Suckered

“BIOSPHERE IS dead.”

That was the quick retort of City of San Fernando Mayor Edwin Santiago to my query at the impromptu media conference held on the sidelines of his Christmas treat to the working press.

“We have decided to rescind the agreement on the Biosphere project because the proponent, Spectrum Blue Steel Corp., failed to comply with the provisions of the contract for the full operation of the supposed to be multi-million dollar waste-to-energy plant,” he said, and promised to make a public announcement about that unlamented demise.

“Really dead.” Affirmed Acting City Administrator Engr. Fernando Limbitco of the Biosphere project that was officially birthed in 2006.   

“For so long we have been prodding them to comply with the provisions of the partnership agreement and the deliverables. Repeatedly, they failed, even as they vowed to complete the gasification plant in a year. The city government and our solid waste management simply got fed up, so we decided to rescind the contract. They kept on asking us for the land title and other documents when they did very little to comply with provisions of the memorandum of agreement.” So Limbitco qualified in a follow-up story in Sun-Star Pampanga.

Limbitco, who admitted to have been tasked with the documentation of Biosphere in his capacity as city planning officer, disclosed that he was “very hesitant and reluctant to process the documents, because Spectrum Blue Steel officials kept on promising to comply with the agreement each time the city government prodded them on the requirements.”

Long on promise, short on delivery. Plain and simple there.

“They put up the building and some equipment but it was not enough. They even erected electricity transmission posts at the facility supposedly to deliver the energy to nearby barangays. They showed a sample pellet produced from the equipment but that was it. And then there was nothing more in the following years except they kept saying other equipment to complete the facility was already in transit and being shipped. Gewa da ka ming mulala (They made fools out of us),” Limbitco lamented.

One BIG FOOL, the city government was indeed made of with the Biosphere project. The wonder of it is how, and why, it took so many years before anyone at

city hall realized this.

Scum

It did not exactly take a rocket scientist to see the scam that was the Biosphere project. Punto, especially this corner, made an advocacy of exposing the scum that the project proponent really was.

In February 2011, we bannered the story of the operating Barangay Lara dumpsite, complete with a photograph of a young scavenger holding the Sun-Star Pampanga issue of the day with then-Mayor Oscar Rodriguez denying the dumpsite’s existence. And in a subsequent Zona Libre I wrote:

No dumpsite but a “residual waste storage” so Rodriguez responded, averring that “San Fernando has the most proper practice of disposing residual waste because we already have a structure. We are just waiting for our partner firm to collect enough residual waste that can be transformed into energy or electricity.”
(In a subsequent story, bannered in our Feb. 11-12 issue, a self-conflicted Rodriguez blamed that “partner firm,” Spectrum Blue Steel Corp. for the delay of the biosphere facility which should have operated last year. “Properly reprimanded” Rodriguez said of the firm).
Woe unto Rodriguez though, there is the Most Rev. Pablo Virgilio David, auxiliary bishop of San Fernando, to admonish him: “Don’t deny the dumpsite.” 
The pictures Punto published clearly showed that “it is a dumpsite,” Among Ambo said in an interview. And there is no such thing as “residual waste storage” in Republic Act 9003 or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2001, the prelate hastened to add. So what was Rodriguez saying?

Oca’s it

In the Sun-Star Pampanga story last week, Limbitco said it was upon Rodriguez’s insistence that he worked on the Biosphere documents: “Mayor Oca told me, baka naman totoo iyan eh wala naming mawawala sa atin. And let us also do our part in the agreement and ipakita natin na mahusay tayong kausap.”

Limbitco said Rodriguez later was dismayed for having been “taken for a ride” by Spectrum Blue Steel.

“In 2011, (Spectrum Blue Steel) admitted to the city government and the city’s solid waste management board that the Biosphere technology was not working here at all. We have reiterated that it was still incineration disguised as gasification and that it was impossible at that point to process the 600 tons per day of waste into energy given the incomplete facility. They insisted introducing another technology but we’ve had enough. It was bogus.” Limbitco furthered, which led to the scrapping of the agreement.

If indeed, the city government have had enough of the “bogus” Biosphere project in 2011, how come its minions were still engaged in spirited defense of it in 2012.

Con game

Again, I reprint here part of Zona Libre of June 5, 2012 titled “Garbage con”: 

Even as the bishop strongly denounced the dumpsite, the city stubbornly denies its existence. Pointing to the mountains of stinking garbage there as “residual wastes” stocked to be processed into energy-producing pellets.

