Hosts and their power tenants

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THURSDAY, 03 MAY 2012 20:27 DEAN DE LA PAZ / THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

OCCASIONALLY the local militia would take matters in their own hands and take care of things. They could always say that they were driven by desperation. And they could always say the local dissidents were responsible. It seemed convenient that the area was rebel-infested—as most remote, backward and poverty-stricken areas on the island were. There was always someone to blame for the threats the foreign engineers received. Thus, the power plant in the middle of nowhere felt the need to hire local bodyguards, if only to keep its expatriates company as they strolled through town or made their rounds even within the plant’s gated and fenced grounds.

Nothing really came from all those occasional threats. The harassment, if indeed that was what it all amounted to, was merely an attempt of a few locals at some form of comeuppance.

Along the eastern seaboard of the great island on which the major base load coal-fired power plant was built, there once thrived a prolific fishing community. A disastrous fish kill had changed all that.

The shores upon which the local fishing town was built had to make way for concrete jetties and off-loading bays for the barges that would sail in and deliver the imported coal that the plant burned to produce the electricity contracted by a distribution franchise miles away on the island’s western coast.

It was amazing how much real estate a coal-fired plant needed. The land had to be cleared. The earth torn up, re-laid and then flattened. The trees had to go. Never mind that they provided sustenance and livelihood for some of the folk. They grew in an area that had to be turned into a great coal pit encircled with a shallow moat and an acidic ash pond to store the plant’s imported fuel and provide for its often-overflowing black toxic runoffs.

Boasting about it was integral to their corporate social-responsibility program, the power plant transferred the fishing village far inland and up in the hills, there providing brightly painted plywood and hollow-block huts, a small community clinic and even a modest schoolhouse.

Never mind that they remained un-electrified for a good five kilometers from the power plant. Never mind that the fisher folk knew little about anything else save to fish. Perhaps with the schoolhouse, they might learn literature and history. They might even learn to speak the kind of yokel English the foreign engineers of the power plant spoke.

The costs to relocate the fishing community were borne by the power plant and the prospective returns of selling the electricity to the distribution franchise with which it had a bilateral contract for 100 percent of its output on a take-or-pay basis ensured its viability. Such costs bundled with predevelopment expenses are front-loaded and form part of capitalized expenses that the power plant can allocate over the economic life of its engines. The accounting ensured that under a take-or-pay pricing mechanism, such costs would hardly be felt and would almost be invisible.

Unfortunately, for the fishermen who suddenly found themselves struggling in the deep bush where there was nothing that resembled fish, the costs were not only substantial and paid in real-time but they were also unending.

As soon as the plant started operations, cadmium, arsenic, carbon, nitrates and sulfur started accumulating in the ambient surroundings. From the ground, strange and toxic metals accumulated. From the sky, sulfur from emissions fell as acid rain. In the air, traveling several miles from where the plant stood, the most toxic of metals freely floated in liquid form. Mercury is a neurotoxin and the only metal with the ability to mix with water and travel as vapor. It can be ingested through eating, drinking and inhaling. It is a bio-accumulate. It never leaves the body once it enters.

Worse, it kills.

The social costs of the toxic power plant were immeasurable—borne by a community that had not only lost the one livelihood it knew but a community that did not understand how to charge for the continuing costs burdened on it.

At first, they charged for every tree felled. Their price was a mere P2,000 per tree. But how were they to price a dead carabao stricken by an unknown affliction that they could only describe as na-ulol? How were they to charge for children with breathing difficulties and sudden mental deterioration?

In this micro-economic system, revenues were earned across the island where the electricity served as an economic multiplier benefiting businesses and enriching entities far insulated from deadly burdens borne elsewhere and paid by the hosts of the enterprise.

Think about it. This is what will be replicated in Mindanao. This underlies Benigno Aquino III’s unthinking, ill-advised, toxic and expensive solution to the power crisis.  source