HOW ARE we faring in efforts to slow down climate change? Are we cooling it, amid the rising heat that’s been scalding the global atmosphere, amid the weather extremes hitting most places world-wide in merry abandon.
Just yesterday, another temblor hit the country, a moderately strong 5.3 magnitude shaker that saw the people Down South scampering for cover. Casualty reports this time would not rouse us all up, considering the quake’s relatively less powerful strength, as compared to what have been hitting vulnerable places elsewhere in the world, like the temblor that shook up Iran and Iraq in recent weeks. Indeed, the new normal in earth-shakers has become more and more intense. It’s the same cataclysmic effects from natural events like weather disturbances, growing from strong to super-strong. Again, it’s all about Mother Nature’s extreme behavior, and what we’ve been all taking recklessly for granted all these years.
Weather temper tantrums in utterly extreme conditions, that’s what we’ve been experiencing worldwide, in an apparent fight-back that Mother Nature has been unleashing in erratically worsening form and shape. When the earth shakes up, it does so not just in mighty heaves, but in suddenly deadly fits and turns. When the weather turns hot, it’s become lethally scalding. When it rains, they come in torrential force, whipped up by lashing winds like no other.
The Global Climate Risk Index has even listed up the Philippines as 4 of the world’s 10 countries most affected direly by climate change, the three others being Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. The stark reality is that we are among the most vulnerable places in the world. Accordingly, the effects of climate change are decidedly far-reaching and will greatly impact on us due to the humanitarian crises that it spawns, the displacement and migration of victimized people and the loss of livelihood.
Archipelagic as our country is, climate change will simply cause coastal areas to shed portions of shorelines, throwing in helter-skelter movement our compatriots who live in these threatened places. Even now, we are witnessing erratic weather patterns taking place in alarming regularity. Subtropical deserts are expanding; arctic glaciers are melting down.
Of course, by now we all know why Mother Earth has gone misbehaving. Human activities — those that we have been recklessly doing since 1750 — have relentlessly produced a 40% increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, resulting from too much combustion of fossil fuel principally coal, oil, natural gas, along with deforestation, soil erosion and animal agriculture. What we ought to be doing is simply to reduce these activities that pollute the global atmosphere. Scaling down carbon emissions — singly and collectively as no less embedded like being etched on stone in the Paris agreement on climate change — is the only sensible thing to do. And that is simply because it is the only right thing to do.
Time and again, we’ve been abusing our fragile environment, since way, way back. We’ve been wreaking havoc on our precious ecosystem that is our lifeline into the future. Scientists have been repeatedly warning us, just recently in another letter to Mankind, that by 2047, the earth’s surface temperature would have drastically altered, enough to scald us all, enough to ignite mankind’s own ill-fated annihilation and extinction. Hold your breath, 2047 is just a scant 30 short years away!
Given the country’s extreme vulnerability to climate change, it is simply right that we do our share in lowering the polluting emissions that have in fact been on the rise from 1990 to 2010 by a surging 65%. When our government set a 70% emission reduction by as much as 70% by 2030 — committed when we signed up our pledged commitment in the global accord forged in Paris — we did so from a conscientious acceptance of a sense of national responsibility. Clearly, we joined up in the worldwide effort to do our share in giving Mother Earth a respite from man’s continuing criminal folly. We recognized the need to be in concert with each other, to abandon our wanton ways and behave as responsible, caring stewards of the only planetary home we can bequeath to generations next.
Yes, we all know what’s been needed, but — hold your cursing words — our own government seems more afflicted in keeping us reliant on coal plants, instead of gradually phasing them out in a rational energy mix of clean sources. Twenty new coal-burning plants are now being built and targeted to be operational by 2020. What this means is crystal clear: we just are not minding our own business, simply because coal business is good business.
To reiterate what our task is: bring down the level of massive pollution now afflicting the world. This means reducing strategically the greenhouse gas emissions into the earth’s atmosphere. This means putting in place a strategic policy to reverse our energy use from coal to alternative energy sources. This means removing the incentives that firm up our over-reliance on coal as principal source of our energy use. This means adding up our voice, no matter how tiny, to the global pressure for the world’s leading polluters to walk their talk.
True, governments may have a Paris accord to guide their ways. (The US government’s withdrawal may have been a great letdown, but that’s just one man’s folly). Leaders may demonstrate resolve in ensuring that nations will abide by iron-clad agreements. But, in the end, it is people — yes, you and I and the rest of all us — who must do its share, even at the cost of the most extreme of sacrifices to keep Planet Earth a worthy hand-over liberated from the clutches of fossil fuel, free enough to use alternative clean energy sources with less pollutive effects to the global atmosphere, free enough go beyond the borders of our self-serving attitudes, free enough to break the barriers that greed has imposed.
Walk the talk, walk on by, that’s what we ought to be doing. Because it’s just the right thing to do, by ourselves.
P.S. With the readers permission, let me use this space to greet my father who’s turning all of 80 years come Monday. I have shared his many triumphs and trials in much of his public life. What he is today — healthy, feeling fulfilled, enjoying his private moments, and very much at peace with the world — he owes it to what he has done in shining pride and contentment. Happy 80th, Papa, the inimitable Bernardo M. Vergara!
