The most unusual weather and other natural calamities have been reported in the United States lately. After weeks of forest fires in Southern California, rivers of waist-high mud driven by heavy rains flowed into several towns in Santa Barbara county northwest of Los Angeles. The mudslides left at least 17 dead in one community in Montecito.
Elsewhere in the country, winter temperatures plunged in the Northeast and snow fell in places like Florida in the normally warm Southeast. It was only four months ago that Hurricane Harvey struck Texas in the South and Hurricane Irma devastated Puerto Rico south of Florida, leaving most of the island without electric power for weeks.
It must be just coincidence but all these unusual natural calamities are taking place in the only country in the world which rejected the Paris Climate Agreement signed by over 200 countries in 2015. Syria and Guatemala were the last to sign the agreement in late 2017.
In the Paris Agreement, the countries submitted their own plans for programs to reduce their industrial emissions of carbon dioxide which have steadily raised world temperatures. These have melted polar glaciers, raising ocean levels to threaten low-lying islands. And they have led to heat waves, unusually heavy rains, and more violent hurricanes and typhoons.
The Philippines submitted its own plan of action, including a steady increase in its use of renewable sources of energy. Right now, most of the electric power for our industries and homes is still produced by coal and other fossil-fuel power plants, but we have pledged, like the other nations in the Paris Agreement, to steadily shift to cleaner sources of energy such as solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal.
In its recent year-end report, our Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) announced that for 2018, it will focus on the issues of air pollution and solid waste management “in line with the pro-environment and the pro-people agenda of President Duterte.”
The efforts of the Philippines and the hundreds of other nations around the world which signed the Paris Agreement should, in time, achieve the goal of keeping the increase in world temperature to less than 2 degrees Celcius. China, now the world’s largest emitter of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses, recently announced a program for a massive shift to electric cars, away from highly polluting gas-powered cars.
That leaves the US, the second worst polluter of the planet’s atmosphere, as the holdout in this effort to bring about a healthier world, with less violent storms and floods, with less extreme heat or extreme cold, and with island nations like the Philippines less fearful of rising ocean levels that might submerge their communities. We look forward to the US rejoining the rest of the world which signed the Paris Agreement and leading this effort.
