The previous article in this series described the problems likely to be faced by Southeast Asia by climate change. It also observed that, in the future, the governments of that region will be obliged to live up to international agreements, the successors to the Kyoto Protocol, which they were not previously obliged to do. Yet there is very little enthusiasm or interest in these issues in the region – well, schoolchildren and students do get plenty of tuition about the climate change issues but, in a set of societies in which respect for the elderly is generally paramount, little attention is paid to the young by decision-makers.
One of the main issues which will have to be addressed is that of affordable and secure energy sources. Southeast Asia relies upon a range of different energy sources and, although there have recently been discoveries of oil and gas in Myanmar and Cambodia and there may be more to be found in the Gulf of Thailand, few countries are genuinely self-sufficient in energy terms. Even Indonesia, for long a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), is quietly debating whether to withdraw from that body because it imports at least as much as it exports – oil comes in many grades and countries which produce oil are most likely both to import some types while exporting other types.
The impulse to move to other types of energy production has been led by the proponents of hydroelectric power. This seems to be a ‘free’ kind of energy because it relies upon trapping some part of the power of a flowing river behind a dam and regulating the flow of that water such that it can be used to drive turbines and hence produce power. Hydropower dams have sprouted across the region, most notably along the River Mekong in its progress through China and in Laos at the Nam Theun one and two dams. The results have been mixed. Damming has been supported for some decades by the World Bank which has argued that it provides a genuinely important means for local communities, which may have access to few resources apart from the water which flows past them, to achieve economic development by having an enormous input of infrastructural construction and development in its vicinity. There are costs to be paid for this, of course, since many of the local people are required to move away from the site of the dam once it has been submerged under water. In the largest ever dam project, the Three Gorges Dam in China, millions of people have been displaced. There are concerns that this effect will be magnified in Myanmar (Burma) where the military junta would seemingly be happy to see thousands of dissident ethnic minority people driven from their homes.
