Article:Our excessive lifestyle

Tuesday May 12, 2009

WE ARE buying more but not necessarily using more. We can only wear a shirt, a pair of pants, one pair of underwear, a pair of socks and a pair of shoes at one time but we only need to open our wardrobe and see what we are doing wrong.

There are houses with two occupants but four or five cars parked in front. Couples with two children live in a house with eight rooms – and an equal number of bathrooms – with air-conditioners. They have food to throw away after every meal and even special food for their pets. All these take resources to produce, including the most precious resource of all, land.

Oil palm and rubber trees have taken up more than five million hectares of Malaysian forests – forests which, if managed properly, will provide revenue of no less than what these two crops can bring in. A hectare of forest will provide 50 cum of logs a year and at a conservative price of RM800 per cum, the money will exceed what oil palm provides us with now.

In terms of water retention and production of oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, oil palm lags far behind most timber species. The amount of carbon stored in oil palm trunks is also much less. These characteristics alone give you the reason for the world's rising temperatures.

Most natural forest in the United States and Europe were turned into farm land decades ago, producing cotton for our clothes, maize and soya bean for our food, grazing land for cattle and other livestock, and other things which we abuse and waste. Can we blame poor farmers in the Amazon Basin for planting more crops when there is never enough of what they produce?

Then there are companies that manufacture aluminium and other metals which need a huge amount of energy to produce. They convince people to use these high-carbon emission products in their houses instead of good old timber window frame, hand rails, flooring and furniture. If you were to buy wood items, you will be storing the carbon which is currently in excess in the environment.

The world is run by the uninformed or the ignorant or the uneducated, I must say. For years now, they have been rewarding people who emit greenhouse gases while those who take it out from the environment are ignored. Right now, if you emit one million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent and you invest in some "clean" technology and reduce your emission by 300,000 tonnes a year, you are allowed to sell the amount which you have reduced. This scheme was invented by those who buy these carbon reduction credits and sell them to developed countries which need to reduce their emissions.

But what happens to the 700,000 tonnes of CO2 that are emitted? Nobody says: "Please pay the world for these 700,000 tonnes."

The carbon credit dealers make money whereas people who plant trees are not rewarded by the same mechanism. Trees have been sustaining life on this planet for millions of years. The tree plantation industry needs a minimum gestation of 15 years before any revenue can be seen. This industry needs carbon credits more than any other industry as, without trees, man will surely perish.

Already we do not find tadpoles in puddles after rain, bees hovering around the sugar cane juice seller, frogs and snails in the garden, worms in the ground. We have to change before there is no more us on Earth.

Kian Kok Yeo
Kuala Lumpur

This article was taken from: The Star Online: Lifestyle: Focus 12 May 2009