Sunday, July 20, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: So, what's next? By Erma M. Cuizon
WITH some friends, we went up the Calatrava forest in Negros Occidental in the late 1980s to an outreach project for Calatrava Negrito children handled by a Silliman University group. It was a school in the middle of trees where a few meters off was an icy raw river.
The place is a network of mountains which Negritos call their “neighborhood.” The school, if it’s still there, didn’t have daily classes as you know classes, but only on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The rest of the days of the week for them, and for a number of their tiny mothers who came along, was foot travel from one mountain to another, to and from school, and home in some livable nooks in the forest.
It takes them days to travel on foot, the Calatrava Negrito does a lot of walking. We might do some walking, too, to help reduce carbon emission. Or try the bike.
Yes, there are signs that lifestyles will change, somehow, as though some unseen power, in reckoning, is bringing back Grandma’s era, the old discomforts, old ways, old values. With no gas emissions, or less, as target among countries, we have to refocus. Yes, we might have to do some walking.
Nature is saying, Change! or else: ice caps in Greenland will continue melting fast, sea levels rising, heat increasing…LPG or electric power for cars doesn’t have as much power as carbon gas. In that case, picture in the near future vehicles that drag in a life that’s shifting to low gear.
A study by a UK-based international research says that the 100 countries which are the most endangered in climate change actually produce only 3.2 percent of carbon emissions.
So the biggest users of products emitting harmful carbon, the Group of Eight (G8), which are the highly economically developed countries, met recently in Japan to begin work on an agreement to reduce carbon emissions by target levels---the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Japan, Germany, Italy and Russia
The countries most concerned had promised some years back in the Kyoto Protocol to reduce gas emission, agreed on by about a hundred parties, over 30 developed countries. But the US government thought there was no rush, that upscaling of technology would help solve the problem. Thus, it did not sign the Kyoto agreement.
The most recent move of highly developed countries to take the problem more seriously was the meeting of G8 in Japan this month, with the US agreeing to ratify it this time.
But reports revealed before the G8 summit was held were updates on the poor results of the Kyoto agreement. Since the Kyoto Protocol, none of the EU and other developed countries had done anything considerable to prevent temperature rise the world over.
A G8 “climate scorecard” pointed to the US government as one which hasn’t done much to address global warming, even while it’s one of the biggest emitters, if not the biggest, of carbon dioxide.
So, we had hoped the recent G8 summit would be real. But environmentalists are still dissatisfied, calling the summit a show.
What comes next after the G8 leaders this month promised each to cut carbon emissions by at least 50 percent by year 2050? Each nation is given a choice to decide to set a nearer target in terms of time.
But the World Wildlife Fund, a climate change program in Germany, says that G8 should reduce carbon emissions 40 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.
Observers call the G8 summit agreement that might be finalized this year as “toothless.”
The developing or undeveloped countries can only sit tight, cross their fingers, and pray.
That is if G8 and everyone else will move quick enough to keep the earth from breaking into pieces.
