GOING GREEN should have the only choice to go for these past several years as the best way to beat huge odds in meeting climate change challenges. Are we in that direction, money-wise?
The good news is we’re irreversibly moving in that direction, bit by bit if you will. The bad news, much as there’s been much of it these days, is dire indeed. Not much progress has been achieved for Mother Earth to cool down a bit from an over-heating global atmosphere. The afflictions we’ve been having in recent years now appear to grow in greater ferocity.
For instance, there’s now snow in the unlikeliest place, right in the Saharas, right in the world’s hottest desert, indicating that what had been unthinkable just decades ago is now happening. Clearly, the challenges that climate change has posited just a few years ago, prior to the Paris global accord, have largely remained daunting. Clearly, toxic gas emissions have continued to pollute the earth’s atmosphere, bringing about extreme weather events unlike any other. Clearly, not much progress to go green all the way.
In a One Planet Summit held at year’s end in 2017, countries the world over gathered anew to put more money on the table, both for investment pledges in green energy and divestment from fossil fuels. They’ve reached the consensus that globally, we’ve not put in the money where our mouth is. In more succinct terms, they’ve tolled the clock in clear-cut terms: “We’re not going fast enough, we all have to move forward, the time is now, lest countries represented here begin to disappear in a matter of years.”
Such dire warnings prodded Big Business in France to roll the dice, squarely putting in 12 billion euros in green investments by 2020, while divesting 2.4 billion euros from coal-company activities. Not to be outdone, the World Bank Group disclosed several projects in the pipeline, street lighting in India and coastal erosion, flooding and climate change adaptation in West Africa. Also off the drawing board is geothermal development in Indonesia and funding of projects under the cities Resilience Program of the Global Covenant of Mayors. The latter project promises to leverage $4.5 billion in World Bank loans to stimulate billions in public and private capital that seeks to address vulnerabilities made worse by continued climate change. Just wondering out aloud: have Philippine cities availed of this? Has Baguio done anything about it, given our own vulnerability?
The One Planet Summit strives to put more money on the table, not just spewed recklessly and forgotten just as soon as the pledges are made. Why it has had to meet just two years since the Paris accord is a telling statement that not much has been done to make the pledges leap beyond mouthed invectives. Scant progress, if you will, but hardly enough to make a serious dent.
Just a quick reality check: the Paris agreement sealed in conscience by 198 countries the world over, including the United States and China, strives to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions that the world’s polluters have recklessly been ejecting into the atmosphere since way, way back. Strewn together by world leaders after nearly a decade of bickering and squabbling over the cuts every country would do, the Paris deal simply strives to bring down the toxic pollution inflicted recklessly into the world’s atmosphere.
The United States along with China have for decades now been at the apex of global pollution, their combined gas output accounting for much of what everybody else has been insufferably experiencing from. The goal is simple: bring down greenhouse gas emissions to well below 2 degrees Celsius. The strategy is doable: all countries, both industrialized and developing, must embed in their economic activities, as if written on stone, how much reduction they will aim for within their respective means.
There is a compelling reason for this. Scientists the world over have been warning us of the peril that unchecked greenhouse gas emissions bring about. Man has been relentlessly ejecting, since the year 1750, a 40% increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, principally from the combustion of fossil fuels principally coal, oil, natural gas along with deforestation, soil erosion, and animal agriculture. These have been going on in greedy, wicked abandon in recent centuries alone.
What we have 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. At the time the Paris deal was forged, scientists agreed that pollution could still be brought down to safety levels, if concertedly done by everyone, by his voluntary will or out of a mandated compulsory behavior.
Indeed, we have been experiencing the effects of global warming that comes from unchecked greenhouse gas emissions largely from coal-fueled economic activities. Sea levels are rising, threatening to erode islands and coastal areas, including the Philippines which now ranks among the most vulnerable in the world. Subtropical deserts are expanding. Arctic glaciers are beginning to melt down and are seen to ultimately disappear. Extreme weather events have become the new normal — heat wave, forest fires sweeping across wide swaths of human settlements, droughts, heavy rainfall with floods, heavy snowfall, killer-quakes whose strength and intensity have been suddenly on the rise, and a surprising weather extreme, snow in the Saharas!
This is why the Paris deal, adopted three years back, came into an iron-clad being, enjoining the world to cap the rise in temperature at “well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).” Sadly, it’s a goal that recent reality checks now show to be seemingly unachievable, considering how a heavy-hitting polluter has even backed off from this epic agreement. Proven by recent weather events, there’s no doubt at all that climate change spells danger and is getting worse, while global gas emission-arresting efforts are nowhere near that doable goal.
Putting more green money on the table, rather than trumping climate change now, should be a reasonable way to push speedily forward the anti-coal initiative. Denying what climate change is simply puts a blinder from present-day realities, a huge step backward each day we do it. In its starkest sense, it sends off the wrong message for the wrong reason: better to live now and die together later.
To reiterate what we’ve been saying time and again: 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, if we don’t abandon our wicked ways and continue to depend on a coal-reliant life, then we’re just well on the way to a shared destiny of perdition.
Mother Earth may survive the impending catastrophe, but Mankind — all of us who have habituated the only planetary home we have — will surely go the way of every living specie that has ever populated this very home. Terminated for good, for all the bad ways we’ve lived it out.
Unless we do the right thing now to scale down all the doomsday activities that we’ve been recklessly doing so selfishly.
