This week's guest colum­nist On Clean­ing Up The Mess, Min­is­ter of Hous­ing and the En­vi­ron­ment Dr ROODAL MOONI­LAL, gives us the news that Cab­i­net has ap­proved the pol­i­cy of green­ing the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route and tells us ex­act­ly what this means for cit­i­zens.

T&T's green­house gas emis­sions for the pe­ri­od 1990 to 2006 in­di­cate that the en­er­gy, trans­porta­tion and in­dus­tri­al sec­tors ac­count for the bulk of car­bon diox­ide emis­sions. Green­house gas emis­sions from the trans­porta­tion sec­tor alone have in­creased by 278 per cent over the pe­ri­od 1990 to 2006. As a small is­land de­vel­op­ing state, Trinidad and To­ba­go is par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble to the ad­verse im­pacts of cli­mate change. Sec­tors that are like­ly to be im­pact­ed are agri­cul­ture, hu­man health, hu­man set­tle­ments, coastal zones, and wa­ter re­sources as well as cross sec­toral so­cio-eco­nom­ic sys­tems. Sta­tis­tics from the Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port in­di­cate that there are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 630,000 ve­hi­cles in the coun­try and this amount is be­ing in­creased by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 30,000 an­nu­al­ly.

Recog­nis­ing the con­tri­bu­tion of the trans­porta­tion sec­tor to green­house gas emis­sions, the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go has at­tempt­ed to re­duce emis­sions from the trans­porta­tion sec­tor by en­cour­ag­ing the in­creased use of al­ter­na­tive low car­bon emis­sion fu­els such as Com­pressed Nat­ur­al Gas (CNG) by the es­tab­lish­ment of eco­nom­ic in­cen­tives through the re­moval of Val­ue Added Tax­es (VAT) and im­port du­ties on CNG con­ver­sion kits. To en­hance this ef­fort, the Cab­i­net has re­cent­ly agreed that the main artery of the road net­work utilised by pub­lic (bus­es) and pri­vate (maxi taxis) mass trans­porta­tion, the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route, be con­vert­ed in­to a "Green" route. Un­der this pro­pos­al it is en­vi­sioned that:

• All ve­hi­cles us­ing the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route would be pow­ered by ei­ther low car­bon emis­sion fu­els (CNG), have ze­ro emis­sions (elec­tric pow­er) or a com­bi­na­tion of elec­tric pow­er and fos­sil fu­el (hy­brid pow­er);

• All street lights along the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route would be con­vert­ed to so­lar pow­ered street lights; and

• All traf­fic lights along the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route would be con­vert­ed to so­lar pow­ered traf­fic lights.

The Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route would be "greened" through the fol­low­ing phas­es:

Phase I.

• Ex­plor­ing the fea­si­bil­i­ty of the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Co­op­er­a­tion (PTSC) re­plac­ing, in the first in­stance, its fleet of bus­es that op­er­ate on the pri­or­i­ty bus route to elec­tric bus­es.

• The Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Co­op­er­a­tion (T&TEC) con­vert­ing all street lights along the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route to so­lar pow­ered street lights.

•The Min­istry of Works and In­fra­struc­ture and/or Min­istry of Trans­port con­vert­ing all the traf­fic lights along the pri­or­i­ty bus route to so­lar pow­ered traf­fic lights.

Phase II

• It is pro­posed that ap­pro­pri­ate sub­si­dies and ex­emp­tions be grant­ed to sup­port the adop­tion of elec­tric pow­ered ve­hi­cles (bus­es and cars) and hy­brid ve­hi­cles (diesel /elec­tric and gaso­line/ elec­tric hy­brids) as an in­cen­tive for the pri­vate sec­tor to ac­quire such ve­hi­cles, and fur­ther in­cen­tives be of­fered to en­sure that fu­ture users wish­ing to be au­tho­rised for use of the bus route must be op­er­at­ing low emis­sion or ze­ro emis­sion ve­hi­cles.

• The Na­tion­al Pe­tro­le­um Mar­ket­ing Com­pa­ny take the nec­es­sary steps to im­prove the fu­el dis­tri­b­u­tion in­fra­struc­ture to make CNG read­i­ly avail­able to fa­cil­i­tate ad­e­quate pro­vi­sion of ser­vices for ve­hi­cles on the bus route.

Glob­al­ly, green­house gas­es are at­trib­uted to be­ing the ma­jor cause of glob­al warm­ing and glob­al cli­mate change. Cli­mate change pro­jec­tions for Trinidad and To­ba­go in­clude high­er tem­per­a­tures and low­er rain­fall. In spite of its mi­nus­cule ab­solute emis­sions, Trinidad and To­ba­go is com­mit­ted to play­ing its part as a re­spon­si­ble mem­ber of the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty.

To­wards this end, the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment has adopt­ed a Cli­mate Change Pol­i­cy, the im­ple­men­ta­tion of which would in­crease the use of new and in­no­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies that have low­er lev­els of emis­sions; en­cour­ag­ing the use of clean en­er­gy tech­nol­o­gy such as nat­ur­al gas tech­nol­o­gy and clean pro­duc­tion tech­nol­o­gy; en­cour­ag­ing the use of re­new­able en­er­gy that have ze­ro emis­sions; and adopt­ing more en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient tech­nolo­gies and prac­tices.