Let’s get serious in cleaning the environment!

Last Monday, I attended the first Understanding Choices Forum hosted by the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (RAFI) and the Eduardo Aboitiz Development Studies Center in cooperation with the Philippine-American Educational Foundation who brought in Dr. Charles Rarick, professor of Management and director of International Business at the Barry University in Miami, Florida. Dr. Rarick gave a lecture on "Economic Integration, Political Disintegration" before a jam-packed crowd at the George Byrant Hall of the Eduardo Aboitiz Center. Call it timely that one of the main topics of Dr. Rarick’s lecture was ASEAN integration, something that Cebuanos learned from the recently concluded 12th ASEAN Leaders’ Summit. The latest on that issue was that the ASEAN leaders agreed in Cebu last month to move up their timetable from the year 2020 to 2015. But Dr. Rarick believes that this new timetable might not be met by the ASEAN leaders as it is still too far away and a lot of things could happen that could derail this plan.

Indeed, everything depends on the acceptance of the final draft of the ASEAN Charter, which is due to be adopted hopefully in the next ASEAN Summit in Singapore. If and when that’s approved then they can truly set the timetable for creating the ASEAN Union. But that’s easier said than done and we can only hope this could be done sooner because an integrated ASEAN would certainly be more economically stronger to compete against a globalized environment than what Southeast Asian countries are today... totally separated individual countries competing against each other and with the rest of the world.

A few people in the audience came from the Netherlands and naturally used the European Union (EU) as a good model for the ASEAN integration. However, there’s really very little in common between Europe and Southeast Asia. For instance, the EU came together as a result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the rest of the Warsaw Pact. That political disintegration created a golden opportunity to gather the European countries into one economic bloc. This could never have happened in the days when Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Romania were under the Soviet boot poised to do battle against NATO.

Dr. Rarick also briefly discussed another ASEAN dream of having a single currency. Again, too many economists are telling the people within ASEAN that this idea is just too far and too complex to do. I know a lot of people who are convinced that we should have a single currency in ASEAN, which may even include the ASEAN dialogue partners. But yes, a lot of groundwork needs to be done to achieve this... and in Cebu, since we got to host the ASEAN Summit, we are just starting to embrace the need for ASEAN integration as the Europeans have embraced the EU.

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Talking about the EU, it seems that European governments are seeking a worldwide collective action to cut greenhouse emissions when the United Nations (UN) Inter-government Panel for Climate Change finally tagged the human race for its responsibility for the rising of global temperatures. In Paris, French President Jacques Chirac opened the Paris Conference on World Environmental Governance, warning that, "Soon will come a day when climate change escapes all control: We are on the verge of the irreversible. Faced with this emergency, the time is not for half-measures. The time is for a revolution: A revolution of our awareness, a revolution of the economy. A revolution of political action."

I fully agree that our situation is bleak. We know too well that we may have disturbed our climate beyond repair and yes, the time has come for drastic changes and Filipinos cannot pretend not to be aware of the damage to our environment. Sure, the Arroyo administration just recently passed the Biofuels Act, but I’m sure that the implementation phase would take a longer time and time is not a luxury we can enjoy.

I dare say that the Arroyo administration should start identifying the kind of pollutants we are using and create a doable plan to phase them out as quickly as possible. For instance, we know too well that the two-stroke engine is one of the principal causes of pollution. It’s time to phase it out sooner, not later! Let’s get serious in cleaning up our environment!

What about those Multi-cabs... call them chop-chop vehicles brought in by Norkis Trading? In all candor, this is plain dumping of Japanese junk into our country because these minicabs have been taken off the roads of Japan because they are already polluting the environment there. Perhaps we ought to ask the Japanese government that these junks should be destroyed rather than be sold to Third World countries like us. If Japan will no longer sell them to eager buyers, then Filipino companies that used to import them from Japan would now be forced to buy brand new vehicles, which cause less pollution. Yes, we must get rid of our second-hand mentality!

There is no question that our problems with pollution can only end if we start doing something positive to reduce the toxic emissions we release to the atmosphere. A couple of Sundays ago, my good friend Hector Almario inaugurated his latest gas station ... the PTT gas station located along Maximo Patalinjug Avenue in Humay-humay, Lapu-Lapu City.

It turned out that we were all witnesses to history in the making... as Almario proudly told us that this was the first multi-fuel gas station ever to operate in the country. Indeed, this was the first time that a service station had both the usual fuel pumps for unleaded gasoline or diesel fuel and another bay dedicated solely to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). If you didn’t know, vehicles using LPG emit fewer carbons into the atmosphere. At least in Cebu we are now embarking on a new era in the use of alternative fuels. This is what we call, thinking out of the box!

Almario’s PTT gas station will pave the way for more multi-fuel gas stations to open throughout the country very soon, where we can expect alternative fuels like coco-diesel or ethanol to be sold at your friendly neighborhood gas stations. The more we use alternative fuels, the less pollutants we throw into the environment. A few months back, Almario also opened the first-ever Autogas LPG gas station in Panagdait, Mabolo, which caters solely to vehicles using LPG. But I think having a multi-fuel station is a good start. We hope that the traditional gas stations would soon follow; after all this is to help clean up our environment.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.