This morning, the frontpage of the newspaper was all about Najib’s unveiling of the Tenth Malaysia Plan – but what about that all-important emissions cut pledge in Copenhagen?
Let’s see now – 52 “high-impact projects” including:
seven highway projects (think lucrative toll concessions and the promotion of private vehicle ownership),
massive property development all over the place,
coal-fired plants (including the controversial one in Sabah?), and
two aluminium smelters (to justify all those unnecessary dams?). Continue reading »
Folks, it’s bad news from the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen as the nations of the world failed to agree on a common platform to reduce the threat.
Najib has committed Malaysia to a 40 per cent cut (compared to the 2005 level) in emissions by 2020. The Pakatan parties, on the other hand, unveiled their common policy framework, which promised to “reduce carbon emission rate to conform with international standards” and to build the foundation for a smooth transition to alternative energy resources.
But in the same week they pledged all this, the deputy sports minister, representing Najib, unveiled the Malaysian-backed Lotus Team drivers for the coming high-octane Formula One season, while over in Penang, street circuit races were revived with the holding of the Petronas Cub Prix at the Esplanade over the weekend. Are these politicians for real? It is as if Malaysians live on a different planet, where rhetoric and reality never meet, where climate chaos will never encroach into our comfort zones.
Part of the problem is that we have been kept in the dark on the key issues surrounding climate change, while a small minority are in denial mode. The other reason is that many of us seem to value unsustainable corporate-led economic growth above environmental protection. This is a piece I wrote for IPS:
Many of us would think that the concern about hill-slope degradation in Penang and warnings of climate change are a fairly new development which began in the 1980s and 1990s.
Wrong. James Richardson Logan – the man who coined the name ‘Indonesia’ and who is honoured at the Logan Memorial outside the Penang High Court and buried in the nearby Protestant Cemetery – expressed such concern in the mid-19th century in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, which he edited. The brilliant Logan, who was ahead of his time, was a member of the Asiatic Society, corresponding member of the Ethnological Society of London and of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences.
Here are some excerpts from the Journal Vol II, printed in 1848:
It was remarked that the whole of the eastern front of the range [of a mountain in Pinang] has within a few years been denuded of its forest…. In Singapore the present zealous Governor has, in an enlightened spirit … absolutely prohibited the further destruction of forests on the summits of hills…. Climate concerns the whole community and its protection from injury is one of the duties of Government….
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