By RICHARDSON DHALAI Tuesday, December 1 2009

ENVIRONMENTAL activist and UWI lecturer Dr Wayne Kublalsingh has signalled his intention to write French President Nicolas Sarkozy requesting his clarification on statements he made on the controversial Alutrint aluminium smelter while Sarkozy was attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Port-of-Spain.

Addressing a news conference at the International Financial Centre, Port-of-Spain last Friday, Sarkozy was asked to comment on TT’s intention to construct an aluminium smelter while at the same time discussing ways and means of reducing carbon emissions, Sarkozy is reported to have replied by saying TT was not at risk of upsetting the world’s carbon balance.

“China and the United States alone account for almost 50 percent of carbon emission which is not the case for India and whatever the significance for Trinidad and Tobago, I don’t think Trinidad and Tobago is at risk of upsetting the world’s carbon balance,” Sarkozy had stated.

When contacted yesterday, Dr Kublalsingh who recently engaged in a sit-down protest at the Ministry of Energy’s offices over delays in providing anti-smelter activists a cost benefit analysis of the smelter project, said his letter would be forwarded to the French President through the French Embassy in Port-of-Spain. “There is now a popular misconception that President Sarkozy is supporting Mr Manning’s dream of an aluminium smelter in Trinidad and Tobago, so we are asking for a definitive statement by the French Government on whether this is so or not,” Kublalsingh said. Kublalsingh said the letter would be hand delivered to the French Embassy later this week.

Asked to comment on whether or not he thought CHOGM was a success given the Port-of-Spain Consensus on Climate Change, Kublalsingh said the CHOGM success would be determined on whether an agreement could be reached at the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen this month.

“CHOGM 2009 in Trinidad and Tobago is a step forward in the right direction because it is a very small instrument and arrived at a consensus at what is possible in Copenhagen but its overall success or failure will be determined by the success or failure of the Copenhagen Summit,” he said.

Kublalsingh also said Manning’s plan to deal with carbon emission by way of carbon sequestration, stated the technology for carbon sequestration was not developed on a commercial scale either nationally or internationally.

Carbon sequestration is a geo-engineering technique for the long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon, for the mitigation of global warming.

Carbon dioxide is usually captured from the atmosphere through biological, chemical or physical processes.

Kublalsingh said a proposal, which had been forwarded to the government since 2002, for the planting of a tree belt on lands owned by the former Caroni Limited, was one method of eliminating green house gases.