COAL barges dominate the river traffic in Samarinda, a sprawling Indonesian city on the island of Borneo. The coal is mined a few miles upriver, scarring the land with craters and toxic lagoons. The digging at one mine has gone on for a decade and gobbled up vast tracts of farmland, says Sapinah, a farmer who frets at the earthworks creeping in the direction of her home.
All eyes are on what big countries, starting with America and China, commit to do towards cooling the planet at the climate conference which begins in Paris on November 30th. But the promises made by lesser emitters of carbon dioxide matter too—not least the ten countries that make up the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The bloc’s carbon emissions are just 7.4% of the global total. But with emissions increasing by 5-6% a year, says Ancha Srinivasan of the Asian Development Bank, they are among the fastest-growing in the world.
ASEAN’s challenge is to find cheap and clean ways to meet a demand for energy that grew by half between 2000 and 2013. A further increase of perhaps 80% is expected by...Continue reading
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