A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

286 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingthe subdistrict administrative authority’s committee and residents in‘surrounding villages’. Yet there is little evidence that this ‘comprehensive’programme was satisfactory to local residents. According toDNV itself, the meeting it claimed to hold with the Lam Mai subdistrictauthority took less than one hour.Throughout, DNV presented the project and its participant firms asa ‘black box’ or neutral machine into which formulas for environmentalimprovement, participation and good community relationscould be fed with near-automatic results. Local environmental problemswere seen as stemming from a mere technical gap – one that theCDM project would help fill.Similarly, when at an August 1999 public consultation few respondentsagreed with the project, DNV put it down to ‘previous dissatisfactionwith the dust caused by AP’s operation’ and claimed that, followingthe installation of a new boiler which uses sawdust, ‘Lam Mai[subdistrict] residents no longer disagree with the Project’. 134Are you saying that that’s not true?It’s certainly not the impression given by a number of local residentsinterviewed more recently. To them, the workings of the firms involvedin the project, far from being enclosed in a ‘black box’, areboth open to view and of powerful interest.Several people interviewed pointed out that the AP’s ‘public participationprogramme’ referred to so uncritically by DNV, instead of involvingdissemination of useful information, has featured expenses -paid tours for local people to biomass power plants in Thailand’s centralregion. Such tours, they reported, have included hotel accommodation,food and free visits for some male participants to localprostitutes, but no opportunities for close inspection of the plants inquestion or chances to meet local people.Local residents also pointed to AP’s name on a pavilion that the companygave to a Buddhist temple adjacent to its factory after temple monkscomplained about pollution – an act incurring powerful reciprocal obligations.They noted that other modes of persuasion have also beenused. One elderly resident interviewed reported receiving no less thanthree death threats as a result of voicing criticisms of the AP project.So some of the locals aren’t too keen on carbon trading?Who knows? They understand well what biomass is, but they’ve neverhad a chance to discuss the carbon market. Most people are unawareof the AP project’s projected role in this new global trade.