T’S Valentine’s Day today and millions of couples worldwide will celebrate this “day of love” with their loved ones. The latter could refer to family – parents you didn’t choose (and who sometimes) didn’t choose to have you but had to!), partners you chose and hopefully are still happy you did, and children you sometimes didn’t choose to have but God chose otherwise.
There will also be those who will be celebrating today with people they’d rather not be celebrating with but have no idea about that, which is sad but is a sad reality. Over the years, I’ve grown old enough to know that love is one of those things that can make an otherwise sensible man delusional.
Same as religion and being anti-mining.
Think of religion: if not, okay, seriously think your religion is everything true, then the billions of others who believe in someone (or something) else are delusional. Unless you’re the one. Or unless all of us are.
You see, the problem with many (most?) of the religious is they’ve latched on to the idea that theirs is the only way. Yet every day, billions of others live, apparently happily, under a different belief system. And lighting doesn’t strike them dead.
Same with the anti-mining. These single-issue folks (especially the extreme and sanctimonious ones) believe that being anti-mining makes them environmentalists. Just as vloggers believe having a vlog makes them journalists.
Delusional, all.
In one province in the Philippines, the Sangunian is discussing whether or not to impose a ban on endorsements for new mining projects as a means of “protecting the environment,” If you attend its hearings, you’ll hear defenders of the bills cite “climate change” and “global warming” as justification.
These are real issues, no question. Global ones. But if you think deeper and link the issues to the concerns of the anti-mining advocates, they all fall apart.
Global warming and climate change, two separate but related issues confronting humankind today, are indeed global issues. The more intense typhoons that strike the Philippines are not of our doing; neither are they God’s punishment for our silly religious beliefs. Being global in scope and cause means the solution is global as well. Hence the COP conferences that had tried to focus our attention on these issues and attempt to get nations to commit to contributing to an improvement in global conditions.
Think of this as a series of leaks in your water system at home. Your meter shows you that every month you are paying for more water than you use. A quick survey shows that you have a faucet that drips every hour in your bathroom while four others drip every second in four other places in the house. Which do you address?
Global GHG emissions coming from four countries (China, the US, India and Russia) make up more than 50 percent of the world’s total and they are the principal reason we have fiercer storms and more damaging typhoons. The Philippines (based on statistics I saw on the website of the Philippine Statistics Authority) contributed 0.04 percent to the global total. So even if we halt all of our GHG production – and that’s assuming we can, when the biggest contributors to Philippine GHG emissions are energy generation, agriculture and transpiration – typhoons will keep on getting destructive by the year. Why? Because the primary producers are doing little to address their GHG emissions, with the US pulling out of the whole process.
Let me repeat: unless China, the US, India and Russia can drastically reduce their GHG emissions, super typhoons will remain a reality for us Filipinos.
And that’s how you smoke out a real environmentalist. He – or she – would be up in arms against these four countries. They’re the four big leaks in your water system. They’re the reason for Yolanda and any and every super typhoon that has wreaked havoc on our shores. They’re the principal culprits for global warming and climate change.
Ignore them and you do nothing about the ills you claim your heart bleeds for.
Delusional.
