Inflation must have indeed been a jump-starter in Philippine economy, enough to push the Department of Energy into directing oil industry players to offer Euro2-compliant diesel as fuel option for the transport and industry sector. Accordingly, the Euro 2-compliant fuel only costs less than P.30 in the pump-end market, as contrasted with Euro 4, thus making it more affordable for the masses down under — our public utility jeepneys and other motor vehicles running on diesel. Make Mamang Tsuper happy, that’s what it’s really all about.
Unfortunately, this would seem to be a knee-jerk reaction: help Mamang Tsuper by making him use a low-grade Euro compliant standard that is just down below the line of clean energy for which most economies are now gearing automotive and industrial engines everywhere else. While everybody else is moving notches up in the standard emission game, we’re doing just the opposite, all in the name of an anti-inflation strategy.
Inflation, the keyword of what we’re all experiencing now, is at an astronomical level now. Last month, the consumer price index reached 5.7%, up from the 5.2% recorded after just a month, and it’s on an up-and-up spiral. Just what’s causing inflation to push up are said to be the weakening peso, rising global prices, and TRAIN, that onrushing contrivance magically pulled out by our rabbit raisers.
Too bad, they didn’t reckon with the high sulfur content that Euro 2 diesel has, enough to cancel out whatever toxic reduction we’ve all been struggling to do as our major share in the global campaign to downscale even by as much as 2 degrees C our daily bombardment of the world’s atmosphere.
We’re supposed to globally reduce greenhouse gas emissions that the world’s polluters have recklessly been ejecting into the atmosphere since way, way back. But here we are, going backwards simply because inflation is at a phenomenal high. Mamang Tsuper may be too glad to get a big boost in his daily diesel consumption, but what about the environment?
We ought to be encouraging the use of clean and efficient energy for our economic activities, but government seems to be not on the same page. All because there’s need to ease the inflationary effects of TRAIN, among others? Regardless of how bad dirty fuel is to our engines, how deleterious its emission results are to our atmosphere?
This is why the Paris accord on climate change just years back has brought together practically all nations across the globe, including the polluters themselves, purposely to come to a final deal. Either we bring down greenhouse gas emissions to well below 2 degrees Celsius, or we bring Mother Earth to plain smithereens in just a few decades.
The reason draws from what scientists the world over have been warning us. Greenhouse gas in the earth’s atmosphere absorbs and emits radiation. Since the year 1750, man has produced a 40% increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels principally coal, oil, natural gas along with deforestation, soil erosion, and animal agriculture.
In brief, what everyone has been enduring these recent years, simply termed as global warming, is causing indescribable havoc to our ecosystem biodiversity, putting at grave risk not just the economic livelihood of people worldwide, but the very survival of humankind.
In fact, we have repeatedly been warned to hold in check our carbon dioxide emissions; otherwise, we will continue to experience in greater intensity and ferociousness the effects of global warming that comes from unchecked greenhouse gas emissions ejected continually from coal-fueled economic activities.
Sea levels are rising, threatening to erode islands and coastal areas. Dear Philippines is even now ranked among the most vulnerable in the world. Subtropical deserts are expanding. Arctic glaciers are beginning to melt down and are expected to ultimately disappear. Extreme weather events have become the new normal — heat wave, droughts, heavy rainfall with floods, heavy snowfall, killer-quakes whose strength has been suddenly on the rise.
In a recently published study by the journal Science Advances on a strategic part of the world, it was determined that South Asia where one-fifth of the world’s population live (including us here in miniscule Philippines), that heat has been on the upward climb Humidity is way up, rising to perilously threatening levels. The study warns us that South Asia may be facing in a few decades “summer heat waves with levels of heat and humidity that exceed what humans can survive without protection.” That simply means it will irreversibly happen if greenhouse gas emissions into the global atmosphere remain recklessly unchecked, remain irresponsibly ejected out of economic necessity.
This finding validates without question what scientists the world over have been telling us with fearsome certainty if the present level of greenhouse gas emissions continues. Accordingly, by 2047, the earth’s surface temperature would have reached a level predicted to push ocean levels further up, heat up temperatures beyond survival levels, and bring mankind to an irreversible fate: annihilation and extinction. Yes, that year is 2047, a mere 29 years from now!
As repeatedly conveyed in stark simplicity many columns back, the Paris agreement represents a huge global effort by every nation to minimize man’s own folly all throughout the ages. Singly and collectively, we have the task to do our share by the simple ways that can be done right here and now. You and I and the rest of us are no longer bystanders when it comes to climate change. If we don’t take care of nature, it won’t take care of us, all of us. If we don’t work to manage our future well, if we don’t drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels through an energy mix of clean, unpolluting sources, if we don’t take the business of environmental cleanup seriously, nobody else will.
Going backward now to ease inflation is not the way to bolster our environmental strategies. It simply gets us heated up now as our energy planners race with their counterparts in government to get the populace boiled over. All in the name of an anti-inflation strategy that refuses to recognize TRAIN’s role in its up-and-up spiral.
The finest self-sacrifice we can all do is to sweat it out now to give Mother Earth a rare chance of cooling down, even bit by bit. It is the right thing to do.
