is almost 1,000 a month.

So what is going on? A 75 per cent drop? Or is this another example of the police issuing wrong statistics?

Unproclaimed laws

I didn’t realise until Hamza Rafeeq brought it to the nation’s attention that the Human Tissue Transplant Act, which was passed in Parliament in 2000, is still not “proclaimed” by the President.

Friends that is seven years! What is there that takes seven years to sort out? (of course if you left it to our judicial system it could take even longer!)

But this also begs the question, how many other Acts of Parliament are unproclaimed? Does any reader know of a Web site where a list of legislation and its status is available?

Slipping further

Last week, I wrote that while we are better off than we were five years ago, we are not as well off as we should be. Many thanks to the reader who brought to my attention the new World Economic Forum report on global competitiveness. This is a major global organisation and very influential. Go to http://www.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/gcr2006_rankings.xls for the full report.

Check out the table I, at right, extracted for you.

Note:

1: The 2020 countries are in the top 20.

2: Barbados is 31st (We are 67th!)

3: Jamaica is also ahead of us.

4: Jamaica and Dominica Republic are improving.

5: Trinidad has slipped down another place.

Ranked second

I think most people understand that a major factor in global warming is the emission of so-called greenhouse gasses, in particular carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon dioxide is generated primarily when you burn fossil fuels, such as oil or gas.

My thanks go to a reader, a vet by profession, who asked me the other day with all the existing plants and now with the aluminium smelter, where would that put T&T on the world stage of CO2 emissions per capita.

You know you won’t find that information on any Web site in T&T, so it was off to the trusty United Nations and its 2005 Human Development Report.

Check out the graph, at right, I have prepared for you comparing the CO2 emissions for the heavily industrialised countries and T&T on a per capita basis.

Only one country is worse than us. Now these figures are for 2002 and since then we have built a lot more plants so we may be #1 by now.

This has serious implications for us. As the lobby for reduction of greenhouse gases gathers momentum, the pressure on every nation to reduce CO2 emissions or be penalised will become significant.

We could easily see products from the world’s worst CO2 polluters like T&T attracting a CO2 tax, which would make us uncompetitive.

If we aren’t careful we could have energy reserves and be unable to use them.

The answer of course is to move from large energy consumptive process plants to ones where energy plays a much smaller part such as manufacturing.

Just a thought.