Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. on Wednesday said the Philippine would no longer attend official climate change conferences that would require air travel.
Locsin made the statement after President Rodrigo Duterte himself expressed no interest in taking another stronger stand against climate change and even questioned the rationale of participating in international talks about the matter when no entity could enforce the laws governing climate.
“Following Duterte’s answer to UN’s plea for yet another stronger stand against climate change—which he branded as more hot air—I am rejecting all official participation in climate change conferences requiring air travel,” Locsin said in a Twitter post.
“We’ll just vote Yes to radical proposals. No more talk,” the top diplomat stressed.
Duterte earlier said he once had a roundtable discussion with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres where he expressed his misgivings about climate change conferences.
“I said to the body: Let’s stop kidding each other or else we are just wasting the time and the money of the people coming back and forth to these conferences, which has not improved a bit since we started to talk about it as it was maybe the noisy scientists,” the President had said.
In 2015, the Philippines, along with almost 200 countries, committed to cut down the global greenhouse gas emission.
According to Duterte, the agreement could be a farce, particularly if developed countries would not honor their obligations under the pact.
Nonetheless, the President was convinced by his Cabinet members to sign the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2017.
With the Philippines joining the global consensus to fight climate change, Duterte expressed hopes that this consensus would hold and real action be undertaken, “especially by those most responsible for this monumental problem.”