Kim­ber­ly Mack­han

Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning sought to dis­pel con­cerns that T&T en­gaged in a lack­adaisi­cal ap­proach to pol­lu­tion af­ter a jour­nal­ist from the British Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (BBC) high­light­ed that the twin-is­land re­pub­lic ranked among the top ten worst na­tions on the emis­sions per capi­ta in­di­ca­tor. Man­ning said T&T un­der­stood its re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to both the lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ties and would take vol­un­tary ac­tion about its "neg­a­tive con­tri­bu­tion" to cli­mate change, re­gard­less of the out­come of the Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing (CHOGM) in Port-of-Spain.

"Yes, we are an in­dus­tri­alised coun­try and, yes, T&T has to con­cern it­self that we have been mak­ing a neg­a­tive con­tri­bu­tion to this cli­mate change mat­ter," Man­ning said. "We have al­ready made it clear that what­ev­er agree­ments are ar­rived (af­ter CHOGM), T&T un­der­stands its re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty and to its own pop­u­la­tion and on a vol­un­tary ba­sis T&T is go­ing to seek to do some­thing about it." Man­ning was re­spond­ing to ques­tions from the BBC's Diplo­mat­ic Cor­re­spon­dent James Rob­bins, who not­ed T&T was ranked high among the top ten car­bon diox­ide emit­ters.

Ac­cord­ing to Man­ning, Trinidad and To­ba­go re­ject­ed stud­ies about car­bon diox­ide that were con­duct­ed on a per capi­ta ba­sis. He added: "When the earth re­sponds to con­cen­tra­tion(s) of green house gas­es in the at­mos­phere, it does not do so on a per capi­ta ba­sis, it does it on the ba­sis of ab­solute emis­sions and there­fore T&T cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly re­jects any analy­sis of this mat­ter on a per capi­ta ba­sis. "The per capi­ta ar­gu­ment is one that we con­sid­er un­sus­tain­able and one that T&T cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly re­jects."