Back in No­vem­ber 2007 at the Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing in Kam­pala, Ugan­da, then Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning ex­pressed the con­cern that while Trinidad and To­ba­go’s re­lease of tox­ic gas­es in­to the at­mos­phere was com­par­a­tive­ly small, on a per capi­ta ba­sis, it was high.

Mr Man­ning was deeply con­cerned then that cal­cu­la­tions of high emit­ters were be­ing made on a per capi­ta ba­sis rather than on the ex­treme­ly high to­tal vol­umes of coun­tries such as Chi­na, In­dia, the Unit­ed States and west­ern Eu­ro­pean states. His was the recog­ni­tion that with this coun­try’s ex­ten­sive en­er­gy in­dus­try and quite small pop­u­la­tion, a mere 1.3 mil­lion, we would be placed amongst the high per capi­ta emit­ters.

Ac­cord­ing to da­ta giv­en by Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Pene­lope Beck­les, that time has ar­rived. “T&T has a high per capi­ta en­er­gy con­sump­tion which mea­sures 5,911 kilo­watt hours when com­pared to the world av­er­age of three thou­sand eighty-one kilo­watt hours per capi­ta,” the Min­is­ter said ear­li­er this week.

In a sur­vey done by Sta­tista, an in­ter­na­tion­al agency which mea­sures such mat­ters, T&T ranks fourth amongst CO2 emit­ters in met­ric tonnes per capi­ta. This lands us amongst coun­tries such as Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, Mid­dle East­ern coun­tries with mas­sive quan­ti­ties of en­er­gy emis­sions from world-sized en­er­gy plants.

As re­port­ed by this pa­per, Min­is­ter Beck­les not­ed that half of the house­holds in this coun­try have a con­sump­tion lev­el on par with the North Amer­i­can house­holds and near­ly three times the glob­al av­er­age.

“These are un­flat­ter­ing sta­tis­tics cou­pled with the in­creas­ing­ly pro­gres­sive in­ter­na­tion­al cli­mate agen­da which have en­cour­aged the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go to pur­sue cli­mate ac­tion through the de­vel­op­ment of a broad cli­mate agen­da,” the Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter said.

As has been not­ed in this news­pa­per and else­where, with T&T’s main eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty cen­tred around the en­er­gy in­dus­try, there has to be re­al con­cern about our con­tri­bu­tion to the in­ter­na­tion­al cli­mate change dis­as­ters; which are al­ready se­vere­ly im­pact­ing.

The fact is that while we have to con­tin­ue mak­ing use of the pe­tro­le­um re­sources, we have to be con­scious of our emis­sions foot­print. So too, T&T has to meet its in­ter­na­tion­al com­mit­ments to keep the in­crease in glob­al out­put of nox­ious fumes with­in the 1.5-de­gree C lev­els agreed up­on in Paris.

While the in­creas­ing im­pacts are be­ing felt comes the sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis from the World Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Or­gan­i­sa­tion, in its Glob­al An­nu­al to Decadal Cli­mate Up­date (May 2023), that it is quite like­ly that in one of the next five years, the cru­cial 1.5 C glob­al warm­ing thresh­old will be breached. If that were to hap­pen, it stands to rea­son that there will be se­vere neg­a­tive hu­man im­pacts around the world.

“It will be a stark warn­ing of what’s in store if we don’t quick­ly re­duce emis­sions to net ze­ro,” is one of the con­clu­sions of the WMO’s Re­port.

At the Wind Pow­er Gen­er­a­tion con­fer­ence in Port-of-Spain, where Min­is­ter Beck­les spoke, dis­cus­sions cen­tred around the es­tab­lish­ment of the leg­isla­tive frame­work to fa­cil­i­tate the ex­ploita­tion of the winds around the is­lands.

So too, there are a cou­ple so­lar plants be­ing de­vel­oped for large in­dus­tri­al plants and for house­hold us­ages. The time is up­on us, we will not be spared the wrath of cli­mate change.