Climate change now conceded

As oracles of global disaster, Al Gore and the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change should be natural allies. Both were in fact very busy the past two weeks with their common advocacy. The former, billed as America’s ex-future president, spent hours convincing a US Senate panel that industries and individuals do litter the air with greenhouse gases. The latter was reviewing the final version of its report on how climate change will annihilate countries and species.

These days, however, conservationists like Gore and the IPCC are not working together as required. As laymen in general come to accept the need to save Earth from doom, the forecasters of that doom have begun to twit each other’s methods. Sad as the division may look, it could be a good sign. That governments and institutions are now taking lead roles to curb carbon dioxide emissions means that a higher stage has been set for the environment. No longer will the fight against pollution be voluntary as Gore advocates, but mandatory as IPCC prefers. Stricter rules will have to be imposed on each man, industry and country to lessen their ecological load on the world.

Gore perhaps is a good measure of how the debate on climate change has reached a new level. Only a year ago persons who refused to accept the reality of global warming were taunting him as an empty agitator. Critics claimed that his emceeing of the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" was but a springboard for a political comeback. Talk subsided only when Gore did not show up at the starting line of the Democratic presidential posturing. Analysts began taking more seriously his warnings about cities sinking under rising ocean levels and farms drying up from dead rivers. That’s when environment activists themselves began taking on the job of Gore-bashing. No longer was he harangued for being a prophet of doom, but for not pushing harder to prevent the doom.

Time magazine’s Charles Krauthammer condensed the plaint against Gore by describing his line as limousine liberal hypocrisy. Here was Gore, he said, extolling carbon credits to lower greenhouse gases, when what it actually does is encourage more fossil fuel burning by those who can afford to. Buying absolution, Krauthammer wrote, "is a way for the rich to export the real and costs and sacrifices of pollution control to the poorer segments of humanity in the Third World." He cited as example the carbon trading by the Dutch outfit GreenSeat with a foundation that plants trees in Uganda — at the expense of driving out poor farmers from national park expansion. Worse, he cited, is Gore’s own environment-unfriendly but conscience-free lifestyle. Gore’s Tennessee mansion happens to consume 20 times more electricity than the average American home, but that doesn’t matter since he buys carbon offsets.

As for the IPCC report, the past two weeks saw fierce resistance from the United States, China and Saudi Arabia. One delegate in the drafting committee complained about political pressure being exerted for them to water down the 1,400-page listing of critical areas and industries. The report almost did not come out, were it not for a 24-hour session during which words were substituted to lighten criticism on the most gas-emitting activities, like power generation, meat processing and motoring.

At least, it was a qualitative leap from where the IPCC was in Feb., when the first draft was released. Last week’s wrangling was no longer challenged the reality of climate change. Two months ago there were last ditch efforts to make it look like global warming was a myth.

That the initial report was explosive is an understatement. Ian Sample, science reporter of London’s The Guardian newspaper exposed the payment of $10,000 for scientists and economists to debunk the IPCC draft. He traced the payola to the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank funded by US oil companies. Travel expenses and additional payments went to mercenaries who slandered the 2,500 experts who prepared the most comprehensive report yet on climate change. "The AEI has received more than $1.6 million from Exxon-Mobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration," Sample found out.

Fossil fuel lobbyists and allies surely would try to belittle the IPCC anew as unreasonable and its findings as unfounded, but still the UN has spoken. The world will have to curb carbon discharges under closer watch.

A recent survey shows Filipinos, among Pacific peoples, to be most aware about climate change. And yet, like Gore perhaps, they’re not doing enough about it. Slash-and-burn farming (kaingin) appears to be at its worst in 25 years. Last week airline pilots reported a dark cloud of smoke from a forest blaze stretching 500 kms from Mindoro to Palawan’s southwest coasts. And summer has just begun.

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