The Philippines will no longer be attending climate change conferences that would entail flights, according to Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. on Wednesday.
“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,” he added.
Duterte questioned the rationale of participating in international talks about climate change when there was “no entity to enforce the laws governing climate.”
The President also said that 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,” Duterte had said.
The Philippines, in a bid to cut down greenhouse gas emissions globally, committed to join almost 200 countries in a deal in December 2015—during the Aquino administration.
Duterte had said that this could be a “farce” if the developed countries would not honor their obligations under the pact.
He, however, was convinced by his Cabinet members to sign the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2017.
“The Philippines joined the global consensus to fight climate change. We hope that this consensus would hold and real action be undertaken, especially by those most responsible for this monumental problem,” he recently said.
By: Dona Magsino
Source: gmanetwork.com
