Earth Hour advocacy a stunning success!

For our special presentation on Straight from the Sky we bring you our first opening show for our 9th year celebration with a travel show about Macau: It’s history, culture and cuisine. There’s so much to see in Macau, we could not cram it in just an hour-long show. Tonight is the first part of this two part episode, the Macau of the past, where we will show you its rich heritage, being under Portuguese rule for 400 plus years.

We also present to you Macau’s Grand Prix museum, giving you a complete tour of the cars that were used during the Guia Races from 1954 to the present. The family of the late Arsenio “Dodjie” Laurel presented his Brabham racecar as part of the memorial for Dodjie, the only racer who won back-to-back victories in 1962 and 1963, a feat that no one has repeated. He was the first racer to die in the middle of a car race back in November 1967. He is still a Macau Grand Prix icon even to this day!

Beside the Grand Prix Museum within the same building is the Wine Museum that shows you the produce of Portugal. We present to you real Portuguese cuisine when we dined in Antonio’s. So watch this first episode of our show about Macau on SkyCable’s channel 15 at 8:00 pm tonight. Next week will be the second episode of our Macau show.

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The big question people will be asking in their offices today is “Where were you when they switched off their lights during Earth Hour?” We were in our uncle’s house in Nivel Hills for the graduation party for our nephews and had a good vantage view of the beginnings of Earth Hour, where at the appointed time, many homes switched off the lights of their homes to show their support and advocacy to help improve the environment and reduce carbon emissions at least in this part of the world.

While we did have a great view from Nivel Hills, you’d hardly notice whether homes switched off their lights because most of the street lights were not turned off, including the lights of the two Mactan bridges that blazed brightly. But as I drove back home by 9 pm, I noticed that many homes did switch off their lights. But it is the businesses around JY Square all the way to Escario St. that didn’t switch their lights off. So you can see that most of the areas that had business along the road were well lighted.

Well, this is one environmental advocacy that has become a global activity. Thanks to satellite and Internet connectivity the entire world responded to this call with bravado! This shows to you that the advocacy to combat climate change has been embraced by a majority of the people in the world. This means, we should now go to the next level in this advocacy and push for more concrete reforms that would truly clean the environment.

The Earth Hour is merely a global advocacy campaign. But it is a humble start for a problem of a global scale. One of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions are power plants all over the world, most of which still use coal. But whether we like it or not, until and unless we truly shift to power plants that no longer use fossil fuels, we will not see coal power plants disappear soon. This is why in Taiwan they are using “Clean Coal” technology that do away with carbon emissions. This is the technology that Taiwan Power is currently building for Global Power in Sangi, Toledo City.

I have no doubt that global advocacy for Earth Hour was a success not only here in Cebu, but throughout the country and the whole world. This should give a hint to our political leadership that they must push for more laws to protect our environment and I mean laws that can be enforced, not laws for mere lip service to help restore our ailing Mother Earth.

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It seems that Charter Changes (cha-cha) via a Constituent Assembly (con-ass) is still being vigorously pursued by Administration Congressmen lead no less than by House Speaker Prospero Nograles despite the fact that this move is so unpopular to the majority of our people. This only shows that Congress is planning something devious. If they are not stopped now, we could wake up one day seeing that the term limits of our elected officials extend beyond their legal terms. Congress should be warned against the people’s wrath in the coming polls if they try to pull some kind of stunt!

If they truly care for the country, they should push for the election of the delegates for a Constitutional Convention (con-con) together with the candidates for the 2010 elections. I was invited by Atty. Christina Garcia-Codilla last Saturday morning to be one of the judges on a Moot Court for 1st year Law students of the University of San Jose-Recoletos on this very topic. The presenters against cha-cha won their case, because 1st year students know that Con-ass isn’t the right method to change our charter.