Perhaps he ought not to have raised the allegation of rhetoric, which is clearly what Awang Tengah is fearful of being accused of.

Unless the ubiquitous state Minister for Natural Resources and Urban Development is willing to follow up his constant ‘eco-claims’ with concrete facts and proper transparency then, in fact, it is exactly what it all amounts to.

To back his self-promoting propaganda Tengah refers to having planted 35 million trees, for example.  Yet, owing to the lack of transparency of his forest and land survey departments, there is no data on what kind of trees they are, where they were planted and h0w they have progressed.

On past information people are entitled to assume that these trees consist of plantations of oil palm and fast grow foreign cash crops (which both cause environmental devastation and ADD to carbon emissions from the land base of Sarawak).

Moreover, Mr Tengah fails to refer to the number of natural trees (which conserve the environment and genuinely capture carbon) which have simultaneously been felled during that period in Sarawak as a result of both licensed and unlicensed logging which his state government has failed to tackle.

Satellite imagery has revealed the appalling level of continuing destruction in supposedly protected areas, which for strange reasons the state government and Tenth’s environment department have done nothing about.

This despite hundreds of police reports and complaints by local communities who have found themselves ignored time and again.  Meanwhile, as Sarawak Report has recently detailed, agricultural communities are being turfed off their legitimate lands in the name of extending natural parks on degraded land, whilst prime remaining natural forests see no protection from blatant felling. Why?

Continuing to back up his flatulent and unsubstantiated claims of being a global leader against climate change (which the forest state of Sarawak could and indeed ought to be) Tengah then moves on to boast about a host of half baked projects supposedly adopted by the government, but which are barely past the newspaper announcement stage.

These ‘good ideas’ that have gone virtually nowhere are touted as if they represent genuine progress, namely his references to “pioneering efforts in Sustainable Aviation Fuel production and exploring advanced carbon capture, utilisation, and storage technologies.”

It is the definition of mere rhetoric to claim that these paper plans are already “mitigating climate change impacts but also creating new industries and high-quality jobs”! 

Beyond a couple of meetings and MOUs and lots of announcements in the client media, there is nothing to speak of these initiatives – certainly in terms of concrete climate mitigation.  Nor will there be for years, if ever.

Likewise, the cascading dams, ‘green’ hydro-power and all the other mega projects that should be treated for what they are – yet another onslaught of resource extraction promoted by those in control of the Sarawak government.

As for certification schemes and sustainable forest areas, these are again meaningless concepts without proper monitoring and transparency of which there is none in Sarawak. Putting a label on a hundred thousand hectares of a landscape where millions of hectares have been ravaged for decades does not solve the massive problem of degradation in the state.

Equally, expressing an intent is by no means the same thing as achieving a result.

Awang Tengah was blatant at the last election as he walked through the market place publicly handing out RM50 notes.  He is not a man whose mere assurances and rhetorical claims should be given any credence.