Thailand shockingly callous to climate change threat
31 mar 2008
By Chang Noi
Today the next round of UN-hosted global negotiations on climate change begins here in Bangkok. They could not have come to a place less interested.
Open any international newspaper today, you are buried in stories about climate change. In Thailand? The Nobel Prize for Gore and the UN Climate Panel rated a couple of stories. The Bali Conference registered a slight news tremor. That’s about it. Of course, we have an excuse: we have been glued to the tragicomedy of Thai politics over the past three years. But now that’s over and the only thing left is the cleaning staff sweeping the trash off the stage.
We also have the excuse that climate change is a big country problem which will need a big country solution. Five countries put over half of the carbon in the air. Thailand could do something heroic about emissions but the poor planet wouldn’t notice. Gore’s Inconvenient Truth was just so American in every respect that it seemed to create exclusive ownership of the problem.
Put the Thai for “global warming” into Google and you get 825,000 hits. But even the top-listed are just translations on the general principles. There’s almost nothing on what it might mean for Thailand. Greenpeace composed a report on Thailand three years ago which is excellent in outline. But it was scraping for data to move beyond very basic principles, and by now its findings are outdated.
The Thailand Environment Institute (TEI) has been concerned about global warming for several years. It advises firms how to use energy more efficiently. It raises awareness among schoolchildren. It contributes to research. But the impact of such an NGO is limited by its size, its funding, and the society’s interest. Last year TEI claimed to help 140 firms save a total of 150 million baht in energy costs. In the macro scale of energy economics, that’s not even a drop in a bucket.
TEI also collaborated with the UN on a report on environmental issues in the Mekong basin. Rightly the report focused on immediate problems of water, land, and food. The whole climate issue was not just secondary, it was totally absent. No mention of what might happen if/when the Himalayan glaciers melt (big floods for a short time, followed by big droughts for a long time). In India and China, where there are rivers fed by the same glaciers, the concern is much greater.
Apirak Kosayodhin is the only public figure to have embraced the importance of the issue. But the mayor of Bangkok doesn’t have the power or resources to do very much, and anyway Apirak has tripped over the trash on the political stage.
Thailand has some committed academics and technocrats interested in the global issue. But they are very few, and they are outnumbered by the ostriches. When the UN published data on the rise in global sea levels, some Thai scientists came out to say they were falling here. They did not manage to explain how the sea surface could bend from one zone to another.
This blithe disinterest is no big surprise. The problem has been created by the big rich countries in the temperate areas of the world. The research is being done in these same rich counties. It tends to concentrate on the problems of those countries. From Bangkok, melting ice-sheets seem a long, long way away.
On top, we have just had one of the longest and best cool seasons ever. Though we should be into the pre-Songkran furnace, we are still being cooled by evening breezes. Of course this abnormality is part of the problem, part of the increasingly erratic behaviour of weather systems worldwide.
In late February, the Met Department announced we were going to have a real scorcher of a hot season. It predicted exactly which week the mercury would go north, and exactly how hot we would be fried. As the predicted week approached, and the cool winds refused to go away, the Met Dept did a U-turn of which any Bangkok taxi-driver would be proud. This was not an El Nino year (dry) but a La Nina one (wet). We will not fry, we will flood. This tells us one very important thing. The Met Dept hasn’t got a clue. We cannot blame them. Climate change is destroying old forecasting models and old truths. But that’s the point. The local climate is not something we know much about. But it’s not something we can any longer ignore.
Yet the political establishment is doing just that. Have you heard a minister mention climate change or global warming? From Samak that’s no surprise. Throughout his political career, he has shown no interest in the environment and treated activists as trouble-makers. But how about the minister of environment? Her first instincts on coming to office was to float projects to destroy more forests. No surprise. She belongs to the contractor class. Resources are there to be destroyed for profit. Dams are good.
Since then she has got a bit excited that Thailand might be able to profit from selling carbon credits and producing bio-fuels. This shows an admirable entrepreneurial spirit. Unfortunately, these are two of the most problematic issues in the political economy of global warming. Carbon credits allow rich countries to conspire with poor countries to cheat the systems being designed to cope with the carbon monster. Bio-fuels may be a solution far worse than the problem they hope to solve.
The UN has produced some figures that should do away with all this complacency, ignorance, and freeloading. Thailand stands 22nd in the world as a carbon polluter. Since 1990, Thailand’s emissions have increased faster than every other country in the world but one.
At the same time, the worldwide models that try to predict what changes are coming show that Thailand may get whacked pretty hard. More on that next time.
Source : The Nation
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