IN WAR, one of the most basic tenets is to know your enemy. That goes without saying that you should know yourself first, so that you will know how you can defeat your enemy.
That is also the case in marketing, because you have to know your product first, before you will know how you could defeat your competition.
The parallel between the two is not accidental, because a war between two forces is akin to a war between two or more products. Just like saying in mathematics that there is actually no problem if there is nothing to be solved, we could also say in politics that there is no war if there is no enemy.
This seems to be the case in the war against climate change, because there are still many politicians who believe that climate change is not real, and at best, climate change is just a figment of our imagination or a mere invention.
When I was a member of the Presidential Commission for the Year 2000 (Y2K), I was faced with the problem that many people actually believed that Y2K was not real, and that it was just a figment of our imagination or our invention.
Tasked with official functions on the strength of an Executive Order, the members of the Y2K Commission proceeded with the work preventing any damage that the problem could cause to our national security and our economy. As history would bear me out, we did our work as we were supposed to do, and as it turned out, the clock struck after midnight of Dec. 31, 1999 and nothing happened, as in the transition to the year 2000 did not cause any problem here in our country.
I learned later on that in some countries, our counterparts who were members of the Y2K authorities in those countries were actually jailed, for the crime of perpetuating a hoax.
Here in the Philippines, no one thanked us for the work that we did, but we ended our tasks with the consolation that at least, we were not sent to jail.
Up to now, years later, there are still many people who believe that the Y2K bug was not real, and we should have not done anything to prevent it from creating any problem.
That seems to be the problem now, because there are still many people who believe that climate change is not real, and that we should not do anything to prevent it from creating any problem.
In the case of the Y2K bug, it was very clear that it could not possibly cause smaller problems, assuming that the bigger problem was not real.
That is not the same situation in the case of climate change, because it actually causes many smaller problems right now, even if we would just agree for the sake of argument that the bigger problem of climate change is not real.
Going back to the need to know ourselves in order to know how to defeat our enemies, we should know that the enemy is not climate change. With apologies to everyone who reads this column, it seems that the enemy is everyone who contributes to the pollution of the environment, and that could be almost everyone. (To be continued/PN)
