Attended by hundreds of foreign investors, the Tropical Landscapes Summit in Jakarta was supposed to promote environmentally friendly infrastructure projects, but instead the Indonesian government was busy dodging attacks directed at its plan to build the biggest coal-fired electrical plant in Asia.

Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro claimed that the government effectively had no cheaper economic alternative than to build a 2,000-megawatt (MW) power plant in Batang, Central Java, to support economic growth and meet the country’s growing electricity needs.