Hell is just another kind of environment and the road to it is paved with good intentions

There is a perception among many of Macau’s residents that air quality is declining. The number of motor vehicles goes up every month, and trucks and buses persist in belching black fumes in a mockery of all the inspections they are supposed to undergo.

Many construction sites appear to have dispensed with all the precautions they could take to reduce, if not eliminate, the production of dust – and that is quite apart from all the noise they make.

Days when that haze hangs over the city like a pall have become more common, while on hotter days the air seems to have a quasi-solid quality when it comes in contact with the skin. Suspended particles have become a hazard you must protect your eyes against.

That is how it feels. The official version is not always so clear-cut.

Composite indexes of air quality appear to be indicative mainly of suspended particles and little else. Curiously, forecasts of air quality range, as a rule, from good to moderate. The haze – a mixture of dust, smoke and other particles originating mostly from traffic, industry and construction – is quaintly called, in Portuguese, ‘bruma seca’, which could be translated as “dry mist” – a name you might give to an air freshener.

It would be interesting to know if, apart from collecting raw data, the government has studied properly the characteristics of the haze, where it comes from, what disperses it, and how it affects nature and human health. The authorities assure us that they are paying attention to air quality and that improving it has become a priority. But what that means exactly is a little … hazy.

If transport needs to be cleaned up, I believe that Macau, compact and densely populated as it is, would be an ideal place to test and demonstrate greener ways of getting around.

Not long ago the government said it would back electric vehicles, later promising incentives to buy them, raising expectations that the necessary infrastructure would be built and floating other ideas for cleaner transport. It seems most of these ideas are still floating, because the government has not properly thought through their ramifications.

Suck it and see

More recently the government created an Environmental Protection and Energy Conservation Fund. We can infer the general objectives from the fund’s name, but the government has yet to tell us precisely what it is meant to do and how it is meant to do it.

Rules governing how the fund must disburse subsidies for green technology and hardware tell us little. All we know is that companies, associations and individuals can apply for subsidies for up to 80 percent of the cost of the green stuff they buy, up to a limit of MOP500,000 (US$62,500) per year.

Nothing is defined. Everything is left to the discretion of the authorities. So we could try claiming subsidies to replace our incandescent light bulbs with modern fluorescent bulbs, or to buy new, less environmentally hostile cars. A cynic might say the fund is just a way of showering money on companies and associations on the pretext of taking care of the environment.

The lessons to be learned from all the talk about electric vehicles and the environmental protection fund are that fine words about the environment butter no parsnips, and that ad hoc measures will mostly be wasteful if not actually harmful.

If the government wishes to protect the environment, it must decide what it wants to do, how it wants to do it, and how much it is prepared to spend on doing it. That is how you make policy, which is what governments are supposed to do. All else is just paying lip service, which is something anybody can do.

By José I. Duarte Economist, Macau Business Senior Analyst – jid@macaubusiness.com