Nobody is perfect. Not even I. The sooner we admit it the better it is for all of us. And, yet, it takes an artfully staged Eco School Parliament to remind us all that we have failed to preserve our natural heritage for the next generations and that six-year-olds are reminding us 50-somethings that lack of control has led to an exaggerated amount of water extraction from this tiny island and that if something were not done, and fast, we will be paying a high ecological price for our lack of commitment sooner than we think.
Although this was, no doubt, a PR exercise of sorts it shows that even these "put up jobs" have taken the art of criticism very seriously.
Therefore, while Finance Minister Tonio Fenech implied in his article Politics Are Dirty; Truth Is Clean that there will be up to 20 per cent of toxic waste and 80 per cent non-toxic waste produced by the new Delimara power station extension, a full page ad in this paper categorically states: "The Delimara power station will not produce toxic waste".
Now I am perplexed all over again. Whom should I believe? Should I believe the minister who is ultimately responsible for the project and implies that only (sic) 20 per cent of the Delimara wastage will be toxic and will be disposed of in the most secure manner possible or some king of spin who designed this advert? Twenty per cent of a power station's wastage is not something to be sneezed at.
The advert also states that I will be "able to monitor online its effect on the air. Anytime." Apart from its peculiar grammar, this statement would be utterly amazing were it not so brazen. Therefore, should I decide one fine day to monitor the air quality and find that the harmful PM10s, or whatever they are, have increased, what should I do? Wear a mask? Buy a ventolin pump? Or resign myself to that dreaded fate that has become three in five?
Yes, the Big C, as it is called, affects three in five of us in one way or another and it will take more than Minister Fenech and his cohorts of spinners to persuade me that "nothing is cleaner than the truth". I have had experience of all this before when I developed acute asthmatic symptoms working in what was called Hexagon House in Marsa in 2000 and 2001.
Not all is lost. That bastion of arch-conservatism, the law court, has installed solar panels on its roof to reduce its annual energy consumption bill of €80,000. In the first four months it has saved €1,700 and if my math is up to scratch, which it usually isn't, it will reduce the bill by €5,300 or thereabouts annually. Nothing dramatic, however, I still feel that this sort of saving is better than none at all.
I remain convinced that we are not doing enough to foster eco-friendly energy on a national scale and that, by and large, individual installation remains beyond the financial reach of most of us.
The more time passes I become more convinced that the Delimara extension is unwise and has only been engendered because of the panic caused by the recent power cuts. No long-term solution has been put forward, apart from the hope that we will be connected to the continental gas grid in 2015. So we will have to suffer pollution for another few years till this is made possible, won't we?
Meanwhile, Gasco Energy was exempted from paying a €98,000 fee because its services are in the national interest. Gasco is building a €25 million gas plant in a disused quarry on the outskirts of Birżebbuġa from where it used to operate for many years. The Birżebbuġa mayor, while expressing satisfaction that this industrial plant had, finally, been moved out of the village centre also ruefully remarked that the €98,000 fee could have been very useful to the council, which proves that one cannot always have one's cake and eat it too.
We are a tiny island and our resources are limited. Our lifestyles are relatively high. We are consumers par excellence and the waste we produce, when one comes to think of it, is humungous. We must change. Packaging has proved to be our nemesis. Running a household of two plus cat entails a large bag of packaging put out every Tuesday; sometimes two. Now all this plastic and polystyrene cannot be good for us, can it? I am not sure where and how the grey bags are disposed of, however, I feel that consumerism has its downside.
Whatever happened to the grease-proof brown paper of my childhood and the recycled bottles of whisky used to collect the ration oil? Being as primitive as that is today something as extinct as the dodo, as we will soon all be if we go on destroying the planet the way we are at present.
What are we doing to ourselves? What sort of Malta are we handing down to our children? Somewhere in the vicinity, as I write, some leviathan in the employ of a building contractor is at work. Its distant purring and grunting is accompanied by faint noxious fumes that have invaded my study-cum-studio overlooking Wied Għomor. This is not an isolated case. These fumes also affect the government primary school situated within yards of my apartment just as they affect me. Within a few minutes, hundreds of boys and girls, some of whom have just left toddlerhood, will come out to play and breathe in air that is anything but clean and fresh. How tragic!
kzt@onvol.net