Climate Politics

On the 2008 June issue of Outcrop, the UP Baguio official publication, I wrote a feature article about the call to mitigate climate change. Entitled “Seconds to Shutdown”, the article was a combination of research, analysis and significantly, calls to environmental social responsibilities. 17 months later, I have written what you are reading right now.

Seventeen months may not be very long for the Earth’s calendar, but it is for the human race, as it is fast-paced, and let alone the fact that we are on a race against global warming. This being considered, we should be asking what has been done, instead, what is more evident are the things that have not been done.

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Three days ago, I attended a lecture by Larry Lohman for the Deconstructing Discourse and Activist Retooling Programme or DDARP at the University of the Philipines Diliman. He gave light to today’s climate politics and climate justice. To start his lecture, he showed us a simple illustration symbolizing the causes of climate change – fossil fuel being taken out of the ground - and then showed a very simple solution – putting a cork on that ground’s hole. “And if there’s any solution that does not lead to this, it is not a solution”, he added.

To add more details to this very simple problem-solution slideshow, he started talking about the politics of this solution. He introduced the audience to the idea of “Carbon Trading” – the commerce of pollution rights. This system makes pollution rights, or carbon footprint for ordinary people, a commodity. This is based on the principle that the [economic] north owes the [economic] south, as many environmental activists would put it. This is one “solution” that is in practice today, Lohman says.

The lecture went on about just solutions to solve the climate crises, until it came to the open forum. I stood up and asked “Given the circumstances – the economic north not doing enough of their corporate social responsibilities – does the third world stand a chance at leading this global economic and political initiative?” He has one answer to that question – “absolutely.”

Larry Lohman is an American lecturer in front of an audience of one Chinese and about a hundred Filipinos. But he is not lying.

Our world today may look like a snapshot out of the scene between David and Goliath, a duel between the North and the South – economically and politically. But then, at the height of global interdependence, we all now look at what each other’s doing at a risk to overthrow abusive and monopolistic forces – the “Neoclassical Liberalism”, the “Free World”, a world in continuous pursuit of justice.

And in this world, let alone at a time that the human race stands fragile and struggling, there is significance to every nation’s ascendancy, every leader’s discretion. We have to empower ourselves and in effect, start the initiative. Not one human voice shall stand insignificant amidst the threat of an environmental, a political, and a global lack of action.

J.E. Micael M. Eva VIII

UP Diliman Geography Student