Climate change, social change

Ike Señeres

IN war, one of the most basic tenets is to know your enemy. That goes without saying that you should know yourself first so that you will know how you can defeat your enemy. That is also the case in marketing because you have to know your product first before you will know how you could defeat your competition. The parallel between the two is not accidental because a war between two forces is akin to a war between two or more products. Just like saying in mathematics that there is actually no problem if there is nothing to be solved, we could also say in politics that there is no war if there is no enemy. This seems to be the case in the war against climate change, because there are still many politicians who believe that climate change is not real, and at best, climate change is just a figment of our imagination or a mere invention.

When I was a member of the Presidential Commission for the Year 2000 (Y2K), I was faced with the problem that many people actually believed that Y2K was not real, and that it was just a figment of our imagination or our invention. Tasked with official functions on the strength of an Executive Order, the members of the Y2K Commission proceeded with the work preventing any damage that the problem could cause to our national security and our economy. As history would bear me out, we did our work as we were supposed to do, and as it turned out, the clock struck after midnight of 31 December 1999 and nothing happened, as in the transition to the year 2000 did not cause any problem here in our country.

I learned later on that in some countries, our counterparts who were members of the Y2K authorities in those countries were actually jailed, for the crime of perpetuating a hoax. Here in the Philippines, no one thanked us for the work that we did, but we ended our tasks with the consolation that at least, we were not sent to jail. Up to now, 15 years later, there are still many people who believe that the Y2K bug was not real, and we should have not done anything to prevent it from creating any problem. That seems to be the problem now, because there are still many people who believe that climate change is not real, and that we should not do anything to prevent it from creating any problem.

In the case of the Y2K bug, it was very clear that it could not possibly cause smaller problems, assuming that the bigger problem was not real. That is not the same situation in the case of climate change, because it actually causes many smaller problems right now, even if we would just agree for the sake of argument that the bigger problem of climate change is not real. Going back to the need to know ourselves in order to know how to defeat our enemies, we should know that the enemy is not climate change. With apologies to everyone who reads this column, it seems that the enemy is everyone who contributes to the pollution of the environment, and that could be almost everyone.

As a reaction to the proposals to bring about charter change, I jokingly said that what we actually need is character change. I said that because in my opinion, the Constitution has all the provisions to make our country work, if only we the citizens would change our ways in order to make it work. In this connection, I remember that many years ago, the government invested millions in new traffic lights in the hope that it would solve the traffic problems. As we know it now, no high tech traffic lights would work if the motorists would not change their ways to make the traffic system work. Now that we are facing the issue of climate change, I will say again, but not jokingly, that in order to minimize the problem of climate change, we should have character change.

The doctors would always say that diabetes is not curable, but it is manageable. It seems that that tenet would also be applicable to climate change, because it is still manageable, even if it is no longer curable. That is the meaning of climate change adaptation. We could adapt to climate change even if we could not cure it. In other words, we could no longer prevent climate change from happening, but we could still prevent it from worsening. Now that we already know as we are supposed to know that the enemy is pollution, we should now plan and act to defeat the enemy in all fronts, in land, sea and air battles. It is perhaps a coincidence that the battlegrounds of the war against pollution are the same as those of a military war.

Simply put, our enemies are soil pollution, water pollution and air pollution, the sea being only one of the water bodies that become polluted. I am sure that it is not a coincidence that these enemies are also targeted in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. Goal # 14 is “life below water” and that takes care of water pollution. Goal # 15 is “life on land” and that takes care of soil pollution. Air pollution seems to have been left out, but that could already be included in Goal # 13, which is “climate action”. There is a separate Goal # 6 that is “clean water and sanitation”, and that probably takes care of water pollution already.

Many experts say that air pollution is the cause of the damage to the ozone layer, a problem that in turn causes global warming. While that is true, it could also be said that the garbage problem is the cause of soil pollution, a problem that in turn causes the production of methane that also pollutes the air. While water pollution is not usually blamed for global warming, what actually happens is that the pollution of the water causes it to become warmer, thus also contributing to global warming. Among all the other causes, fossil oil emissions are being blamed as the main culprit for global warming, hence the goal to reduce emission levels in order to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

In theory, the fossil oil emissions caused by motor vehicles could be reduced. In reality however, it is an uphill battle because most of the vehicles out there are still running on fossil oils. Difficult as it is, the middle ground or the interim solution really is to control emissions by way of devices or additives or to use a combination of both. Thanks to Filipino ingenuity, there are already local inventions in these two categories that could already be promoted globally. On one hand, these two products will help reduce emissions all over the world. On the other hand, and more importantly, it will help increase our export earnings. In the case of devices, I am referring to Aeronox, a fuel saver that was invented by the late Erdy Evangelista. In the case of additives, I am referring to the IC Green Oil Enhancer that was invented by Dennis Alvarez.

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