“Barangay Lara is where you can find Spectrum Blue Steel’s (SBS) pelletizing plant. The plant is close to the city’s former open dumpsite.” So was one Esteban Callo Jr., chief engineer of True Green Energy Corporation (TGEG), quoted in a story here. “Unfortunately, we had problems in shredding residual wastes when our machine malfunctioned which forced us to pile up ready-to-shred residual wastes outside the plant.”

Only idiots will buy such an alibi.

And an unbuying Mayor Oscar Rodriguez promptly ordered SBS to shred all remaining residuals within three weeks or if they can’t, to bring all residuals to the sanitary Kalangitan landfill. That order made on May 23, Mayor Oca’s deadline for SBS is tomorrow, June 6. What gives, thereafter?

Whatever, the prospects are not promising.

“Rowee Freeman, City of San Fernando environment officer, said a small volume of waste is thrown in Kalangitan because the bulk has been diverted to a waste-to-energy facility that is operated by the Spectrum Blue Steel Corp. since March 1.” (Underscoring mine).

So was written in Tonette’s Inquirer story of May 28, that came after the Punto! story, May 24, of the SBS admission of its failure to pelletize and thus the pile up of “residual wastes” in Lara. Freeman is apparently clueless of what’s smelling in her own stinking backyard.

Her assertion in the same Inquirer story that the “waste segregation campaign has reduced residual waste by 25 percent from 130 MT in 2010 to 100 MT in 2011” only compounded, if not complexed, her cluelessness.  

While incredulous with her figures, given the Metro Clark Waste Management Corp. report of the City of San Fernando generating 51,464.16 metric tons of waste in 2011, Freeman nevertheless affirmed, if inadvertently – via simple arithmetic – that indeed, the city has a gargantuan waste mismanagement problem.

Okay dummies, the equation goes:  51,464.16 metric tons of waste minus 100 metric tons of residual waste equals 51,364.16 metric tons, less “small volume of waste thrown in Kalangitan” equals BIG volume of waste unmanaged. Some 700 tons of it piled up in Lara. 

And then there’s the highly respected Marco Nepomuceno of ENext, a Belgian company that produces “high-calorific green coal,” casting doubt on the integrity of SBS’ pelletizing plant.    

A working plant, so Nepomuceno contends, needs no less than $27 million to put up and operate. That’s over P1 billion.

The dysfunctionality, if not inoperability, of the SBS’ facility in Lara makes an affirmation of Nepomuceno’s contention.

Which, its engineer, Callo himself confirmed: “As of now, all we can do is sort out residuals being sent to our plant. We cannot yet press together or pelletize these residuals because we’re still waiting for our bigger machines,” adding that his company’s top officials in Thailand have heard of the problem but have not given any responses yet.

Pure garbage talk. All the pun intended there.

Suckers

So Biosphere is now dead.

And P.T. Barnum lives: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Why, only last September we noted here:

THEY’RE NO Greeks bearing gifts, but Pampanga’s LGUs better beware of them.

They are foreign companies or consortia proffering facilities – at little or no cost to the government – to solve the garbage problem of the province.   

“$450-M plasma plant to solve trash problem,” the Capitol press released last Friday about US-based Quantum International Group, Inc. seeking a joint venture with the provincial government. The intent: “to establish a plasma waste treatment facility for the processing and disposal of municipal and industrial solid wastes.”

The $450 million “to be used for the construction of the plant, purchase, importation and set-up of all plasma equipment, and as compensation for the technology required in the plasma processing.”

The PR furthered: “Merlinda Cantero, vice president of Quantum Philippines Property Holdings and Management, Inc., disclosed that the proposed plasma gasification plant needs at least 2,000 metric tons of municipal and industrial wastes daily and is expected to produce power supply not only for the province but for some other parts of Central Luzon.”

And more: “The processing of 2,000 metric tons of wastes could generate 2,000 megawatts of power. The local government units might be able to choose what products they wanted to produce from the plasma gasification plant such gasoline, kerosene and bio-fuels.”

Caveat: Anything that is too good to be true is certainly not true.

Will our LGUs ever learn?

Clark's roar

TIGERAIR PHILIPPINES starts today, Dec. 17, its thrice weekly Clark-Davao flights.

Reopening the route AirAsia Phil accessed on March 29, 2012, only to abandon in October this year.

