#BTColumn – The Glasgow gospeller

The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Dr Wayne Kublalsingh

The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, the great gospeller of smelter, flew off to Glasgow to plead for climate funds. He appealed, “We need funds, like the Green Climate funds.” He petitioned for “climate finance flows.” In announcing plans for a 112 mW solar renewable plant, he solicited, “We need help.”

What the great gospeller did not tell the COP26 delegates was that he spent years gospelling for a smelter industry in Trinidad. The Chatham ALCOA smelter would have produced 340,000 tons of aluminium per year (tpy), with an enhanced capacity of 500,000 tpy. Alutrint would have started at 125,000 tpy and doubled capacity to 250,000. It takes 17000 kWh’s of electricity to generate a tonne of aluminium.

This means that both smelters at start-up would have consumed 7.9 billion kWh of electricity. If capacity was enhanced to planned volumes they would have consumed 12.75 billion kWh per year.

The consumption of electricity by all customers, industrial, domestic etc is currently 9.87 kWh. In other words, the smelters would have consumed approximately 80 per cent of the current energy needs of the nation. At full intended capacity it would have consumed 130 per cent of current annual consumption. The life of the smelters was expected to be 50 years.

Nor did he disclose that his Government tried to build eleven other heavy gas-based industries, 100 per cent foreign-owned, in four industrial estates at Chatham/Cap de Ville, La Brea, Claxton Bay and the fishing banks off Otaheite. Nor, that we had no gas to support this ill-advised Trade Liberalisation Gaffney/Cline Master Gas Plan. Nor did he reveal the magnitude of social, economic and ecological costs involved. Nor that Trinidad and Tobago emitted 33 million tons of carbon in the atmosphere in 2020, the fourth highest per capita on the planet.

Nor did smelter gospeller inform the world that five years after High Court Justice Mira Dean-Armorer quashed the Certificate of Environmental Clearance for the Alutrint smelter – largely on the basis that the Government had no proper plan to dispose of the highly toxic spent pot-lining (information that I became privy to during a 40-day 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. fast, outside the EMA in 2009) – he was still gospelling for smelter.

Nor did he admit that, like the government which preceded his in 2015, he ignored the independent, scientific recommendations of the nineteen experts in the Armstrong Report. A key recommendation was,

“An Environmental Economic Study of this Project must also be undertaken to inform a decision whether or not to proceed with this Highway segment.” And he proceeded with construction of a one-mile part of this Debe to Mon Desir segment, from Fyzabad to Mon Desir, knocking down part of the Otaheite Forest and backfilling lagoons, without the benefit of such a study. Nor did he illumine his hosts on the following part of his party’s manifesto of 2015, “Our approach to governance in our next term will be data based, scientific, holistic and evidence driven, paying due attention at all times to the need for compassion, sensitivity and the respect for the rights and freedoms of all citizens in all matters of state.”

Nor did he inform the gathering that his Government has failed to shift the energy equation to a renewal energy economy – in particular local government reform, recycling, waste management, transport diversification, the democratisation of the energy and water grids, and the development of renewable products and systems.

Nor did he explain why successive governments since the post-1970 renewable energy era, coinciding with

our oil and gas booms, failed to use windfalls to shift the national energy equation to renewables.
Nor, that his Government largely ignores, or is at best reactive to, the cries of villagers suffering from the impacts of extreme floods, landslides and coastal erosion. History shows that those global leaders leading the Climate Change challenge in COP26 have persistently failed.

In 2016, I wrote that the Paris Climate Agreement “is based on delay and deferral…To put it succinctly, the promise pussyfoots on global ecological, and therefore, economic justice.
Big polluter nations have been let off the hook. They can weasel their way out of firm commitments using the longwinded bureaucratic ambiguities in the document.”

Unlike the Barbados Prime Minister, who stared down these leaders, made them squirm in their seats, our smelter gospeller did not properly represent our contribution to global mitigation and adaptation strategies. And he went to plead for money.

If I were the Chancellor of the Exchequer for global mitigation and adaptation projects, I would ask the smelter gospeller the following questions. What renewable energy project has your nation built, either during your administration, or any time preceding? A solar panel, a storage battery? How have you used your fossil fuel energy windfalls for carbon reduction? Why are you pouring millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere with your internal combustion hell-in-acoconut-shell car economy?

How long have solar, carbon sequestration, hydrogen projects been on the drawing boards, “in the pipeline”?

How much reparation are you going to pay the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, since you generate 25 tons per capita of carbon in the atmosphere while they generate an average of 2.6 tons?

I would send the great gospeller packing for practising on the minds of donors and ‘first-world’ consciences, and not grant him a cent.

Dr Wayne Kublalsingh is a Trinidadian activist, academic, writer and university lecturer.