After almost 18 years of the Clean Air Act, air quality has not improved and may have worsened with no massive intervention being done, while over 350,000 vehicles are sold yearly, thus, contributing to the increasing share of vehicles to total air pollution in Metro Manila from 70 percent three decades ago to 93 percent today.
Solutions needed, not mere tests or diagnoses. Ever since, our clean-air programs have been limited merely to three activities: 1) Measuring ambient-air pollution through Department of Environment and Natural Resources’s monitoring stations; 2) Road apprehension by antismoke-belching units of the local government units; and 3) Vehicle Emission Testing centers. All three do not offer real solutions to air pollution at source. These activities are limited to accosting polluters and measuring pollution levels and do not solve anything.
An emission inventory is vital as one cannot plan something one cannot measure. However, unless the technologies used can measure real time of, say, every minute, or 43,200 times a month, results will be inaccurate. For one, as an archipelagic country exposed to regular sea breeze and air turbulence, pollution levels can change drastically and be diluted any second, says a study by Dr. Emmanuel Anglo.
Moreover, many of our air monitoring stations bought from a single supplier Electro Byte the past 17 years are no longer functioning, and if they still do, have high margins of errors. In short, they do not measure up accurately to expectations, making many of them useless.
Penalties won’t reduce emissions, education will. On the antismoke-belching campaign, no frequency of road apprehensions or increases in penalties will reduce emissions. Drivers are the ones penalized, and since no one teaches them how to reduce their emissions, they get caught again, so their solution is to bribe their way around.
The Private Emission Testing Centers are another case with their rampant anomalous practice of issuing “Non-Appearance” Emission Clearance Certificates, which are mere paper compliance with no actual physical tests. Worse, they are declared valid stupidly for a period of, say, three months.
Section 46 of the Clean Air Act requires that on top of penalties, violators must undergo a seminar on how to reduce emissions. Section 11 mandates the government to make available all the information, best maintenance practices and technological options to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, these are not being done.
In the end, the right education or the dynamic application of theory into practice will help reduce emissions.
Huge funds, but none for research? Another unimplemented provision is Section 15 on Pollution Research, which is lamentable as even ResCueAir, the group of researchers from academe, led by Dr. Mylene Cayetano from UP and Dr. Edgar Vallar from De La Salle, spent a few hundreds of thousands from their own pockets to bring a team of Germans and their equipment to conduct ambient-air tests.
This is unacceptable, as there are untapped huge funds for clean air like the P9-billion Special Vehicle Pollution Control Fund from the road users’ tax, and the hundreds of millions of pesos of the Air Quality Management Fund coming from all air-pollution penalties.
Even the Department of Science and Technology’s Environmental Technology Verification program tasked to verify technologies is not funded much to verify the various technologies in the market.
By endorsing all, government doesn’t favor any. The government has long been squeamish about endorsing technologies, for ethical reasons of favoring any technology, while ignoring higher moral issues that air pollution is resulting in thousands of deaths and health costs of $2.8 billion in 1990, says a World Bank study.
In fact, 85,000 Filipinos die yearly from respiratory diseases, like bronchitis, emphysema, pneumonia, lung cancer, asthma, etc., all aggravated by air pollution with drivers topping the mortality list, followed by street children. The World Health Organization also confirms that even cardiovascular diseases are caused by air pollution.
Actually, if the government endorses all technologies, it is not endorsing any single technology. So there is really nothing wrong with pushing for technologies as this is the only missing element in finding solutions to emissions. Even the US Environmental Protection Agency carries technologies on its web site as a menu of choices.
The government has already endorsed technologies, but not specific brands, like the shift from four-stroke to two-stroke engines, and even subsidized by P500 million the shift from incandescent bulbs to CFLs.
Patronize inventors, top technologies. We must allow all technologies to compete and give users the freedom to make the choice. After all, most technologies have specific interventions like a fuel additive for fuel, oil additive for lubricants, air bleeders to enhance air-fuel ratios, etc.
Let’s put them all to the test, but give priority to those that work and those by local inventors like Deo Reloj, who demonstrated straight-run diesel is as clear as water, but is adulterated by light cycle oil from refinery wastes containing heavy poly-aromatic hydrocarbons that cause the emissions that can be treated by oil and fuel additives; or George de Guzman, for his oxygen enhancers as fuel boosters; or
Pablo Planas, for his air bleeders enhancing air-fuel ratios, whose verified gadget for two-stroke engines was also independently studied by Miriam College and Dr. Serafin Talisayon of the UP Technology Management Center.
Let us include in the research and techno challenge or tests, all the fuels in the market; the air-monitoring equipment; high-end antiviral masks that can neutralize certain viruses and bacteria; or old friend Marlo Colimbo’s assorted high-tech accessories, like his oil-filter magnets that can capture abrasive metal shavings and dust, gas chromatographic paper that can instantly diagnose oil and brake-fluid quality, and many more. Also put to the test the proposed new vehicles and engines, forming part of the transport modernization.
Lamentably, the absence of a program and support policies have not created a market for small technology providers, over a dozen of whom have turned bankrupt, as it is still cheaper and convenient to buy a piece of paper (nonappearance emission certificates) than resort to actual maintenance and adopting technologies. But, in the end, Engr. Dave Garcia of Atin To Development Services stressed that all these technologies will not work well without regular maintenance in the same way humans need maintenance like food, sunshine, exercise, vitamins, etc.
1 comment
In 1996 a Canadian executive of gas pipeline systems once told me to use ‘bottled gas’ for transport vehicles to reduce gas emissions. I did not fully understood what he said. He was referring to CNG compressed natural gas. Our very own DOE came out with a program to equip buses in EDSA with this type of CNG-powered vehicles. DOE also preferred this over petroleum based LPG taxis and jeepneys. We have the supply from Malampaya for the CNG.