Dear Editor,

Oh no! Just when you thought it was safe to live in Cambodia without being terrorised by the CCBs (Climate-Change-Bullies), along come the CTBBs (Carbon-Trading-Bovver-Boys) to put the fear of God into you. ("Cambodia pioneering world's first carbon trading cooperative", 16 September).

Fortunately, the CTBBs aren't quite as evangelistic, and therefore objectionable, as the CCBs because they're more overtly in it for the money.

Brave Cambodian entrepreneurs! As you carefully nurture the tender shoots of your flowering but precarious businesses, be warned. The CTBBs will throw fallacious CCB statistics at you, forged to fit the anti-capitalist agendas of arch-gurus Al Gore and Michael Mann to (a) fan your guilt about your  "carbon footprint" (which, whatever your boot size, will make not one jot of difference to the climate) and  (b)  hand over chunks of your hard-earned profits should you happen to have made some.

If you are so persuaded, they will then either squander your money on unproven schemes in far-off lands about which you (and, in all probability, they) know nothing, or use it to feather their own air-conditioned aeries from which they can preach ever more shrilly about "saving the planet" which doesn't, in fact, need saving.

Finally, full marks to Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Royal Cambodian Government for sidelining the whole global warming razzmatazz and the hysteria gripping the rest of the world. That's not to say I'm unconcerned about the local environment. Far from it. If invited, I'd willingly to join a Government think-tank to devise inexpensive ways of cleaning up, inter alia, Cambodia's smoky exhausts, street urinations and expectorations, and piles of mouldering garbage.

Not to save the planet. To save my sanity and, with a fair wind, that of my fellow citizens in this potentially green and pleasant land.

Matthew Robinson

Phnom Penh