Who's to blame for the haze

A problem that could not be solved even before my children were born must have deep roots which go everywhere. The sort that the cure is worse than the problem at least from some powerful vested interests point of view.

This wouldn't appear in our ST and yet another of many opportunities the foreign media make ours look sloppy.

WSJ: Southeast Asian Haze: Who's to blame?

The story is a year old and it still begs the question how many companies involved in clearing land by fire are affiliated to Singapore and Malaysia?

I can imagine some cost-benefit analysis done before and kept secret already. If the damage to our economy and health is worse than the economic benefits especially of Temasek invested companies, we will try harder to solve this problem.

Again it is mostly about damn $$$. What a moral vacuum.

Meanwhile our resources and manpower are on standby to offer help to the Indonesians, which Vivian B has publicly repeated the offer. This as I have felt before is totally insensitive to the Indonesians feelings. It is like asking another man to help your wife have children for you. How can you expect them to accept? This is also the out of touch attitude this government display when they deal with the least wealthy and powerful among us. If we really want to help the Indonesians help us, we must employ and pay for the resources in Indonesia to prevent and stop the fires. Indonesia already look weak to the world for failing to control such fires. There is no need to humiliate them further. Like Dengue it hasn't until now done enough damage for us to deal with this more seriously. It doesn't make sense to me as this belong to the class of problems that would not go away on its own and also surely get worse. What happened to our reputation for being farseeing? Only exists in the water issue and the SAF? But that is only continuing the momentum from past leaders.

Update: 6:15am

Only Indonesian commercial interests?

If we have haze like this every year, which is a given at some point then we put in the utmost effort to solve this eh?

Most of us including myself have forgotten the many facets to this issue. I find myself having to refresh my memory.

It is costly and trying to act sensitively to the Indonesians but there is no other way to even begin to solve this problem. Too many of us assume that they are just irresponsible but I think we forget they are not proud of this themselves. Makes them look very bad to the rest of the world.

We can continue looking for low cost solutions. None would be found and given global warming this problem will worsen. In other words we could be waiting for it to be a lot more expensive before we finally successfully deal with this, if ever.

Update: 3:50pm

Finally Vivian Balakrishnan is starting to get it but this is only the beginning. One key word for him when dealing with such matters: Leverage.