Greed, the Guru of Growth

There were heroes that sacrificed their own lives while saving the weak and helpless during the height of the devastating tropical storm that brought rampaging flood waters cascading through Manila, sweeping all before them. A construction worker, Muelmar Magallanes,18, leap again and again into the raging torrent and saved over 30 women and children until he was too exhausted to fight the current as he was saving a baby girl. He was swept away to his death. A Judge, Raph Lee, 49, of Quezon city took his Jet ski and later with two rubber boats rescued over a 100 people in danger of being drowned by the rising waters. Hundreds of ordinary people took great risks as they carried their neighbors to safety. Thousands spent days and nights on their roof tops terrified as the water kept rising.

Such terrible tragedies bring out the best in the Filipino as neighbors help one another. Mostly the poor helping the poor survive the turbulent torrent. The kind and generous people, non-government and church agencies are out day and night sharing food and dry clothing as I write this.

Media commentators and editorials have lambasted politicians and government officials that were nowhere to be seen as they cowered in their mansions while the poor were carried away to their deaths. Disaster prevention and readiness was practically non-existent, there were no plans, no practice or preparation according to an opposition Senator Loren Legarda. “It’s plain incompetence of the leadership, and the government was absent.....clearly it has no plan”, she said.

The political fall-out in the Philippines as a result may well be like that of hurricane Katrina in the United States that brought election disaster to the Republicans because of the Bush administration’s inability to respond adequately. The need for change was apparent then as it is in the Philippines today. The world need to change too as Copenhagen gets ready to host the World Conference on Climate Change in December. International agreements must be reached and signed to reduce CO2 emissions from power plants, factories and cars to save the planet.

These terrific storms of growing intensity and frequency are evidence of the deadly effects of climate change due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Soon we will reach the point of no return, a tipping point where a runaway chain of events will cause the planet to heat ever more quickly. The burning of fossil fuels have to be cut back and clean electrical generation must be harvested from renewable sources such as wind turbines, ocean tides, solar panels on houses and factories and arrayed across the hot deserts.

There is much we can do to contribute to the reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. We can recycle everything we can, reduce the use of our vehicles, get smaller electric cars, insulate our houses to reduce the need for heating and cooling and stop cutting and instead plant millions of trees. What we need also is to change the almost fanatical belief of our politicians and economists that consumerism is the engine of growth, that greed is good and we must shop til’ we drop. The world economy came to a shuddering halt as a result of this ideology that champions possession and power. The more we have, it says, the more powerful we are. The pursuit of riches is not the same as the pursuit of happiness and do we really need to pursue the goddess of growth? Do developed nations really need continual non-stop economic expansion? Are the rich never rich enough?

Greed is the guru of growth but soon it causes us to burst our britches with the economic obesity that is alternately causing the planet to burn, the ice caps to melt, the oceans to rise, the land to perish in drought and then to drown in storms and typhoons. Millions of plants and animals are going extinct and poor hungry sick people, shrivel, starve, drown and die in their millions. Growth, is it worth it after all?