Sen. Loren Legarda completely missed the point on why President Duterte said he would not implement the 2016 Paris Agreement on Climate Change (“PH industrialization possible under Paris Accord,” News, 8/1/16).
For a senator, it was naive of Legarda to say that under the agreement industrialized countries would help the Philippines and other developing nations in “preparing for natural hazards, reducing disaster risks… and moving toward low carbon emission.”
Sure, it’s easy for industrialized countries to provide technical and financial assistance to developing countries on disaster risk reduction and mitigation. But even this is highly debatable, considering the US experience with Hurricane “Katrina” and China’s perennial floods that kill thousands yearly.
But even conceding the above, it’s an altogether different thing for countries like China and the United States, which are also signatories to the Paris accord, to move toward a low carbon footprint. Why? Because that would entail shutting down energy power plants running on fossil fuel like oil and coal.
Remember that the United States has about 600 or so coal power plants and many more running on oil, and China has thousands. The coal plants in the Philippines, on the other hand, can be counted by a person’s fingers and toes.
That’s the basic point of our President—that if countries like China and the United States would continue using fossil fuel, why would the Philippines itself stop using coal and oil?
So why is Legarda crying like the lone voice in the wilderness in calling for the implementation of the Paris Agreement? Is it because her son is engaged in the business of solar power?
How true is it that the company of Legarda’s son has gotten incentives and preferential treatment under the government’s FIT (feed-in-tariff) Program from her intercession as the chair of the Senate’s climate change committee?
Legarda is clearly in a conflict-of-interest situation here in opposing the use of fossil fuels, which by far are the cheapest and most widely used by all countries that have become highly industrialized.
—PATRICK NOLASCO, nolascopatrick257@gmail.com