Forum
Published on: Sunday, January 09, 2011
Anti-coal group not majority
By: David Lee
I HAVE been reading every report in the local papers on the coal fired power plant for Sabah and the opposition seems to be as strong as ever.
The anti-coal-fired power plant group does not represent the silent majority who has not spoken one way or the other about the project proposal.
They would sooner have the electricity supplied to their homes and industries un-interrupted rather than to join in the debate.
They trust that the State and Federal governments would make the right decision with both the electorates and the environment in mind.
It would help to make the right decision if the decision makers make a study of the traditional coal user countries like China, Japan, Britain, European countries, Taiwan and Australia and see what damage had been done to the people and countries.
Countries like China, Britain and the European countries had been burning coal for a thousand years.
If coal use was that bad as some claimed, the damages would have been written on the faces of the people and the countries.
Queesnsland in Australia has the world’s biggest and longest coral reefs and the beaches are the world’s best. It is the paradise for tourists who go there by the millions each year.
The State of Queensland produces tens of millions of tonnes of coal for export each year.
In addition Queensland burns tens of millions of tonnes to produce some 8,000 MW electricity for decades. Over 70 per cent of the State’s energy needs came from coal. If our Sabah environmental activists claims of environmental disasters resulting from coal-fired plants are correct, the coral in the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland would have been all wiped out by now by the pollutants discharged from a dozen huge coal-fired power plants. Tourists would have stopped going there long ago.
Likeswise Britain and European countries draw the biggest tourist crowds.
Yet they are traditional coal users for centuries.
If those fish and coral off the Dent Peninsula were poisoned one day, it would not be the result of the as yet non-existing coal-fired plant, but due to the effluents from all the oil palm plantations and mills washed down to the sea. The run-off into the sea of excess NPK and other elements and temperature of the surrounding sea water over time and would adversely affect the marine life, coral included.
Even now, after 30 years of extensive agricultural activities on the east coast,. the sea water chemistry may have already changed.
But we did not have a base line study 30 years ago. So we don’t know what changes had taken place.
Whatever harm the oil palm industry may bring on the environment, there is no turning back.
The industry is deeply rooted in Sabah’s economy.
Looking at things in global perspective, I think George Wehrfrits who wrote in Newsweek Dec, 17,2007, summed up the situation aptly about the inevitable continuing would-wide coal use.
“It isn’t just Pandas the World Wildlife Fund is hugging. In a major policy shift, the group is cautiously embracing a longtime foe of the greens: King Coal. Its report titled Climate Solutions; WWF’s Vision for 2050, maps out a plan for doubling global energy consumption while slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 60pc – the minimum necessary to limit global warming to 2 degrees C.”
“Amid the usual call for renewable, WWF envisions coal delivering 20pc of global energy needs in 2050.
Why coal? Because there is no silver “bullet” to stop global warming, says Liam Salter, head of WWF’s climate-change programme in Hong Kong. Nor is it practical to rule out the dirty coal but abundant fossil fuel.
The report envisions “a clearly defined, though limited, role for coal in a climate-friendly economy.”
Coal would fire highly efficient (and still experimented) power plants that store CO2 underground.
Conservation would help bridge the gap between now and 2030, when the new coal plants will be ready.” G.W. Newsweek.
As if in response to the WWF’s favorable assessment about coal usage the Indonesian miners are going full steam ahead with their coal mining and coal-fired power generation. Our neighbour is top coal producer/exporter in this region. By 2017 it will burn about 100 million tonnes of coal to generate electricity as its oil and gas reserves are depleting fast. What do you say about the effect of climate change from Indonesia’s coal power plant emission compared to our burning of mere 1 million tones?
Indonesia will double coal production to 400 million tonnes per year by 2017. It earns tens of billion US. dollars from coal export.
Who is going to stop the country from burning and exporting CO2 to Malaysia and other consumer countries?
Even the so-called green energy sources like oil and gas, hydro, biomass are all polluting energy sources. Our local NGOs should have gone to the Gulf of Mexico to help scoop up the scum from the recent oil spill and bury the birds to realise the effects of oil and gas pollution.
If we were to go total green we would need millions of tonnes of iron and copper ores and millions of tonnes of coal to refine and smelt the raw materials into finished metals to manufacture all the steel and other metals needed to fabricate oil and gas pipes, the monster rigs, the huge hydro turbines, hundreds of biomass plants, thousands of wind mills etc to produce 3,000 MW electricity that Sabah will need.
Sabah has all the raw natural resources like iron ore, coal, copper ore, manganese, nickel and other metals and minerals. But NGOs will have to mine them, refine them and turn them into finished ready-to-use metal products in order to be able to manufacture all those turbines, plants, mills, etc, to produce the “Green Energy” that some had been advocating.
But the Green Turf members said: “Absolutely no mining in Sabah”.
We have to come to our senses. No mining means no Green Energy!
The environmental activists might suggest that we could import all that from China.
But it would be a crime to export pollutants to another country. China’s sky would be all darkened by industrial pollutants and many of its citizens will choke to death if it continues to supply world needs for the steel and other manufactured products, while Sabah and the rest of the world enjoy the pristine environments and bright skies.
Where is our conscience?
Why can’t we have our cake and eat it too? Beause the Chinese are getting smart. They are following the footsteps of the Japanese who, in turn, had been following the footsteps of the Western world.
Rather than building more factories at home Chinese are now shifting their heavy industries and factories to the third world and even to the developed western worlds like United States and produce the goods they need in their own backyards!
The Chinese are coming to Sabah, too, to build huge aluminum plants, cement plants and all other plants to produce the goods that we need.
Hurray! The world trading creed has come full circle.
Sabah seems to be the only State which has been gripped by environmental activist movement.
The movement seems to be wielding enormous political influence as it is probably supported morally and financially from its rich foreign counterparts.
The local movement has been attracting foreign environmentalists who find the state fertile ground to carry out their mission.
They come to Sabah for one or two days and make fantastic praises about Sabah’s environment-eco-paradise, exotic species, pristine forests, lost world, world heritage quality, 8th wonders ,etc, and expect their pronouncements to be carried in the local newspapers. Must be real experts to be able to assess Sabah’s wonders in such a short time!
Their mission is to create a virtual clean and green state so that those fragile flora and fauna will thrive over humans. Every development – a road passing though conservation area to a kampong is considered harmful to the speies and the project has to be stopped.
Mining for river sand, (vital to our infrastructural development), on a 100 meter stretch of a big, 300km long river is to be stopped because some tourists and some monkeys in the nearby forest didn’t like the sight of the operation.
Some of our high government officials are already infected and are dancing to their tunes.
Minister Datuk Chin must have done some reading to come up with the statement that “most countries in the world are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels as their main source of energy.
We cannot run away from such traditional fuel sources”. Well said. But this is not the type of song the activists like to hear!
Can one imagine United States which depends 45pc of its energy on coal and China (60pc on coal), together consuming some 2.5 billion tonnes of coal annualy, were to suddenly go for green energy?
They would have to exploit and deplete the whole world’s mineral resources in a short time, including our Maliau Basin coal and iron in order to achieve the objective.
Whatever decisions the governments will make on the proposed Tunku coal-fired power plant, I hope it will not be founded on fictional scary tales of environmental disasters but on well researched data and on world-wide trend on coal usage.
The environmental authorities should be rational and be realistic and should not reject the whole project proposal just because there are some spelling mistakes here and there in the EIA reports.
Bear in mind that whatever project for the humans and species, and the governments and public agencies have carried out many such projects over the years, there is no escape but at the expense of the environment.
Chin, don’t throw out the baby with the bath water in frustration!
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