Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s rejection of claims that Trinidad and Tobago is one of the world’s largest polluters on a per-capita basis is an attempt to deflect international attention and carry on with his plans to build even more polluting plants.

This is the view of University of the West Indies lecturers physicist Dr Peter Vine and environmental activist Dr Wayne Kublalsingh, who said Manning’s stance on the issue was personal and not shared by citizens.

During a news conference on Thursday, the eve of the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting, Manning dismissed claims that this country was among the world’s top ten offenders in carbon emissions on a per-capita basis. He said when the earth responds to concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it does not do so on a per-capita basis, but on the basis of absolute emissions.

Dr Vine said Manning was speaking for himself, ’not for his Cabinet and definitely not the country’, when he made those remarks. He said the country would pay heavily for those emissions.

Dr Kublalsingh said the measurements of the emissions were usually done in three ways-per capita, volume and per hectare-but Manning chose to look at it another way so he could escape easily ’and introduce 1.9 million tonnes of carbon emission in Claxton Bay and La Brea’.

There are stalled plans to build an aluminium smelter in La Brea and a proposal to build a steel plant in Claxton Bay.

Dr Vine said Trinidad and Tobago was in the top five for carbon emissions.

Dr Kublalsingh wrote to Manning yesterday, stating, ’It is not cool to embark on high capital and energy intensive work without conducting diligence studies, or do high consumption health and ecological projects without cost benefit analysis.’

He stated that Manning and those at the top floor of the International Financial Centre must tell the nation the costs factored in for the smelter.

Those factors, he said, included the loss of three dams, 1,000 acres of forest, beekeeping industries, farms and orchards, the loss of oil wells and well capping, infrastructural costs, the costs of loans for the smelters, power plant and port; relocation loans for at least three communities; the cost of gas subsidies to the power plant for the supply of electricity to smelter, the costs of salaries to Alutrint for four and a half years, legal costs, the costs of rod mill, cable and wire plants; technical services, engineering, soil testing and consultancies, Environmental Impact Assessments costs and administrative costs.