The New York Times howls: “One of China's lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.” The paper continues: “In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific.

An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the West Coast.”  Its reporter observes: “Researchers in California, Oregon and Washington noticed specks of sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts of coal combustion coating the silvery surfaces of their mountaintop detectors. These microscopic particles can work their way deep into the lungs, contributing to respiratory damage, heart disease and cancer.”  “Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas,” the paper quoted Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.

Now shifting gear and getting more hysterical, the New York Times warns: “Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.”

Ironically, over in the United Kingdom, a Sunday Times headline screams “Green Dams Hasten rape of Borneo’s Forests!”  According to the writer, Michael Sheridan, “the dams which are proposed to create 1.5 million jobs through industries powered by safe, clean hydro-electricity,” had left campaigners furious and feeling powerless in the face of a project that “will compound the devastation wreaked on Borneo’s peoples and land by…the felling of forests.”

Just how much of the forest lands have been compromised illustrates Sheridan’s penchant for hyperbole and gross exaggeration.  It is well known that Sarawak still has close to 75% forest land which in modern terms would put the state in the upper echelons of states that has not raped its forests by any means or measure.  Compare that to the state of forests in Sheridan’s own home country (probably LESS than 20% forest land left) and the hypocrisy rings out with a grating resonance and hollowness!

According to Sheridan, the project will deprive the Dayaks, the largest indigenous group in Sarawak of their ancestral land, whiich has led to bitter legal battles and has even got the “newly invigorated Malaysian opposition” to campaign and assist the natives to help hitherto powerless tribal peoples to challenge in the courts land grabs.”

In the view of Deforestation Watch, the fact that indigenous tribes in Malaysia could engage in “bitter legal battles” and challenge in the courts land grabs” illustrates that the rule of law is alive and well in Malaysia and disproves Sheridan’s wild assertion that the natives are being deprived of their ancestral lands with impunity!

How palm oil can be dragged into a report on hydro-electric power generation would involve an incredibly absurd abuse of logic, but it did not stop Sheridan from so doing.  What takes the cake is Sheridan’s assertion that “palm oil poses an even more insidious threat, for it promises prosperity and development to Borneo’s poor!”

The trouble with the Sunday Times report is that it betrays Sheridan’s reflexive hostility to all things developmental, even when it concerns poverty eradication in a developing country.  Deforestation Watch is moved to ask: “Since when has a policy decision calculated to improve the economic condition of its own people constituted a violation of the people’s rights?”  Its instructive to note that Sheridan’s own home country (presumably Great Britain/ the United Kingdom) when it was in the business of colonizing others never showed much concern for native rights or any rights, for that matter!  THE END.