THREE years after the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, in which 195 nations, including the Philippines, pledged to carry out national programs to reduce their respective carbon emissions to keep world temperatures down, environmentalists from around the world met this week in Katowice in the coal-mining region of Poland.
It was at the Paris conference in 2015 that the various countries accepted the findings of scientists that world temperatures have been steadily rising due to increasing industrial emissions, causing the ice in the polar regions to melt, raising ocean levels, and spawning increasingly violent typhoons and hurricanes arising from the heated oceans.
This year, our part of the globe has been hit by several powerful typhoons that caused so much death and destruction with their strong winds, heavy rains, and storm surges. The Philippines is listed as the world’s fifth most vulnerable country to extreme weather in the last 20 years.
On the sidelines of the United Nations Climate Conference in Katowice, Poland, various international campaign groups renewed their call on countries to shift away from the use of coal and other fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas to produce power for homes and industries.
China and the United States are the leading emitters of carbon into the atmosphere today because of their industries. At the Paris conference, China pledged to reduce its carbon emissions, announcing a policy of shifting to the use of electric cars. The US, however, has rejected the Paris conference call, with President Donald Trump determined to protect the US coal industry.
Compared to these two giants in industry, the Philippines is a minor producer of carbon emissions but it is among the leading sufferers from violent storms in the world. Last week, the Philippines was featured in the international program of Al Gore “24 Hours of Reality” as the victim of super-typhoon Yolanda, the strongest tropical typhoon ever to make landfall, which took the lives of thousands in the Visayas in 2013.
In our continuing effort to develop, we have great need for considerable amounts of energy and so we continue to depend on coal power plants as the cheapest source of power. We will also soon have oil and gas from our joint exploration projects with China in the Reed Bank in the South China Sea.
Bu we continue to move forward in our program of renewable energy – geothermal, solar, wind, biomass. We have such great potentials for these natural sources of power that will not add to the world’s carbon emissions.
Today we are among the worst victims of climate change. One day we should be able to be at or near the top of the list of nations contributing to the making of a safer world from typhoons and other natural calamities.
