© Pacific Affairs: Volume 82, No. 3 Fall 2009 467 Reassessing Energy Security and the Trans-ASEAN Natural Gas Pipeline Network in Southeast Asia Benjamin K. Sovacool * I ntroduction In June of 1992, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)— then a six-member consortium consisting of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand—faced a choice between protecting the environment and bolstering trade. That month, Austria had passed legislation stipulating the mandatory labelling of tropical timber imports, requiring them to be certified as having been produced under sustainable forestry conditions. Given that ASEAN exported a majority of timber to Europe but did not practice sustainable foresting, the organization asserted that the fundamental “right to development” superseded any type of environmental regulation, and threatened to ban all Austrian exports. 1 Malaysia lodged a formal complaint against Austria with the governing body of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and, as a result, Austria repealed its legislation in March of 1993, and ASEAN tacitly endorsed economic growth over preservation of the natural environment. The consequences of this decision have been disastrous. Within ASEAN countries as a whole, deforestation has been five times the global average and ten times the average for the rest of Asia. 2 Indonesia alone is being deforested at a rate of 14 million hectares a year, with only 53 million hectares of total forest area left, 3 and the deforestation there has helped promote the forest fires and peat land degradation that have made the country the __________________ * Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to the Singaporean Ministry of Education for grant T208A4109, which has supported elements of the work reported here, and to Dr. Toby Carroll, who helped collect some of the primary data for this article. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Singaporean Ministry of Education. 1 Manuel F. Montes and Francisco A. Magno, “Trade and Environmental Diplomacy: Strategic Options for ASEAN,” Pacific Affairs vol. 70, no. 3 (Autumn 1997), pp. 351-372. 2 ASEAN Secretariat, Second ASEAN State of the Environment Report (Jakarta: ASEAN, 2000). 3 Indonesian Working Group on Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation, The Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation (Jakarta: IWCUCD, 1999).