This coming and going was foremost in the collective media mindset at Friday’s launch of this newest ticket at the Clark International Airport. Having been there in all the maiden flights of AirAsia Phil to both domestic and regional destinations, hearing – and feeling – its advocacy for the CIA as “most ideal” gateway.

“Clark International Airport is a vital location for our operations, especially in our flights in the Asia-Pacific region, and we intend to expand our presence in the area,” Tigerair Phil President Olive Ramos declared.

Qualified the lady boss: “Tigerair will maximize its presence in Clark and as a hub for its flights because of its ideal location. Unlike the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Metro Manila, it is not as busy and congested.”

And then some more:  “Operating in Clark offers many incentives, such like the fuel is tax free, and fuel is 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost of operating carriers, That’s why it is cheaper to fly out of Clark.”

Capped with the come-on: “With these flight, travellers from the Northern and Central Luzon no longer need to drive all the way to Metro Manila to take their flights to these destinations.”

Haven’t we heard all these before? 

Actually a recurring refrain in all of AirAsia Phil’s maiden flights – Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, Davao, Puerto Princesa and Kalibo too – alas, all gone.

Virtually verbatim at the Emirates’ daily Dubai-Clark-Dubai launch last October 1. Which moved Business Mirror’s Joey Pavia to ask, rather pointedly, Mohammed Mattar, Emirates divisional senior vice president: “How deep is your pocket? Will you not pull out (of Clark) once your planes fly way below their passenger capacities?”    

Rather than a straight answer, we heard Mr. Mattar tell the story of Emirates’ maiden flight to Mumbai with only five passengers and the low, low pax volume in the succeeding flights, only to culminate to the now fully booked, five-times-daily  Dubai-Mumbai flights.  

"We are sure that we will do good in Clark after many studies in the market. We are not worried and we will do good here in Clark just like in Manila." So was Mr, Mattar quoted in news reports then.

While, far from fully-packed, the Clark-Dubai flight has markedly risen in capacity, and is expected to increase some more, with the holiday seasons.

Why, our family has been rather busy lately with arriving relatives from Saudi Arabia at Clark via Dubai.

Faced with the same Pavia poser, Tigerair’s Madame Olive did a Mattar: “We are here to stay. Focused as we are on what the people of Central and Northern Luzon need and want. ”

Not only to stay – if we may give our one-way ticket’s worth – but to grow. As indeed Tigerair has – the Singapore-flagged parent company opening at Clark  with daily flight to the “fine” city-state, then veritably absorbing Seair, evolving into its present corporate body with expanded reach to Hong Kong, Bangkok,  Kalibo, and now Davao, seeking to reach further in 2014 to Incheon and Tokyo.

What mighty roar there. So that when Clark International Airport Corp. President-CEO Victor Jose Luciano was asked how viable has Clark remained in the wake of AirAsia Phil’s pull-out, his snap-of-the-finger answer: “Take a look at Tigerair.”

Yeah, right there is the new poster boy for the Clark airport.

 

  

   

Useless, as usual

AS INANE as it goes.

A multi-billion company in Clark is reported to have been extracting soil, aye, levelling a hill, near the Sacobia Bridge for use as filling materials to the Midori Hotel it is constructing.

The Aeta tribes there cried “illegal quarrying!”

Apprised of the situation, one Engr. Rey Cruz of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau said his office was not aware of any permit issued for the Midori project in the area.

“Any extraction of ordinary earth or quarry materials should be covered by pertinent permits. (In Midori’s case) wala po kaming alam diyan,” said Cruz.

As there were no permit issued, so there could not be any quarrying there? Testimonies and pictures to the contrary notwithstanding.

Wow, what unreason!

Environmentalists decry the denudation of that Clark hill Donggwang is developing into a golf course. The Environmental Management Bureau allayed fears of any erosion resulting therefrom as Donggwang, it said, constructed anti-erosion barriers. At the slightest of rains, earth and water rush down that hill, silting nearby creeks, blocking roads, inundating low-lying areas.

The EMB swears by the efficacy of Donggwang’s anti-erosion barriers.

Wow, what blinded faith!

Still on the EMB. Schools, residential and commercial areas along the Porac-Angeles City boundary complain of the stench of piggeries in Barangay Sta. Cruz, which has caused respiratory ailments, skin diseases and allegedly even contributed to aborted pregnancies and birth defects.

The EMB said there is no mechanism to measure the obnoxiousness, much less the toxicity, of the stench. So it cannot be said that it affects people’s health.

Whaaat?      

