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Friday, March 29, 2024

PCCI chooses GDP over climate change mitigation

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The reality of worsening world climatic conditions and the international realization of the need for a universal response has forced governments, private institutions and people to make choices between realistic alternatives to continued normal existence on this planet. Like the rest of the 192 members of the United Nations the Philippines signed in December 2015, a treaty committing all signatories to limiting the Earth’s average temperature increase to 2 degrees above an agreed base figure. The Philippines’ by-2030 commitment for reduction of carbon emissions – submitted to COP21 (the 21st Conference of Parties on Climate Change) – was 70 percent.

Foremost among the private institutions that have been under pressure to take a position on the issue of climate change mitigation is the business sector of this country, which is principally represented by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry. PCCI has now stated its position. That position, contained in a recent letter from president George Barcelon to the Climate Change Commission, which was created by Congress a few years ago to provide focus for the government’s climate change mitigation efforts.

“We are very much concerned,” George Barcelon’s letter began, “on how this 70-percent commitment will impact on industries, especially those in the manufacturing sector and the small and medium enterprises.” The letter went on to say that if interventions in order to reach a 70-percent reduction were to be capital-intensive, enterprises and industries “would be under pressure to incur higher operational costs and consumers would be paying higher prices for goods and services.”

Therefore, Barcelon’s letter concluded, “With Philippine manufacturing only starting to redevelop, the measures that should be adopted should balance the need to sustain economic growth with the need to protect the environment.” He noted that the previous goal of 40 percent reduction had been supported by the private sector and suggested that a 40 percent reduction was “the threshold [at] which industries could reduce their carbon emission.”

Assuming that he does not subscribe to the position that he took in his letter to the CCC, George Barcelon does not deserve criticism. He was only acting as the bearer of a message. One may kill a message but never the messenger.

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PCCI deserves criticism in full measure. Barcelon’s letter was reflective of an institutional mindset made up of two parts that are equally unacceptable. The first part is that it is business-as-usual in the world, which includes this country. The second part of the mindset is that in the realm of policymaking the Philippine business community – particularly the manufacturing sector – must be accorded priority over all else.

Let me address the business-as-usual part first. I pose the question, is PCCI for real? Some of the hottest-ever years have occurred in the past dozen years, and PCCI thinks it is business as usual? Really bad bad natural disasters have been occurring with frightening frequency in places in the globe that never experienced them before – the most recent example being the overflowing of the Seine River’s banks in Paris, a city with a history of climatic stability – and PCCI thinks it can still be business as usual in this country? And how about Ondoy followed in unrelenting succession by Pablo, Reming, Sendong and that more recent nightmare, Yolanda?

Now, the second part of the apparent PCCI mindset. In taking the position it has – to wit, that the Philippine government’s commitment to the COP21 agreement is bad for the manufacturing sector’s growth and therefore bad for the nation – PCCI, through its messenger George Barcelon, has echoed the dictum laid down in the 1940s by General Motors Corp. chairman Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson: “What is good for General Motors is good for the US.” A statement worded in that fashion was bound to be misinterpreted, and it was. Charles Wilson never lived down that boo-boo, and today it is one of the prime entries in the lexicon of not-to-be-made business statements.

If what PCCI and George Barcelon were trying to say was that what is good for PCCI’s members is good for this country, they are very wrong, like Charles Wilson was. A whole is greater than any of its parts; the PCCI membership can never be greater than the national economy. In the same manner that what was good for General Motors could not be equated with what was good for the US, so the best interest of George Barcelon and his PCCI colleagues need not be in best interest of this country of 102 million people. Most certainly, it is not so in the increasingly urgent matter of climate change mitigation.

PCCI and George Barcelon don’t have to be told that global warming and world climate worsening are no longer postponable deferrable, business-as-usual matters. After a disastrous El Niño episode, this country is looking at a La Niña that could be worse, and there are the usual 20 or so typhoons lining up to visit these exposed islands this year.

After much study and review, the Philippine government has made a commitment of 70-percent carbon emissions reduction to the UN. That’s a done deal. The commitment cannot – and should not – be watered down. The Philippines is one of the most vulnerable and foreign-assistance-needy countries in the world where climate change is concerned.

Instead of responding to the government in “It’s bad for us” fashion, PCCI should put the experts to work to see how continued manufacturing-sector growth and attainment of 70-percent carbon emissions reduction can be reconciled. Perhaps the increase from 40 percent to 70 percent will not be as capital-intensive as PCCI fears it will be.

In any event, George Barcelon should not be shot; he is only the messenger. It is PCCI that should be shot, for its inward-looking, damn-the-nation attitude toward climate change mitigation.

E-mail: rudyromero777@yahoo.com

    

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