Pe­ter Bal­roop

A last-ditch ef­fort to force Gov­ern­ment to aban­don all plans to es­tab­lish the Alutrint smelter in La Brea has been launched. The de­ci­sion was tak­en when lead­ing econ­o­mists, en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists, an­ti-smelter cam­paign­ers and con­cerned cit­i­zens came to­geth­er for a sym­po­sium, chaired by Prof Patrick Wat­son, head of the Sir Arthur Mc­Shine School of Eco­nom­ics and for­mer Cen­tral Bank di­rec­tor, at St Mary's Col­lege au­di­to­ri­um in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day.

It was econ­o­mist Mary King, a re­spect­ed en­er­gy cor­re­spon­dent, who gave the smelter project a scorn­ful thumbs-down, stress­ing that it would dri­ve T&T to eco­nom­ic ru­in. "I don't think the coun­try can af­ford not to shut it down," King de­clared. The sym­po­sium came up with a res­o­lu­tion to be for­ward­ed to the Gov­ern­ment, in­sist­ing that it cease all plans to pro­ceed with the smelter. Both King and Wat­son, as well as en­gi­neer Reg Pot­ter, who sat at the head ta­ble, stressed it was like pulling teeth to get the Gov­ern­ment to lev­el with the pop­u­lace and pub­li­cise a cost-ben­e­fit analy­sis for the project, which all par­tic­i­pants agreed had a health risk at­tached to it hang­ing over the coun­try.

En­vi­ron­men­tal­ist Prof Julien Ken­ny and his col­league, Dr Pe­ter Vine, warned that the smelter would be a ma­jor car­bon diox­ide pol­luter.

King said the smelter was a nat­ur­al gas guz­zler that would de­plete T&T's re­serves. She was pes­simistic about any ma­jor gas finds in the near fu­ture to feed the smelter. Par­tic­i­pat­ing from the floor, char­tered sur­vey­or Afra Ray­mond equat­ed the smelter project with the CL Fi­nan­cial bailout and the shut­ting down of BWIA, and be­ing re­placed with Caribbean Air­lines...None was vi­able, and they were just drains on the Trea­sury.

An­oth­er par­tic­i­pant said T&T was full of crazy peo­ple, be­cause Prof Ken Julien had been at the fore­front of the IS­COTT project in Point Lisas that was los­ing mil­lions a day, and now he was in the van­guard with Alutrint, and no one was say­ing a word. The peo­ple of La Brea and fur­ther afield were warned to fight the Alutrint smelter with their last, dy­ing breath.