The year just past was caught in a web of crises (the rice crisis, the oil crisis, the economic crisis), scandals (NBN-ZTE, fertilizer scam, “euro” generals, “Alabang boys”) and lies (Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain, no-term-extension Charter change). It must be said, however, that 2008 ended on two positive notes.

Oil prices in the global market, which had been soaring to dizzying record highs since July 2007 and peaked at $147 in July 2008, plummeted to $33 early last month, a range last seen in 2004. Then a yearend survey found that despite a darkening economic horizon, 92 percent of Filipinos nevertheless believe 2009 will turn out to be a lot better for them. The nation’s never-say-die spirit is very much alive.

A word of caution, though: This feeling of relief and optimism should not lull us into complacency. To recall an apparently long-forgotten Filipino school fable, the ripe guava is not going to fall down by itself into the mouth of the waiting, lazy and famished Juan. Opportunities have to be seized, the future has to be built — or won.

Yes, it would be a grave mistake to believe that we’re over the hump of the oil crisis. This should be clear from the recent uptick in oil prices, which breached the $40 per barrel mark anew late in December, mainly because of the renewed hostilities in Gaza; the rise underscored how volatile oil prices still are. And lest we forget, the steep $114 drop in oil prices was not prompted by a rosy turn of events but was more of an offshoot of the world’s grim economic conditions.

This means the Philippines remains in the shadow of the oil crisis specter. And it can’t get itself from out of the shadow by just waiting for oil prices to fall. The problem lies not in the prices, which rise and fall beyond our control. The problem lies in our heavy reliance on imported fuels for our energy needs. (Although the share of imported oil in our energy mix has been declining these past years, it remains high — more than 44 percent in 2007.) It goes without saying that the solution is not in cheap prices but in energy security or independence.

But energy security has been our primary policy thrust through several administrations since Ferdinand Marcos’. There is no question the Arroyo administration is also looking in that direction. Its energy program is targeting to make the country 60-percent energy self-sufficient by 2010. In 2006 it passed the Biofuels Act and last December the Renewable Energy Act. Aside from dipping into natural resources available locally (geothermal, water, natural gas, coal, oil), our country has started tapping new technologies (solar energy, wind farms, electric jeepneys and tricycles, hybrid vehicles, ethanol, coco-biodiesel).

But even after four decades of pursuing energy independence, we seem to be a long way off from the 60-percent energy self-sufficiency target. We continue to hear of massive brownouts in some parts of the country and a looming power crisis. Our ethanol program has hardly taken off but already there is talk of importing more ethanol to meet demand, and of food shortage as ethanol production threatens to eat up into food supplies and encroach on agricultural lands. Even as we have yet to solidify our gains on the energy front, the challenges keep mounting.

Which makes the need to achieve energy security imperative — and more so not only because it is the wisest and most pragmatic way to the future but also because in a bleak economy some of the initiatives taken in pursuit of this goal would create more jobs locally and even help address one of the world’s present-day problems, which is global warming.

All this gives government leaders, especially those in Malacañang and Congress, greater reason to take the lead in this undertaking with as much urgency, earnestness, resolve and creativity as they usually show in defending and raising their pork barrel allocations, in pushing for Charter change and in killing impeachment complaints.

Now that would be a real basis for relief and optimism.