Visiting Lao Magsaysay Award recipient for community leadership Dr Sombath Somporn warns social and environmental impacts from the mushrooming hydropower dams on the Mekong River may increase community's vulnerability to climate change.

"Shareholders and board members of concerned agencies including the Mekong River Commission, and the Asian Development Bank should be held accountable to their noble pledges to fight against climate change. Stopping building or supporting construction of the non-EIA-checked dams is one way to help prevent global warming," he said.

Currently, communities in the North and Northeast of Thailand blamed a series of dams built across the Mekong River in China - Manwan, Dachaoshan and Jinghong - of causing the heaviest floods in their communities in four decades last August.

As interests in climate change are now growing, due to several climate related extreme events in particular, Poznan, Poland, has become visible perhaps for the first time on world map. This is because the next round of climate change negotiation will take place in December there. Poznan is only a brief stop before Copenhagen next year, when negotiators want to continue taming global rise in greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions by a new protocol to timely continue the Kyoto climate regime.

While we may see the continuation of the “Head-banging” or “Finger-pointing” game of negotiation between developed and developing countries, each side talking themselves into a corner, “real” politics will dictate that a compromise must be reached, somehow. The question is how, and how Copenhagen Protocol could accommodate this? What kind of concessions will be seen from Poznan to Copenhagen?

The government's monopoly of the energy industry is depriving Thailand of urgently needed innovation at this critical time of world energy uncertainty, leading economists said.

"The energy industry is becoming similar to the telecommunication sector in that it needs to move forward with the fast changing technology, investment and dynamism. But the Thai power sector is moving in the opposite direction," said Dr Duenden Nikomborirak, a chief economist from Thailand Development Research Institute.

The Thai power sector saw a regressive trend in the past decade when it comes to competition and dispersal of ownership, added the economist. The concentration index is higher now than the past 10 years, she said.

Last week quite a bit of criticism fell on a government plan to accelerate the introduction of 85-per-cent ethanol fuel to petrol stations countrywide.

Leading auto-makers were frustrated, saying the tax incentives offered were much too weak to encourage them to ramp up production of cars that can run on E85.

Without such cars, where would the ethanol-fuel demand come from?

It is the unwillingness of the government to address the lack of demand for ethanol that would impede a shift by consumers to embrace it, said critics

Picking up local newspapers over the past few weeks, every day I find reports on rapid hikes in food prices.

But on the very same pages I also find pictures and stories of protesting farmers, complaining about low prices for their produce. What's going on here?

Veteran agri-businessman Paichayon Uathaveekul had the explanation all laid out at a recent discussion at Thammasat University. At first it sounded like a familiar story of greedy middlemen taking advantage of poor farmers. But then his insights left an average consumer like me astounded.