2012 was the wake-up year or the year that should have been a steel baton that hit our leaders’ heads. How can anyone forget those hundreds of tons of garbage washed along Manila’s shoreline that is supposed to be Manila’s showcase to the world? It is not new; we know we are killing the planet in our little corner of the third rock from the sun. Whatever I write here will only be redundant.
Philippine lies in the path of no less than 12 typhoons a year but we unfortunately have not learned our lesson in a hundred years. We simply hoard people in evacuation centers, feed them for sometimes until the storm has passed, collect the dead bodies and bury them in mass graves. We virtually sit and wait for the next storm to strike and do it all over again. It is our fate; our nation’s fate but while we can neither tell the storm to stop nor lessen its fury…we can certainly devise ways to lessen its impact.
The government spends billion trying to solve this perennial problem with very little if at all positive result. While we can squeeze cigarette and wine makers to pay more taxes to pay for the harm it causes to people; why can’t we squeeze manufacturers of plastics and other environmentally unfriendly products to pay for the destruction their products wreck on the environment? We either squeeze them out of business or compel them to buy back the plastic garbage and dispose of it properly. Buying back plastic litter at a reasonable price will provide the scavengers with a better income. The government must set and guarantee prices. Plastic litter will vanish in weeks if students and pupils will spend their free time picking up plastics. Homes and establishments will in fact religiously separate their plastic garbage if they can get reasonable cash for it. If government matches whatever amount manufacturers can afford to pay for it; it will be a double whammy that will encourage everyone to keep his/her own dirt for money. It is an indirect bribery of people to keep them disciplined but for a good cause being my yeah; thoughts for the New Year.
Emissions are rising, ice is melting and yet the response of governments is simply to pretend that none of it is happening
By George Monbiot
January 01, 2013 "The Guardian" - - It was the year of living dangerously. In 2012 governments turned their backs on the living planet, demonstrating that no chronic problem, however grave, will take priority over an immediate concern, however trivial. I believe there has been no worse year for the natural world in the past half-century.
Three weeks before the minimum occurred, the melting of the Arctic's sea ice broke the previous record. Remnants of the global megafauna – such as rhinos and bluefin tuna – were shoved violently towards extinction. Novel tree diseases raged across continents. Bird and insect numbers continued to plummet, coral reefs retreated, marine life dwindled. And those charged with protecting us and the world in which we live pretended that none of it was happening.
Their indifference was distilled into a great collective shrug at the Earth Summit in June. The first summit, 20 years before, was supposed to have heralded a new age of environmental responsibility. During that time, thanks largely to the empowerment of corporations and the ultra-rich, the square root of nothing has been achieved. Far from mobilising to address this, in 2012 the leaders of some of the world's most powerful governments – the US, the UK, Germany and Russia – didn't even bother to turn up.
But they did send their representatives to sabotage it.
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