Thai PM orders all agencies to step up efforts to address PM2.5 dust problem

[NedR69]

Doing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity.  

 

[BananaStrong]

lots of farmers in Thailand, lots of farmland.   saw someone spraying yesterday, hopefully not those death chemicals.  then last night, fires.   

 

I want everyone to stop killing the Amazon rain forest!!  oh, yea, money

No more mining!!!!  nah

No more smoking!!!  nah

 

This is all just talk talk talk for headlines, but money talks and this BS is walking.  

[steevjee]

Nothing will be done with the current Government in power, as the only way to fix it would involve billions of baht spent by Thai Government to purchase necessary farm machinery so that Farmers dont have to burn off their crop refuse

[RichardColeman]

Must be running China close in the pollution of the planet league

[blazes]

Imagine: somewhere in Nakhon Nowhere a policeman is told to visit a local farm where burning is taking place.  Go to Farmer Somchai's sugar cane field is the order. 

Policeman nods and then wonders whether that would be a wise decision.  Farmer Somchai's wife's brother has an uncle who is a good friend of the police chief. 

Leave it till next week.....

[brianthainess]

17 hours ago, engamann said:

Don't need to spend money on early warning system you dum dum , just have a look out of the window tell you bad or not , Cha Cha the biggest ???? in Thailand.

As Bob Dylan wrote ''you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows''

[phetphet]

They should get a load of propeller driven planes to fly from north to south and blow it out to sea. ????

[brianthainess]

18 hours ago, webfact said:

The government, he said, has been accelerating the use of alternative energy, such as solar cells, wind energy, biomass, hydro floating solar panels

What a pleb trying to divert the main cause, this is about burning off crops/fires. can't even see the horizon on Koh Chang, my wife is coughing her nose irritated, but she has to go to work in her open shop.

[Tom H]

I heard that spraying water nearby PM 2.5 sensors helps.????????????

[ikke1959]

It looks like election promises.. Every year there is this problem. and every year it is the same as with the floodings, as soon as it is over nothing will be done about it anymore...Government must take measures to prevent the problems... A lot can be done... Why are in Eu citys zones where old vehicles are forbidden? Why are there in big cities electric new taxis driving and public transportion....Why are in some  countries restrictions for factories about airpollution??

Why can it be done there and not in Thailand?? Why are there still so many blacksmoke cars driving here around although several crackdowns, why here still so many oldtimers driving around? Why not educate people not to take the motorcycle for a very short trip( a few hundred meters to a shop for example) etc etc and restriction on burning rice and sugarfields And of course enforce the laws....But this is Thailand... always walking behind the facts, no view, and no idea how to solve things properly

[Tom H]

12 minutes ago, Tom H said:

I heard that spraying water nearby PM 2.5 sensors helps.????????????

Luckily the weather layers called Temperature Inversion will change soon, so the situation will also soon be forgotten again. 

 

When the layers wont change anymore in the future than …

 

 

 

 

Edited March 11, 2023 by Tom H

[mikebell]

19 hours ago, webfact said:

nose irritation has become increasingly common.

A real problem for anyone called Pinocchio.

[whitfield]

Everyone knows it comes from crop burning across SE Asia.  Why do they burn?  Because they don't own tractors to turn the soil over, so burning is the cheapest way.  Now for the cost of 3 submarines you could buy 28,000 tractors, enough for three in every agricultural tambon.  You could rent them out for a nominal fee and over time the investment would pay for itself.  Immediately the nation would see an improvement in health.  But of course defense of the realm must take priority over the nation's health.

[Polaky]

It is so bad that I went out in the morning with a nice white crisp shirt, returned later in the day and it was yellow, imagine what it is doing to your lungs, especially if your also a smoker, this is a serious health issue and should not be taken lightly, but there is nothing they can do, as lot of it is blowing over from neighbouring countries. 

[bangon04]

19 hours ago, grego49 said:

Same <deleted> every year from the government and nothing changes.

you mean "Thai PM / (Insert other leader here) tells government agencies to actually do their jobs for which they are getting paid."

[SunsetT]

Saw a documentary on the rice stubble burning problem in India. Some conscientious and more wealthy farmers were buying mini ride-on tractors which plowed the stubble into the earth thereby enriching it much more than burning. These machines which are too expensive for most farmers but could/should be bought by the Thai (and Indian) government and supplied to every village/district for collective use. The existing  village health staff and volunteers who did so well fighting Covid could be employed to organise and oversee this with police back-up to enforce it.

[shackleton]

Bob Hope and No Hope comes to mind same every year 

Talk and no action ????

[Lee65]

20 hours ago, grego49 said:

Same <deleted> every year from the government and nothing changes.

