Every time I think I’ve seen the craziest thing yet about global warming mania…along comes something else. From the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific blog, comes this bizarre story from Thailand that shows what lengths a government will go to to slap a global warming fine on farmers.
Humans cutting down forest land to farm is nothing new. However, charging rural farmers for causing global warming is. A controversial formula is quantifying the damage villagers have to pay for their small scale farming. Now, the villagers are taking a stand against what they know is wrong.
PHETCHABUN – Early one Thursday morning, a gun was pointed at Ms. Kwanla Saikhumtung, a 34-year-old mother, because she was farming.
The man who pointed the gun was one of ten armed officers from Phu Pha Daeng, the local wildlife sanctuary in Lomsak district. After observing the villagers for three days, the officers finally informed Ms. Kwanla and twelve fellow villagers from Huay Kontha that they were trespassing on wildlife sanctuary land. They demanded that the villagers come to the police station to talk with them.
They refused. The villager that hired them paid taxes on the plot, leading the villagers to believe they had a right to work the land, and they worried about finishing their work.
The officers quickly became annoyed. One threatened to shoot any villager that resisted the officers’ orders.
“Are you really going to shoot? I’m here to harvest the corn, and you want to shoot us?” Ms. Kwanla shouted. She then bravely grabbed the barrel of the gun, pressed it to her chest, and said, “If you’re going to shoot, shoot.”
The officer lowered his gun. That night, the officers marched the reluctant villagers through the community and drove them to the police station.
This incident was the beginning of a seven-year-long legal battle, pitting Ms. Kwanla against the Thai government. She and the other twelve villagers — the youngest only sixteen at the time — were first charged with trespassing.
The real shock, however, came when they were slapped with a 470,000 baht fine for contributing to global warming under the charge of causing environmental damage.
As the landowner was paying taxes on the plot of land in question, he had the right to grow crops on it. Since Ms. Kwanla and the other villagers had been hired to harvest his corn, it had seemed that they were not breaking the law by being there. However, unknown to the landholder, his plot overlapped with the wildlife sanctuary land.
The Royal Forestry Department (RFD) fined the villagers for cutting down trees and farming, drawing from the 1992 National Environmental Quality Act which forbids “destruction, loss, or damage to natural resources owned by the State.” Their fine was determined according to a formula used to calculate environmental damage. The formula measures the increase in temperature caused by cutting down trees. Any increase in the land temperature shows ‘global warming’. In essence, cutting down trees to farm corn leads to global warming.
The Huay Kontha villagers have a running joke, “Because we pick the corn, the world gets hotter.”
The charges that Ms. Kwanla and the other villagers face shed light on an emerging trend in Thailand. Land dispute issues are becoming increasingly common. According to Pramote Pholpinyo, coordinator of the Northeast Land Reform Network (LRN), there are currently 35-40 “global warming” cases against villagers in Thailand, with charges amounting to almost 33 million baht.
Full story at the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific blog
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h/t to WUWT reader “brokenyogi“
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Since I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in that burg I’d like to share my observations.
The Thai govt. and main stream Thai society had bought in to the AGW and Green Goodness lock, stock, and barrel. A massive green indoctrination campaign is in progress, spurred on by the usual NGOs and UN agencies. People are to be ostracized for ‘wasting energy’ and ‘demand side management’ is the new status quo.
There is plenty money to be skimmed and the scammers are hard at it.
Bio-Diesel from palm oil had caused cooking oil shortage with regularity.
The cost savings from B5/10/15 was never realized but the industry kept lobbying the govt. to keep the program going so they can maintain profitability.
The govt. finally concede (again) and dropped their Bio-Diesel mandate (again) earlier this year.
The Ethanol industry had caused sugar shortage, or at least inflated the price of sugar (and food prices), for the past few years. The govt. continues to penalize non-ethanol user with upwards of 47% tax at the pump and effectively doubling the refinery cost on regular gas while subsidizing E85 so the pump price is LESS than refinery cost. But I have yet to run in to an actual E85 user…
The country is short on conventional fuel sources. They’ve got a few gas well in the Gulf of Thailand, a smidgeon of crude oil, a few small lignite mines, and already too many hydro dams.
The NGOs had seen to it that the country will not be building a Nuclear reactor anytime soon and the population can just pay to import energy.
All the usual opportunists had jumped in on the govt. renewable energy programs and setting up solar/wind farm to reap the juicy feed-in subsidy, they gets something like $0.12/KWH on top of the prevailing KWH price. That’s $0.12/KWH subsidy in the country where minimum wage is $10 a day and the electric bill for a typical 2000ft2 house often runs over $150/mo.
The irony is that Thailand isn’t all that suitable for solar and the best area for solar farm is also the best area for farming, and they are pretty short on farm land as it is.
Plant a tree, gets carbon credit. They’ve planted thousands of junk trees around the airport to offset the air-traffic carbon footprint. The company who got the contract to plant those trees at the minimum of 10x the market price is very happy, and so is the officials who got the kickbacks.
The feel good tree planting campaign had been going on for as far as I can remember.
Meanwhile, illegal logging and encroachment of primary forest for commercial agricultural use is also going on hot and heavy.
A prime example is the Corn Hills of Nan.
Decades ago, the govt. had declared that any land with more than 20 degree grade is considered ‘protected forest’ and can not be used for farming or habitation.
Up in the NE province of Nan, thousands of square miles of primary forerst with clearly over 20 degree slope had been razed to farm corn to supply the feed and Ethanol industry.
The govt. have done nothing to mitigate this problem and when the corn price dropped the farmers would shut down the roads and demand compensations from the govt….
That, along with the compensations for the seasonal flash flood and mudslide since there is no more vegetation to hold up the soil and soak up the monsoon.
Same problem all over the country, with different cash crop but sometime the same financier.
Yup, it’s a real mess over there.
I find myself in agreement with all the following commentators. I think they make an important point that the left wing/right wing debate in this context is fruitless.
Allan MacRae says: July 1, 2012 at 9:18 am
Michael Wassil says: July 1, 2012 at 12:25 am
Chuck Wiese says: July 1, 2012 at 11:03 am
Here’s a few dumb questions:
Who gets fined for the forest fires that happen in the western US every year? Those fires emit enough CO2 to make the top 200 list of NATIONS annual CO2 emissions. Just saying……..
PS, rumor has it that blacktop and concrete hold heat far longer than grass. Why does the national weather service have their measuring stations located at airports?
Here’s a sure fire way to control global warming: just hold your breath for 10 minutes. Problem solved.