‘Creativity — that’s what will be needed most as we grapple with climate change and its consequences. We cannot look at the problem with the lenses that got us into this problem.’
THAT’S how it felt like yesterday as I settled down in my BGC “pied-a-terre” in preparation for another week of work. (Actually, my place in BGC isn’t an “occasional place to stay in,” which is what that French term means; I just wanted to use it ha-ha).
But because my unit faces west it absorbs the impact of the setting sun. And yesterday, that was some impact. It felt like summer in September.
Just as there are COVID deniers — and a dear friend was one of them who succumbed to the virus she didn’t take seriously — there are climate change deniers in every country in every continent. This despite the evidence all around us — flash floods in Pakistan, severe drought in many parts of Europe, untamed weather throughout North America, and in our part of the world more frequent typhoons of severe intensity.
It may be just because I am almost of dual citizen status, but I only seem to remember Typhoon Yoling of my childhood, the typhoon that cut off central and northern Luzon from Manila and the south due to heavy flooding in the Candaba swamp area. (The experience is what led to the construction of the Candaba viaduct, at that time the longest elevated span of road anywhere in Southeast Asia.)
But of late? The names Ondoy, Yolanda and Odette are just the most recent ones.
And that’s the typhoons. How about the severe localized thunderstorms that get to cause airport operations to stop and offices to declare an early dismissal?
The change is real, and the question is, can anything be done about it?
That’s where all the ado about lowering greenhouse gas emissions in order to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius comes in, necessitating national as well as corporate commitments from every nation on Earth. This is why many auto companies, for example, have pledged to do away with vehicles using internal combustion engines that run on fossil fuels and will only be producing EV vehicles by a set date. This is why the global fossil fuel giants are moving into the renewable energy space, why countries like the Philippines are mandating that by 2040 a big percentage of the power distributed by our power utilities should be from renewable energy, and it is also the reason why a mining and metals corporation like Nickel Asia is not only going full blast into the renewable energy industry but is also embracing ESG commitments, which include reducing its GHG emissions by fixed percentages beginning in 2025 towards a target of net zero by 2050.
Is this going to be easy, for countries as well as corporations? Of course not. It will require, at the very least, leaving behind old habits and foregoing old practices and processes; at the most extreme it will require a course change for many industries that have been so reliant on fossil fuels and on “how we do things” that can no longer be justified by the need to address the critical nature of climate change. I suspect though that while things at the moment may appear to be a pessimist’s dream, human creativity spurred by necessity will result in new ways of seeing things and of doing things, maybe even turning today’s problems on their head.
Creativity — that’s what will be needed most as we grapple with climate change and its consequences. We cannot look at the problem with the lenses that got us into this problem.
Or, as the late US Senator Robert Kennedy loved to say, we must “dream things that never were and ask why not?”
