Doing our best, but so far the best has not been enough. This seems to be the collective result publicly acknowledged at the COP24 summit in Poland this week, enough to dampen the Happy Holiday spirit now sweeping across the globe. Another year of frustrating climate change adaptation results, another year apparently down the drain, after so much serious fuss over frustrations and failures.
The year-end assessment indeed offers too grim of a foreboding that must command everyone’s attention, much more from us in the Philippines who are very much among the most vulnerable of places around the world that are in constant peril whenever weather systems go haywire, spawning super-events without parallel in recent times.
Deadly landslides occurring north and southside of the country bear glaring witness how negligent we have been in under-estimating the force and fury of puny weather aberrations that Ompong and Rosita have been, surely not even anywhere near the might and scale of the hurricanes that periodically hit countries along the Atlantic Ocean, or even the lethal effects that Yolanda and Ondoy left behind.
Accordingly, a UN report has warned the world that gas emissions have continued to creep upwards, instead of being reduced to manageable levels that the Paris accord forged four years ago has embedded as iron-clad agreements among nations. In that grim report, carbon dioxide pollution shot up in 2017 after a 3-year decline which must have made world leaders to ease up somewhat from agreed upon efforts to reduce the toxic bombardment of the earth’s atmosphere.
Analyzing the carbon emissions ejected upwards, Professor Corinne Le Quere from the University of East Anglia warned that peak levels of global acceptance are nowhere near in sight, and emissions have to be brought down further by as much as 50% by 2030 — just 11 years away — and reach net zero levels by 2050.
Grim as they are, the COP24 country heads have expressed utter dismay that indeed, amid unchecked emissions, the industry leaders would seem to be in complacency and not taking heed of climate change’s foremost toxic cause. Fiji Island’s president has put it in more succinct, clear as day, foreboding: “We are nearing obliteration, inundated by rising ocean levels in our midst, all because carbon emissions continued to besiege the atmosphere, enough to trigger heated seas, enough to put my hapless nation under water.”
All of us have a shared responsibility over the recklessness with which we regard Climate Change. By our collective inaction, our own economic activities have largely caused the unrelenting ejection into the global atmosphere of polluting toxic gas emissions. Is it a wonderment that Nature has reacted rather crazily, when it unleashes super-hurricanes unparalleled in strength, mighty earthquakes of greater ferocity, weather disturbances that pack fierce winds and heavily cascading torrents of rainwater — all these took place from our own irresponsible insensitivity?
Year in, year out we welcome the onset of a new year with fresh resolve, with hardening hopes that environmental issues would be forcefully addressed this time. Each time, we raise our voice that time is clearly no longer on our side, not doing anything about it from our own standpoint will clearly amount to nothing in return. Collectively nations and peoples around the world can bring about radical stout-hearted changes and make industries and automobiles be more environment-compliant, enough to mandate that only alternative clean energy must be used, enough to serve as retribution for all the misbehaving ways that Mother Nature has been acting up in recent times.
To echo the COP24 report, not much progress has been attained to arrest greenhouse gas emissions to safe, livable levels. Since the Paris global accord has been forged two years ago, purposely for global efforts to bring down emission levels, not much success had been accomplished, from country to country, despite iron-clad pledges to abate the bombardment of the earth’s atmosphere of gases burned from fossil fuels. We just went on our greedy and wicked ways, simply because the business of gassing up, no matter how toxic, is good for everybody’s business.
Again, we reiterate: we ought to be casting aside from activities that worsen the continuing folly of our everyday activities, from the machines that we activate to the engine that we rev up on the road. We need to use clean energy and get to manage life as well-resolved as possible. We need to get going with our life freed from the clutches of dirty energy, the very bane, rather than the boon, of our fragile environment. We need to plough more money into these new energy sources, and dis-invest from traditional coal-sourced fuels. In brief, more action from less talk.
Time is out there in continuous tick each moment of a now limiting lifetime. Mankind, time’s up.
