Golfers to Indiana Jones choke on smog from Sumatra fires
03 Apr 2014
As smoke from Indonesia’s burning forests drifted across the Strait of Malacca into Singapore last June, the pollution index shot up and Ong Eng Tong’s golf course shut down, Bloomberg reported.
“Once the PSI reaches 150 or 200, they have to close,” said Ong, a 71-year-old independent energy consultant. His Singapore Island Country Club was overwhelmed as the Pollutant Standards Index surged on June 21 to a record 401, a “hazardous” reading in a city averaging less than 50 on most days. “I stayed indoors and turned on the air-con.”
This year may be worse, stoked by drought and El Nino. Backed by activists including Harrison Ford, Singapore is pushing fines for culprits overseas. Even Indonesia is faulting last month’s local response to blazes that sickened 50,000 in Sumatra, where fires are set to turn forests into crop fields. Burning in the region’s peatlands emitted as much greenhouse gases as 89 million cars, according to the Center for International Forestry Research.
The unrelenting fires are preventing Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono from keeping his 2009 promise to cut Indonesia’s greenhouse gases by 26 percent. The government has yet to release data on emissions for any year since Yudhoyono started his second term, and Indonesia would be the last member to ratify the Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreement on trans-boundary haze.
“Deforestation creates more carbon pollution than all of the cars, trains and planes in the world combined, making Indonesia and Brazil the world’s third- and fourth-largest emitters after the U.S. and China,” according to Jeff Horowitz, the Berkeley, California-based founder of the non-profit Avoided Deforestation Partners.
Gary Paoli, a director at Daemeter Consulting, was quoted in this article, of which the full version can be found here.