KUALA LUMPUR — A flying car venture would be a waste of resources and time for Malaysia, which should instead prepare for the effects of climate change which is already being felt, said a top United Nations official.

UN special rapporteur Professor Phillip Alston said a flying car would not be practical in Malaysia where there are frequent storms, adding that it will also consume too much fossil fuels.

“Instead the government should focus on re-orientating the economy away from its dependence on oil and gas, and climate-friendly industries,” said Mr Alston, the special rapporteur for extreme poverty and human rights.

“Malaysia should also focus on emergency planning for more frequent natural disasters which will hit the poor and vulnerable the hardest.

“Current economic planning appears to be blithely proceeding as though climate change is a matter of community education, rather than requiring deep changes to official policies,” Mr Alston said in a statement released at the end of his visit.  

These misplaced policies includes focusing on projects like a flying car, which would be useless in a world of extreme storms, Mr Alston later told the Malaysian Insight.   

“This announcement that soon there will be flying cars, I don’t know anything about them but they are a climate disaster given the extreme weather on the horizon and the fuel consumption.

“I doubt they will be driven by solar power. So the government needs to say to what extent are we supporting these industries.

“We need to emphasise climate friendly industries and not those that will exacerbate its problems and not those that we will look back and say: ‘well that was a bad investment’.” 

The flying car is a pet project of Entrepreneur Development Minister Mohd Redzuan Yusof but the venture has been panned by critics as being unrealistic.

Mr Redzuan, however, said a prototype for the Malaysian-Japanese joint venture is almost 85 per cent complete.

The prototype is being developed by the Aerodyne Group in collaboration with a Japanese partner which the minister said will be a private-sector initiative.

Mr Alston was on a 11-day working visit to study how Malaysia was dealing with poverty. Climate change is an integral part of the study as natural disasters wrought by extreme weather hit the poor the hardest. 

Studies by the UN have shown that Malaysia as well as its Southeast Asian neighbours will be hit by more flooding, frequent storms, droughts and heatwaves in the next few years due to the warming climate.

During his 11-day visit to Malaysia, Mr Alston said he encountered blank stares from government officials when he asked them what they were doing to prepare for climate change. 

This is despite the fact that climate change-induced disasters will undo decades of wealth and development that has transformed Malaysia from a low-income nation in the 1970s to an upper-middle income economy today.

“If you want to start bringing about change, it cannot be about what you’re going to do 10 years from now. It is something that should be thought about and gradually introduced,” Mr Alston said. 

“That is what I don’t see in Malaysia. Whenever we bring up climate change there is this blank stare from government officials.”

The government appeared not to worry yet about climate change as it believed that the world is still buying petroleum and palm oil — commodities which are generating greenhouse gases that lead to climate change.

“But if you open your eyes to what’s going on around the world and how hedge funds and investors are behaving you get a clear set of signals that things are not going to remain as they are.” THE MALAYSIAN INSIGHT