Chief Minister
Vanessa Byrne & Sarah Birch
What would you say are the Governments big-
gest environmental achievements in the last
two terms?
I think you need to look at the environment
through two different filters. One is the physical
world in which we live in and the second is the in-
visible pollution that we suffer. One of the obvious
and huge steps forward was taking what we used
to know as USOC or the pre-fab grounds, which was
earmarked for two or three large towers, and turning
that into Commonwealth Park, which is a green lung
in the centre of our city. I think that was a demon-
stration of how we were going to approach develop-
ing Gibraltar, not just in terms more homes and more
offices, but also, more places for us to enjoy life. The
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second, is our approach to pollution. Now I think
everyone in Gibraltar would agree that there is too
much pollution and that we need to deal with it by
addressing the source. Everybody would like to see
pollution disappear overnight, but that is not realis-
tic or possible. What we decided to do was to stop
the construction of the new power station proposed
by the GSD, which was going to be a diesel burning
power station located at the entrance to the Upper
Rock, and we replaced it with an LNG facility. This
doesn’t address the climate change issues as much
as we would like, but in the context of an island
economy (and for the production of electricity Gibral-
tar is an island economy) it certainly deals with air
pollutants. When you produce energy from LNG it
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