street wise:political carbon footprints

Arn comes out four times a year. Like Fa Diaw Kan, ("Same Sky") it is a product of the political left, with long articles dedicated to different viewpoints on what is going on in Thai society.

In the January-March edition, there are pages of cartoons entitled "Culture in the Greenhouse" by Renoo Panyadee. The story line is brilliant, based on the carbon-credit trading scheme.

Those in the energy sector are familiar with the scheme. Carbon credits are a key component of national and international attempts to mitigate the growth in concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs). One carbon credit is equal to one tonne of carbon.

The idea is to allow market mechanisms to drive industrial and commercial processes in the direction of low emissions, or less "carbon-intensive" approaches than are used when there is no cost to emitting carbon dioxide and other GHGs into the atmosphere.

Since GHG-mitigation projects generate credits, this approach can be used to finance carbon-reduction schemes between trading partners and around the world. In a way, companies in developed countries that have emitted huge amounts of carbon can buy "credit" from power-generators in developing countries.

In his article, Renoo compared greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to political pollution.

Nowadays, as the one-man, one-vote approach is applied, whenever an election takes place, the candidates of the middle-class normally lose due to the greater number of votes cast by low-income earners. This leads to dissent among the middle-income earners and creates GHGs in the form of political protests.

The protests result in benefits for the middle-income group, but the entire nation suffers from them. Thus a scientist should conclude that rights and freedom are pollution, or carbon, Renoo writes.

Like developed countries in the carbon-credit trading scheme, the low-income earners cause the dissent.

Thus while carbon-trading helps developed countries to pursue business expansion without worries about GHG emission, there should be some way in which low-income voters would "pay" as they likewise enjoy the one-man-one-vote philosophy regardless of tax remittance to the national coffers. Renoo labels this a method to tackle "democratic carbon".

Want to know more? Read on this Wednesday.