Everyone can see: In Cambodia as elsewhere, climate has lost its mind. Heavy rainfalls and periods of intense heat now follow each other in the most haphazard fashion based on a calendar quite far from the one we once learned at school or in the rice paddies and fields as something that was as eternal as day follows night.
At issue, the warming of the atmosphere and the oceans caused by human activity and greenhouse gas emissions it generates. This is not me saying this but the international experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
These greenhouse gas emissions mainly come from the major industrialized nations. Of course, Cambodia is not part of this family of large polluters and, like other developing countries, is included in the long list of countries victims of climate disruptions.
For all that, the country must not merely take part in the carbon market, mechanism that enables, in broad outline, to put up for sale the emission allowance reserves of non-polluting countries for the entities that exceed quotas, enabling them to avoid heavy financial penalties and buy, in a manner of speaking, the “the right to pollute.”
This balancing market does not exempt the less emitter countries to work in their own way against global warming, especially by reducing electric energy consumption.
Which is easier said than done! As an example, let’s get to these teenagers with the hoodies fashion, these heavy sweatshirts with hoods that give them the trendy look of Los Angeles gangstas.
it will not have escaped anyone's attention that, in the tropics, wearing this clothing item makes one feel hot, very hot. Consequence: In a private university in Phnom Penh, where this clothing item is all the rage, air conditioners in classrooms are pushed to the maximum so that the teenagers wrapped up in their hoodies won’t die of heat. When a teacher mentioned to these young people that they would be more comfortable in T-shirts and that this would save electricity, he was told: This is a private school, we pay for the electricity, so what’s the problem?
Those young people in their hoodies no doubt will go from their air-conditioned classrooms to their air-conditioned homes in air-conditioned cars. One pays. We don’t care. Climate disruption starts with citizen disruption
