OPINION

What a dump!

Re: "Thailand's trash", (BP, June 5).

The list of the world's worst ocean polluters is yet another disappointing indicator of the steep uphill climb Thailand faces to achieve environmental respectability. Any way you cut it, the figures do not paint a pretty picture for Thailand. The country ranks only 35th in the world in terms of total length of coastline; 20th in population; and 21st in GDP. Yet, somehow, Thailand manages to dump more than a million tons of waste into the ocean each year, and sits as the world's sixth worst polluter of the oceans.

It doesn't have to be this way. Interestingly, some countries with much larger populations, longer coastlines and higher GDPs than Thailand do not make the list of the 10 worst ocean polluters. These relatively well-behaved countries include the United States, India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and Japan. India, Brazil and Mexico are far from wealthy countries, and in fact have per capita GDPs very similar to Thailand, so we cannot simply excuse Thailand on the basis of inability to act or the "need to pollute" in order to develop. The country should take this embarrassing list of worst polluters as wake-up motivation to step up its game when it comes to environmental protection.

Re: "In defence of Trump", (PostBag, June 11).

Barack Obama inherited an economy in meltdown which was, among other things, losing hundreds of thousands of jobs every month. He salvaged that Republican train wreck and left Trump a growing economy with millions more jobs created and the debt, as a percentage of GDP, reduced by almost two thirds. These are facts not unfounded assertions. Mr Rees may find the Obama term "sophomoric", characterised as it was by being dignified, scandal free, soundly managed and honest.

We foreigners also understand the US electoral process. It's the one which elects a president who loses the popular vote, i.e. one most voters don't want.

Apparently Thailand has a lot of old, retired, white Americans who subscribe to the Post, so I expect that PostBag will continue to receive and print pro-Trump letters no matter what moronic things he does or says. But I wish the PostBag editor would figure out a way to warn those of us who are in danger of having a stroke when we read one of those letters. Perhaps printing them in red ink or heading them with the words "Stroke Alert" or "You Are Not Going to Like This" would be helpful.

At the latest G7 summit, Donald Tusk, president of the European Commission, said the "rules-based international order is being challenged, not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor, the US".

The G7 gathering of major democratic powers began at the invitation of the US in an attempt to bring some order to the world's affairs. As the G7 collapses into chaos, it is patently obvious it cannot now fulfil that function. It is therefore surely now time for the European Union to jump into the driving seat and convene its own gathering of important democracies, excluding the competing superpowers of the US, Russia and China, and perhaps including India, Brazil, South Africa and South Korea.

I believe such an EU-convened G10 would be more relevant and productive in an increasingly multi-polar, fractious and uncertain world.

Why the huge uproar about the quality of school lunches in Thailand? And yet not a word about the large-scale addition of fluoride at more than 2% in the free milk programme for kids for decades, even though much of the world outlaws this deadly practice. The internet highlights the consequences of this, which is evident in Thailand.

While using a single candle, as shown in the front page of the June 12 edition, rather than one for each of his 72 years (tomorrow), has reduced Donald Trump's carbon footprint, I'm not sure if the sight of him blowing it out will have made a slice of his birthday cake any more appetising to his fellow diners.

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