The start of the greening of America

Tomorrow, Straight from the Sky celebrates its 7th year on Cebu Television, giving you quality shows about the good things happening in Cebu. Anticipating some changes for this year, like the planned move from our present studio in AS Fortuna to the ABS-CBN complex in Mandaue City, we will depart from our usual annual presentation of previous shows, the best of the best shows on Straight from the Sky and instead give you a show that people these days are talking about. It's about the business of Call Centers.

With us tonight are the top officers of Convergys led by Site Director Mr. Stephen Slade and Ms. Hazel S. Aquisanda who handle training and recruitment. This is the first time we have anyone from a Call Center on our show, hence our guests will give us an insight of the business of Call Centers and certain realities and myths that people ought to know about this business. So watch them tonight on SkyCable's channel 15 at 8:00 pm.

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Houston, Texas: Going around anywhere in Texas means traveling on a car using either surface roads or the Beltway or Freeway. At any given time in America, these road infrastructures are filled with vehicles driving for opposite directions moving hurriedly for one reason or another. One look at a freeway and you can just imagine how many vehicles are on the road in the entire United States of America.

This is why today gas prices in the Conoco gas stations are US$ 2.35 per gallon of regular, $ 2.45 for a gallon of Plus and $2.55 for a gallon of Premium gasoline. I'm only talking about one gasoline company, but the prices do vary from station to station. Other gas stations charge much higher with US$ 2.66 for regular and $ 2.80 for premium. But on the average, these are the pump prices of gasoline in the United States.

One US gallon is around 3.785 liters and if you peg the peso to the dollar at P48.90, you'll find out that 1 US gallon of regular fuel cost P114,915. I'm only using the peso to the dollar at the time I left the Philippines. I don't know if it has changed by much since then. Divide this figure by the number of liters to a gallon, you'd end up with P30,360 per liter for regular gasoline.

The last time I gassed up my car at the Caltex Borromeo station, the price for unleaded gasoline was P27.964. That means Americans are paying higher pump prices for their gasoline on a per liter basis than motorists in the Philippines. The difference between the US and RP is that, especially here in Texas, they are an oil-producing country, while the Philippines is not! No doubt, the average American understands the politics of oil, but the people I met here are already fed up with high gasoline prices. Gone are the days when a gallon of gasoline was only slightly over a dollar.

But there is a new thinking in America these days, especially after former US Vice-President Al Gore became a Global Crusader for the environment with his Academy Awarded documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" which has been embraced by the American public as a "wake up call" for them to make a paradigm shift towards a better and cleaner environment.

To add to this problem, Americans know that they too are part of the problem after all, they use a lot of gas-guzzling vehicles and the Oil Industry is one of America's major businesses.

But most Americans are now aware about the price they have to pay for keeping their Oil Industry alive. It is destroying the environment, and seeing the polar caps shrinking isn't really a pretty picture to behold. Most Americans are also aware that in the global thirst for oil, the Arabs have become extremely wealthy, including rogue countries like Iran who do not believe that Israel has a right to exist and believe that the Nazi holocaust was just a made-by-Hollywood movie and worse of all, Iran is on the verge of get-ting a nuclear bomb, either sooner if not later.

If you followed closely what's going on in Iran, they are not building huge invasion ships so they could invade Israel or even America. They just want to build a nuclear bomb and find ways to deliver their deadly cargo to any city in the United States or in Israel. When they've "nuked" an American or Israeli City, you can bet that all the Arab world would be overjoyed that finally, the great Satan has been inflicted a mortal wound. Some people think that this scenario maybe farfetched, but from the way things are being done by the fanatics in Iran, they might just pull it off!

Hence today, we are witnessing the greening of American through many newspaper articles on how to cut back on carbon emissions and other energy-saving suggestions. Soon, America will be the world leader in solar technology and they are now building more fuel-efficient vehicles. All this means for a cleaner environment, new business opportunities and yes, less US dollars going to the Petrodictators of the Middle East. What about us in the Philippines? When will we do our share to help clean the environment?