Wednesday, June 25, 2008 Osmeña: Energy strategy a must By Antonio V. Osmeña Estatements
THERE is now an urgent need for our community leaders to develop and carry out a carefully inte-grated set of short-, intermediate-, and long-term energy plans over the next 50 years.
Affordable supplies of crude oil and possibly gas will probably begin running out between 2015 and 2050. The answers to the energy crisis depend on the questions we ask.
But resolving the crisis seems so important that we forget to ask what problem we are trying to solve. It might seem smart to suppose that we‘re running out of energy and the solution is obviously to get a lot more of it.
But asking how to get more energy begs the question of how much more we need. That depends not on how much we used in the past but on what we want to do in the future and how much energy it will take to do those things.
How much energy is needed to make cement, run a sewing machine, or keep you comfortable in your house depends on how cleverly we use energy. And the more it costs, the smarter we seem to get.
It is now cheaper, for example, to double the efficiency of most industrial electric motors than to get more electricity to run the old ones. We know how to make lights five times as efficient as those presently in use, and how to make household appliances that give us the same work, using one-fifth as much energy (saving money in the process).
Most automotive companies have made good-sized, safe cars that ran for about 34 to 42 kilometers on a liter, so why not ban the registration of fuel-guzzler vehicles?
We now know how to make new buildings and many old ones so heat-tight (but still well ventilated) that they need essentially no energy to maintain comfort year-round, even in severe climates. These energy-saving measures are uniformly cheaper than going out and getting more energy.
Detailed studies in over a do-zen countries have shown that supplying energy services in the cheapest way—by wringing more work from the energy we already have—would let us increase our standard of living while using several times less total energy (and electricity) than we do now.
Faced with water and air pollution, food and energy problems, land misuse, toxic wastes, species extinction, and potential resource shortages, many Cebuanos feel overwhelmed and powerless.
Despite these problems and dangers, there are grounds for hope—one of the greatest driving forces in life despite the lack of foresight of our country’s political leaders.
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg urges us to look at the present and future with new eyes: “What we are seeking today in all our social upheavals, in all our alarm and anguish over an environmental feedback and, in general, the apparent piling of crisis upon crisis to an intolerable degree, is not a forecast of doom. It is the birth pangs of a new world view.”
The good news is that during the short period between 1986 and present, many Filipinos have become aware of and are now concerned about the environment.
In the end, it comes down to what you and I are willing to do individually and collectively. Let’s begin with ourselves by evaluating the way we think the world thinks and sensitize ourselves to the environment, become ecologically informed, and choose simpler lifestyles by going on an energy and matter resource diet to reduce resource consumption, waste and pollution.
We must become more self-reliant by trying to be less dependent on large, centralized systems for water, energy, food and livelihood. Let us avoid the four “do-nothing” traps of technological optimism, gloom and doom, pessimism, fatalism and extrapolation to infinity. We must be politically involved, work on big polluters and big problems, primarily thru political action.
Business organizations, civic and religious groups and the Confederation of Professional and Scientific Organization should lobby for Congress to seriously consider making a long-term energy plan, and allot enough funding for research and development of renewable energy.
Talented Filipino engineers abound in our country, and if extended the opportunity, they can utilize the abundant renewable and nonrenewable energy resources found all over the Philippine archipelago.
