The challenge of moving away from fossil fuels

The latest report just released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change brings a ray of hope: that we can shift away from fossil fuels and slow down climate change. It is doable, but not being done. And there’s the rub.

This panel convened by the United Nations is made up of 278 experts from all over the world, representing a range of disciplines: meteorology, economics, political science and others. It is reported that their long deliberations over the exact wording of the report produced a document that was the “lowest common denominator of what they could agree on. It is not controversial.”

It calls for the ways to move away from fossil fuels right now and yet with the Russian war in Ukraine, the fossil fuel industry is demanding the production and sale of more oil, more gas, more coal.

Coal, crude oil and natural gas are considered fossil fuels because they were formed from the “fossilized, buried remains of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago.” They are nonrenewable, dangerous to produce and are responsible for oil spills, water table poisoning from fracking and air pollution. Thus, the drive towards renewable sources of energy like wind power and solar.

Rachel Cletus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, made this statement: “Decades of failure in global leadership, combined with fossil fuel companies’ single-minded focus on their profits and unsustainable patterns of consumption within the world’s richest households, are putting our planet in peril.”

The latest climate change report should be especially important for a country like ours, the third most vulnerable country to climate change, according to the 2017 World Risk Report. We have seen how climate change has adversely affected the country with the changes in rainfall patterns, droughts, threats to biodiversity and food security, rising sea levels and public health risks. The segment of the population that is most severely affected is also the one that finds it most challenging to recover from such setbacks. (More on the details of the IPCC report in future columns)

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If you thought the tree whisperer I wrote about last week was a little extreme, New York Times reports that in Melbourne, there is a program that tracks public trees and even assigns them an email address. All in the name of befriending trees to manage climate change.

Consider this: a 122-year old Dutch elm tree is carefully given a “‘reduction pruning’ aimed at controlling the tree’s bulk to help improve its vitality and extend its lifespan.” What loving care and total respect for age-old trees which have benefited generations. Such pruning is considered one of the proven forms of tree maintenance.

This tree is part of a comprehensive tree database accessible on a portable electronic device. It turns green after the pruning is done to register that this elm was back in top shape.

This unusual climate change strategy has drawn the attention of other cities like New York, Denver, Shanghai, Ottawa and Los Angeles, which have all unveiled Million Tree Initiatives. They recognize the ability of trees to “reduce city temperatures, absorb carbon dioxide and soak up excess rainfall.” Has Manila, has the Philippines forgotten that?

Melbourne has launched the Urban Forest Visual, a map that displays each of the 80,000 trees in its parks and streets, and showed each tree’s age, species and health. It has assigned each tree’s own email address so that people could help in monitoring their state of health and alert the council workers.

The surprising thing is that love poems and emotional tributes were conveyed on those email addresses, describing the joy trees have brought them. There were specific messages like, “Good luck with the photosynthesis.”

Someone appreciative of the trees recognizes the “sanity walk” she has around the park, essential to her well-being. “A lap of the park clears my head, then I can go back inside and get back to work,” the 40-year-old project manager for a telecommunications firm confessed.

Having more trees will attract people to go out and enjoy them more and exercise in their shade.  The tree lovers and concerned public officials were made aware that many of the trees were planted in large batches in 1875, so it meant these would die at the same time. Thus, the urgent need to steadily replace them early on.

Councilor Rohan Leppert knows that this tree awareness program needs to continue for the long term because “keeping the city cool by planting trees is the single most cost-effective thing we can do to mitigate against climate change.” He notes that “a healthy tree canopy can reduce a city’s temperature by 4 degrees to 6 degrees Celsius, or 7.2 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit.”

It is time for us to be more respectful and reverential towards our trees – whatever are left of them, still standing tall and not sacrificed in the name of commerce and development.

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We are still writing via Zoom!

Young Writers’ Hangouts are on April 9 with Mary Ann Ordinario and April 23 with Roel Cruz.

Write Things’ six-day summer workshop “Writefest” (now on its 8th year) on May 16, 18, 20, 23, 25, 27 is now open for registration. Open to 8-17 year olds, it will run from 3-4:30 pm every session.

Contact [email protected]. 0945.2273216

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