First word

WHY am I not surprised that Makati Mayor Mar-Len Abigail Binay is so hellbent and obstinate in declaring a state of climate emergency in Makati?

Makati is a place that is fond of securing all kinds of distinctions, like being the richest patch of ground in the archipelago, in being the first to accomplish or acquire this or that, including the inconsequential and the ephemeral.

And now it wants to be the first Philippine city to sport electric vehicles crisscrossing its streets and showing solar panels in its public buildings.

Historically, Makati is also full of surprises. In an address before the Rotary Club of Makati on Aug. 20, 1968, Fr. Horacio de la Costa, SJ disclosed to his startled audience that Makati originally belonged to the Jesuits. And he even had the text of the deed of donation from Don Pedro de Brito and his wife, Doña Ana de Herrera, to the society.

The Jesuit historian related that “Makati was taken away from the Jesuits by the Spanish crown in 1768, when it was decided that the Spanish empire no longer had need of our services, and when in 1869 the Spanish crown changed its mind, and asked us to return to the Philippines, it was on condition that we would not lay claim to any of our properties.”

De la Costa said wryly that the religious order was thankfully spared from a superlative headache not only of managing Makati but other estates in Manila and environs.

In modern times, Makati is a city that has not known a mayor not named Binay for more than three decades running and conjecturally may not know anyone else as its mayor until the climate apocalypse. This is what climate fanatics and fearmongers insist is the future awaiting humanity, if we do not banish or replace fossil fuels from national economies, if we do not bring down to zero carbon emissions, and arrest the warming of the planet.

Mayor Binay, who issued the declaration at a webinar on August 5, says low-lying and coastal areas in Makati and other areas are bearing the brunt of strong typhoons and rising sea levels.

Oddly, Makati has no sea bounding it and no coastal areas to worry about.

“We heard the data. We understood the science. We are feeling its impact. Now is a crucial time to act, and we need to act fast,” Binay said in recorded remarks at the close of the webinar organized by the city’s disaster risk reduction and management office (CDRRMO).

“With this realization, Makati City has found enough reason to declare a climate emergency in the city, and we are well aware that much still needs to be done to achieve our climate goals,” she said.

It is emblematic of modern Makati to extend its sights from monetary and developmental concerns to the planetary, which is the chief excuse for all the hullabaloo about climate change today.

So, it is in character that Mayor Binay has ventured to declare a climate emergency in Makati.

Not the first

To set the record straight, Makati is not the first Philippine city to declare a state of climate emergency. That distinction belongs elsewhere.

In a front page story on July 20, 2019, the Sunstar Bacolod newspaper reported that Bacolod City became the first city in the Philippines to declare a climate emergency by virtue of a resolution authored by councilor Carl Lopez, chairman of the committee on environment and ecology which endorsed such declaration and which was unanimously approved by the city council during its regular session on July 17, 2019.

Mayor Binay did not issue a signed declaration or resolution by the Makati government. She did it verbally at the close of the webinar.

Declaring a state of climate emergency in Makati is not as consequential or epochal as the mayor fancies it to be.

Makati is just a local jurisdiction in the Republic of the Philippines; it is just one among many in the country. It is not even the first Philippine locality to declare a climate emergency; that distinction belongs to Bacolod, the capital of Negros Occidental province.

To place this initiative in perspective, Mayor Binay’s declaration is about as meaningful as Pope Francis’ earlier declaration of a climate emergency in Vatican City or the Holy See. Few remember now the pope’s declaration.

Significantly, Makati is as small an area as the Vatican. It is absurd to imagine that the two jurisdictions can reshape the global climate through their climate action.

Mayor Binay appears to be promoting the idea of the Philippines as one of the most vulnerable countries to climate hazards as claimed by a so-called Global Peace Index, which is concerned with peacefulness, not climate vulnerability.

The Global Peace Index is a report produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) which measures the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness. The GPI ranks 163 independent states and territories (collectively accounting for 99.7 percent of the world’s population) according to their levels of peacefulness.

The index measures or rates the relative peacefulness of countries, and makes a big show of announcing which countries are the most troubled.

Strangely, it is nowhere claimed that the index measures or rates countries according to their susceptibility to climate hazards.

Mayor Binay bought into the purported claim that the index found that 47 percent of the Philippine population are in areas highly exposed to climate hazards such as earthquakes, tsunami, floods, tropical cyclones and drought.

Forgetting that Makati has no sea or coast at its boundaries, she waxed sentimental and alarmed about rising sea levels in the country because of climate change.

Also, earthquakes are not part of the climate. No climatologist will say that.

She turned a reported increase in rainfall experienced by Makati over the years during storms into an ever-present calamity. She bewailed extreme weather events that disrupt public services and displace families.

“We need to plan and create strategies to make our city more climate-resilient. We need to educate and engage our citizens in this important effort, and we need to lead by example by ensuring that our actions align with our goal of achieving a more sustainable future,” she said.

For this reason, the Makati government said it is amping up its efforts to bring down its greenhouse gas emissions.

Among them are plans to use electric vehicles for the city government and solar panels for public schools and government offices.

No climate emergency

Not everyone is as jumpy or naive as Mayor Binay in beholding the challenge of a climate emergency.

In the United Kingdom, British peer and ex-cabinet minister Lord Frost told Mail Online that there is no “climate emergency” and urged the next prime minister to move away from “medieval technology” such as wind power.

The Conservative peer, who was Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, has hit out at the “totally unrealistic approach to climate and energy policy” in the UK over the past two decades.

He demanded that Britain change tack from “managing demand” for energy and instead put greater emphasis on fracking and nuclear power, as well as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

He called for a “pragmatic” response to climate change which he said was just one of the many problems facing the UK.

In an essay for the Policy Exchange think-tank, Lord Frost outlined how a new prime minister could alter the government’s approach to climate and energy policy.

“The current evidence does not support the assertion that we are in a climate ‘emergency’,” the Tory peer wrote.

“Rather, the effects of climate change are a problem, one of the many we face, and should be tackled in that pragmatic way rather than by asking us to up-end the whole way our societies work.

“Western society, and indeed world civilization, depends on copious supplies of energy.

“Yet the prevailing mood is one in which individuals are asked to restrict their use of energy and in which unsatisfactory renewables technology is touted as the best solution to our problems.

“Instead of focusing on technological solutions that enable us to master our environment and get more energy in a more carbon-efficient way — nuclear, CCS, fracking, one day fusion — we have focused on managing demand so we can use medieval technology like wind power.”