FORGET about the soaring cost of electric power at P12/kw-hr and gasoline at P46/liter! Never mind if investors are shying away from Iloilo City because of lack of power! What matters most is that we protect Mother Nature first and foremost.

This is the battle cry of this emerging political ecumenical group in Iloilo that has replaced religion and we call them the Evangelical Green, a group who worship nature more than its country.

For these fundamentalist green, it is still no to coal because it will cause global warming, something that is not yet proven. They sincerely believe that human development and prosperity harms the environment in general and climate in particular. They continue to give sermons on global warming and prophesying environmental disasters such as lead and mercury poisoning from the chimney of a coal fired power plant and then lure the populace to blame industry and capitalism.

To solve the power shortage in Iloilo, they submit energy alternatives such as geothermal and wind power, which are non existent in Panay. Their model in Europe, the Greenpeace have earned the nickname “watermelons” because they are green on the outside but red to the core! Let Ilongos beware of their ecumenical preaching of worshipping nature more than country for according to Plato: “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”

The same Evangelical Green are also active here in the US preventing the exploitation of tremendous energy sources in the country far bigger than all the oil reserves in the Middle east. Take the case of oil in the form of oil shale. It is estimated that Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone are home to about 800 billion barrels of oil that can be extracted from shale. At present, US oil consumption is 20.6 million barrels per day while the oil reserve from the three states alone can supply the US for at least a hundred years.

But the Green high priest in the US Senate, Colorado Senator Salazar (Democrat), “the Senate’s leading oil shale opponent,” had successfully slipped a moratorium for oil shale development when Royal Dutch Shell is about ready to extract it with a new and environmentally efficient process.

By the way, oil shale is a sedimentary deposit of silt and clay that is saturated with oil. Unlike conventional oil deposits wherein pure oil are found in cavities or stratigraphic traps, shale oil, also known as kerogen, is mixed with the soil called shale when it was formed millions of years ago.

This oil rich soil can then be mined by open pit and subjected to heating and squeezing process to separate the oil from the soil, after which the soil is returned to the pit where it was taken. Planting of trees and grasses will follow to restore the terrain to an even better landscape. And so where is environmental degradation here? Just like their counterpart in Iloilo, the so called environmentalists here are very happy having the U.S. dependent on foreign oil. They’re unhappy that their country will develop its own indigenous energy resources. The US, therefore isn’t hurting for lack of its own oil. It is held hostage by these Evangelical Greens who believes the US threatens Mother Nature.

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