The Environment Report

WITH THE COPENHAGEN MEETING ON GLOBAL warming just four weeks away, the prognosis is mixed that the US government, which has not signed the proto-climate change Kyoto convention, would ever come around in time to changing its mind. While US President Barack Obama and the Democrat-dominated two houses of Congress are rushing the legislation that would better arm the United States to make firmer commitments on global warming by the time of the Scandinavian meeting, the issue has so riled the Republican minority, which has traditionally opposed draconian cuts in carbon emission because of its alleged negative impact on business, jobs and investments. And their opposition has become strident and even shrill lately as the Copenhagen clock ticks, with some Republican legislators boycotting key meetings of committees assigned to draft the legislation.

The good news may be that three influential Democrat senators—former presidential candidate John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham—have formed what they called a parallel but informal committee to craft a measure that would appeal to a broader number of senators, enough to earn at least 60 votes that would ensure its immunity from filibustering. Although the informal committee is not by any means a bipartisan group, it is composed of business-minded Democrats trying to cushion the blow of an environmental measure on business and employment.

But there’s the rub. Graham and Liebermen have said that aside from the provision for wind and solar energy, they would like to have more offshore drillings and nuclear plants so as to build on the US power inventory and at the same time, pump-prime the economy and create jobs that may be lost as a result of a cutdown on industrial activity due to climate-change measures. Because of their mind-set, it appears remote that the United States would come around to making up its mind—and quick—on reducing carbon emissions (the bone of contention in the Kyoto protocols) in time for the Danish date.

Moreover, at the Barcelona meeting on climate change, little progress was made on two issues—mid-term carbon emission cutbacks of developed countries and a concrete plan for financing developing nations cutting down on emissions. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has expressed doubts whether industrialized and developed nations could make firmer commitments in Copenhagen.

So while we should wish for the best from Copenhagen, we should prepare for the worst. Countries like the Philippines and Maldives, which bear the brunt of global warming, must press relentlessly for greater resolve on the part of developed countries to cut down on industrial emissions. But while doing that, they have their own environmental house to clean up.

The Philippines has experienced first-hand this year the wild and wooly effects of global warming on the climate. Storm “Ondoy” brought an incredible amount of precipitation that was the highest in 40 years, inundating towns and drowning lives in Metro Manila and several provinces around it. On its wake was Typhoon “Pepeng” which cut a wide swath of destruction in Northern Luzon.

Disaster preparedness caught off-guard and government mismanagement of urban and environmental policies exposed, Congress immediately passed, and Malacañang signed, a law creating the Commission on Climate Change, which has yet to start work because it does not have yet the implementing rules and budget. In the meantime, there has been no review or inventory of long-standing laws and programs on urban planning, environmental conservation, and even weather forecasting, and the utter mismanagement by local governments and line agencies which are supposed to implement zoning rules and such high-sounding legislation like the Clean Air Act. Because we have bombastic pro-environment laws that are implemented in haphazard or corrupt fashion by local and national government agencies, whose bureaucratic existence is paradoxically ensured by such pompous legislation, we have disasters such as “Ondoy” and “Pepeng.” To make up for bureaucratic oversight, we create another bureaucracy, the Commission on Climate Change.

Our mission order is clear: go back to basics, implement effectively rules on environment and public safety, and stop bureaucratizing disasters.