Be fair!  Things are changing ... for the worse.

 

After a couple years' respite during the covid fiasco, this year is by far the worst I have seen.  Some days this year the AQI at this site has been in the 400s, particularly around Chiang Mai.  It is frequently and persistently in the 200s.

 

The proportion of the problem that can be blamed on neighboring countries is unclear.  But there is plenty of evidence that Thailand itself must accept responsibility for much of the problem.

 

[Grusa]

2 hours ago, phetphet said:

They should get a load of propeller driven planes to fly from north to south and blow it out to sea. ????

Flying backwards, I presume....?

[Dljohnt]

In the same article qoute Prayut:

On Thursday, Prayuth asked farmers to stop burning agricultural waste altogether after imposing a three-month ban on burning it last month.

“Please, I don’t want to use the laws. If it’s used, you all will be breaking it. I don’t want anyone to be in trouble, but you must think about the quality of life of others and their health too,” he said.

 

He knows he can't use the laws because then he has to address the big money in Thailand and they will kick him out if he does so.

[mran66]

20 hours ago, Lee65 said:

I dunno.  Thailand's air quality will make all those Chinese & Indian tourists feel right at home.

Well, still makes many of them feel the same as we would feel breathing in Canadian wilderness!

 

Fresh air tours to Thailand it is still so bad is the air in those places. Top it up with the ever present body odours 

Edited March 11, 2023 by mran66

[spidermike007]

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much BS. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize BS and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry.

 

However studiously and conscientiously the BS artist proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity which resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline. The pertinent mode of laxity cannot be equated, evidently, with simple carelessness or inattention to detail.

 

It does seem that lying involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to BS. For the essence of BS is not that it is false but that it isphony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made.

 

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing BS requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the BS artist, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Edited March 11, 2023 by spidermike007

[10baht]

22 hours ago, webfact said:

The government, he said, has been accelerating the use of alternative energy, such as solar cells, wind energy, biomass, hydro floating solar panels and electric vehicles among others,to reduce the use of fossil fuel,

The fossil fuel is COAL both here and China

[John Drake]

5 hours ago, hotchilli said:

More the resposibility of the environmental minister,

So there is an environmental minister? Never would have guessed it.

[wolf81]

I think one possible solution could be if Thailand would use trucks to retrieve leaves and such for farmers, perhaps even give a small amount of money in return.

 

The leaves could then be used to make compost, perhaps even reselling the end product.

 

Might offset the cost of all the sickness caused by the dust. 

 

Basically looking at the problem in a more pro-active way, instead of just telling farmers to stop burning, which they will likely ignore anyways ...

Edited March 11, 2023 by wolf81

[John Drake]

4 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

Are they going to go after the cane farmers?

Going after the cane farmers and other farmers who grow cheap mill crops for poultry and pig farms would mean going after their backers and behind the scenes owners, the two or three major conglomerates who dominate food production, export, and distribution in Thailand. Remember all those contracts to export chicken to Saudi Arabia and China? Got to have cheap chicken feed to do that. And it's in the last ten to fifteen years that Thai sugar production has so dramatically increased, meaning the burning now is worse than ever before. This isn't some "traditional" means of agriculture. It's a newly intensified burn to meet growing export expectations. Thais choking to death to benefit a handful of food conglomerates.  https://www.fao.org/3/x0513e/x0513e24.htm#:~:text=Thailand is now firmly established,world's leading sugar exporting countries.

[Caldera]

Stepping up efforts implies that an effort has already been made. I've seen no evidence of that, not this year and not in previous years as well. It just keeps getting worse with no solution in sight. 

[SpanishExpat]

Simple solution to this problem: cut the military budget and use it for the air pollution issue!!

 

someone should tell those imbecile dinosaurs in charge that being rich and powerful doesn’t exclude them from getting health problems. EVERYBODY is suffering from that sh** sooner or later!

[Skallywag]

This is a problem caused by all of us and overpopulation.  

 

Do you eat rice?  Do you eat sugar? Do you eat corn?  Then it is partly your problem and no government can tell farmers not to farm and feed people...

 

If you do live life without rice, sugar, and corn, then you can complain about air quality,  otherwise you must realize it is all of us that are the problem, not the "government"

 

Of course electrical generation and ICE transport is also part of the air pollution problem, but from December to April in Thailand, it is mostly burning of chaff from the 3 crops listed above.  

[Bim Smith]

Do what exactly. Every year we hear the same thing from the government and nothing is done except cloud seeding when there is enough moisture in the air to do it. It can't be done in the dry season normally. The air is unbreathable here in Nakhon Sawan.