Indonesian Minister Threatens to Send ‘Special Staff’ to Fight Unfair Yale Academics > threats, trees, Yale

Indonesian Minister Threatens to Send ‘Special Staff’ to Fight Unfair Yale Academics

by Mike Bechek | July 14, 2008 at 12:48 pm

Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest country by population. By most other measures, it kind of sucks.

But try telling that to Indonesia.

Earlier this year, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy released its annual ranking of countries for their environmental practices, weighing carbon and sulfur emissions, water purity and conservation. Of 149 countries, Indonesia was ranked as only the 102nd best at saving its natural environment, dragged down by its, um, rapacious destruction of trees.

This did not sit well with Indonesia's State Minister of the Environment, a man named Rachmat Witoelar. Though the results came out in January, Witoelar apparently just found out about them, telling the Jakarta Post that the libelous rankings recently arrived on his desk in "the July 7-14 edition" of Newsweek.

"The report is not fair. It is absurd because all the data is invalid. I will send my special staff to Yale to protest their researchers," he said.

Hopefully, Yale will take this very special threat seriously.

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