November 22, 2007 · Posted in: Environment Watch, Health Issues, i Report Features
Testing, testing…
IF you’ve been having trouble breathing lately, it’s not only because of the rising oil prices or the latest political scandal. Breathing itself has become quite hazardous, considering how dirty our air has become. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) itself says that while air quality has improved a bit in recent years, it is still far from being near what it considers the “acceptable level.”
Four years ago, the government imposed emission tests on all registered vehicles in an effort to keep smoke belchers off the road. But as the latest piece in i Report‘s Power and Poisons series notes, pessimism abounds regarding the impact of the test on cleaning up the air. The tests, after all, do not measure all the pollutants being spewed by vehicles. Incessant reports of payoffs at emission testing centers have also pretty much clouded the credibility of the tests.
Read on at pcij.org.
1 Response to Testing, testing…
jcc
November 23rd, 2007 at 3:11 am
POLLUTION OF THE STREETS OF MANILA IS THE PHYSICAL AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL ASPECT OF POLLUTION. THE DEADLIER FORM OF POLLUTION IS THE MORAL DEGENERATION OF THE NATION AND THE CORRUPTION OF OUR INSTITUTIONS. IN MY BOOK, I WROTE:
“A trial lawyer in the big cities like Metro Manila wasted most of his time commuting to the court then waiting for the clerk of court to wrap up the roll-call of his calendar. Of the three dozen of cases scheduled for the day, only about three cases would go to trial. You were extremely lucky if your case went to trial and saw some glimmer of a head start of a case that had been with the court for almost eternity; otherwise you would go back to your office ahead of other lawyers who felt more honorable because the day’s fee paid by the client is not lost as he has to slug it out in court with his equally gallant opponent lawyer. But if you were a very enterprising lawyer and had already predicted that there was a ninety per cent chance that your case would be rescheduled for another date, you can accept another assignment on the same date and time in a next door judge then shuffle yourself from one court room to another and be paid on both cases. But more often, a trial lawyer despite his seal to attend to a client’s case had to agree on postponement either suggested by the court or the adverse counsel for lack of material time. Thus in most occasions, you have to go back to your office feeling nauseated because you earned your day’s keep by postponing your case and while on your way back to your office you feel even more nauseated by the black smoke and carbon monoxide bellowing from raggedy and rickety buses, trucks and jeepneys that ply the streets of Metro Manila. You find sediment of this pollution even in the exhaust of your private air-conditioned car and you can only empathized with the plight of the people who ride those buses and the pedestrians on the streets that are assaulted daily by this black soot and poisonous gas because for long you have been one of them until you were able to afford your own private car, which oddly enough would not even protect you from this pollution
The problems in the streets of Metro Manila are duplicated in the court room where the lawyer used to argue his case. Traffic moves at a snail pace, and so is justice; streets are polluted, and so are some of court decisions”.