Back to the MGB. There is this Xi-something mining company located within the confines of the FVR Megadike – actually less than a hundred meters from the dike’s base – in Barangay Maliwalu, Bacolor.

Residents in the area said the contraptions erected at the site – “straight from the old Mad Max movies” – are too complicated for a mere batching plant. They suspect something going over there beyond the “cleansing” of sand of pumice rocks and stones.

“May minimina po dito sa buhangin mismo (Something is being mined from the sand itself here),” they said. Noting that the Maliwalu Creek that drains to the center channel of the Gugu Creek has been diverted to run through the site.

Maybe the MGB will again say that as quarrying/mining is not permitted within a kilometre radius of bridges and other infrastructures, there just cannot be any quarrying/mining in that Xi-something site in Maliwalu.      

And then, who was that idiot of a functionary at the mother agency of the MGB and EMB, the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources, that said – over local television – that old trees are a threat to the environment and must be cut, thereby providing his most irrational unjustification to the massacre of trees along the MacArthur Highway?  

As inutile as it gets.

Real, all too real, is the threat of water theme parks and golf courses to the Clark watershed. The ill effects already being felt -- directly in Sapang Bato where water rationing has been reported by no less than Angeles City Mayor Ed Pamintuan himself, and indirectly in the city proper area where residents complain of weak water pressure.

The Sapang Balen Creek – no matter the clean-up program of the Angeles City government – remains in clear and present danger of decaying from domestic and industrial wastes.

Open dumpsites – the Solid Waste Management Act decreed – should have been closed down two years back. The EMB itself listed all towns and cities in Pampanga still operate their open dumpsites.

Industrial pollution is creating much havoc on the prawn farms as well as the fishing grounds of Macabebe and Masantol towns.

Under cover of darkness, the Department of Public Works and Highways cut down scores of trees along the San Miguel-Pilar Village stretch of the MacArthur Highway, flouting both environmental laws and the terms agreed upon by all parties – DPWH and DENR included – on the issue of the trees thereat.

In all the above cases of environmental degradation, what has the DENR – as mandated guardian of the environment – done?

Nada. Zilch. Nought. Nothing. As expected. As usual. As useless.

Is the Pope Catholic?

HE DOES not believe in a “Catholic God.”

He has attacked unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny” – the enemy, verily  assumed as the Devil himself.  

On those matters alone, easily, if hastily, more Red than Black is the Jesuit Pope, Francis.

The unrepentant, aged communist in me makes the Argentine Bergoglio my kind of pontiff, with the gospel of Marx finding expression in the epistles of Francis. Das Kapital, indeed, The Communist Manifesto, extant in Evangelii Gaudium as well as in other papal pronouncements.

In the first apostolic exhortation in his Petrine ministry, Francis wrote:  "Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape."

The comrade in me rises to the timelessness of the Manifesto : “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

Francis’ very phrase “the powerful feed upon the powerless” finding its very definition in Marx’s “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

The commodification of man, to Francis: "Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a 'disposable' culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new."

Finding parallel to Marx’s take on the reduction of the working man to mere beast of burden: “Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.”
What has come to be the very précis of Evangelii Gaudium:  "Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills...” smoothly segues to Marx’s “(Capitalism) has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” 
Francis spoke of a deceptive naivete that “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.”

Marx, putting it squarely: “A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.”

On the eve of the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland last June, Francis wrote its host, British Prime Minister David Cameron: “We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal."

Marx’s article “On the Thefts of Wood” in the journal Rheinische Zeitung says as much: “The representation of private interests ... abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to this object.
So cried the Pope: "Money must serve, not rule!”

So spake Marx: “If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?” 
Exhorts Francis: “The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and a return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favours human beings."

Long conceded Marx, in a letter to his father: “If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

On that hopeful note, this piece could have ended right there. But, I take Francis for his word at the World Youth Day in Brazil, long past that age though I am: “Shake things up! Don’t forget to make a mess…”

So I go on.

Francis, still in Evangelii Gaudium: "While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.”

Marx, still in the Manifesto: “…in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” 

More than Francis, it is Jesus Himself that Marx may have channeled there:  "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." ((Matthew 19:21).

Christian perfection in concord with communism’s core precept there.  

Is the Pope Catholic? In Francis, the idiom takes other than its usual rhetorical sense.

Disbelieving – or should it be unbelieving – a Catholic God, a catholic pope is birthed in Francis. Ad majorem Dei gloriam.