MANILA — Flooded with complaints of massive and unrelenting power outages and the highest electricity rates in the region, Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. demanded the resignation of his Energy secretary in May 2025 and quickly reassigned him to the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources or DENR where a vacancy had opened.
Energy and environmental watchdogs thought that was ill-advised. Energy professionals lauded the removal but bucked the relegation. Nothing good results from rushed and reckless reshuffling and latent developments exposed by natural calamities and worsening environmental crises validate those fears.
To be fair, at the time Marcos may have been unaware that his Department of Energy or DOE secretary, who enjoyed the backing of a major conglomerate whose boardroom he had been spawned from had allowed the expansion of a deadly, toxic and expensive coal-fired plant. The expansion of the toxic footprint despite an existing moratorium drew the ire of environmental watchdogs and various non-government organizations including grave concerns expressed by Greenpeace Southeast Asia.
To be honest, the moratorium had loopholes for exemptions. No bureaucracy has more loopholes than ours where exemptions are our default, common among all departments. Poisoning the environment is another common concern shared by the DOE and the DENR. Importing dereliction across these cabinet portfolios may be a third.
Perhaps fallen to presidential whisperers, the stark absence of a technocracy and the constraints of his leadership style, Marcos, might have inadvertently spread the lethargy contagion by failing to properly vet his appointees.
The task of protecting the environment cannot be left to belated tail-pipe reactions, limp-wristed passivity, substance-less sound-and-fury public relations, empty promises, much less an agenda catering to the corporate interests of polluters like irresponsible mining companies, unregulated power producers, property developers and contractors.
However, the worst interests to cater to are those of a foreign global military hegemon whose designs include the forceful and often violent subjugation and plunder of the Philippine economy.
Where a de facto war footing exits, one employing armed offshore infrastructure, forward deployment of warships and both seaborne and land-based weapons of mass destruction, plus the creation of deadly launchpads in our once peaceful fishing waters, any Filipino who countenances these actively or through passive dereliction is complicit and treasonous.
Note what is now an actual war zone off our coastline where unprovoked attacks and the military occupation and control of Philippine resources dangerously tease and taunt escalations towards a full-blown war to test the strength of our military capabilities and alliances. That nobody calls these acts of aggression as acts of war is understandable especially where the pillaging of the spoils of a virtual invasion is government-sanctioned at both the cabinet and the local government levels. As such, allow us to label the virtual complicity of our officials with a foreign aggressor as nothing but a betrayal.
Scarborough Shoal (Buhanginan ng Panatag or Baja de Masinloc) in the Municipality of Masinloc, Zambales is about 124 nautical miles west from the Zambales coast and lies well within the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone’s 200 nautical mile perimeter.
While the coastal roads are fairly maintained, access roads from the province’s easterly points have fallen to neglect and disrepair where parts resemble dirt roads. These pose negative impacts to the overall local economy especially where the principal source of household livelihood for coastal communities cursed below the national poverty line is fishing.
A secondary source is small-scale agriculture. However, even where this combines with fishing revenues, the total productivity allows only for local self-sustenance, and neither are essentially exported out of Zambales.
Allow us to cite this area and the fishing communities therein as victims of neglect, possible complicity with a hostile foreign power and treason. For over a decade encompassing serial changes at the DENR and the Zambales dynastic government, the geopolitical travesty inflicted there by the Communist Chinese bent on expanding their beach heads within our territory has been the focus of local mainstream media including the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Expectedly adamant, government factotums claim no Chinese involvement. They also claim that the extracted sand and building material are used for domestic land reclamation. They add that the provincial revenues from these eventually accrue in part to the Zambales fishing families and that those who claim otherwise have an insidious self-interest.
Last month victimized by the deadly effects of government-authorized dredging, devastating seabed quarrying, inland mining and the erosion of coastal land resulting in the uprooting of 300 mature Aguho (Coastal She-Oak) trees that protect sand and soil integrity, coastal residents witnessed a fleet of at least eight barges and tugboats shipping off precious sand and soil building material they believe are destined for artificial islands and hostile offshore military platforms.
The neglect and economic blight are common northward from the coastal fishing communities of San Felipe, Cabangan to Botolan — victims forced to witness their own ravaging. From the perspective of the fisherfolk shoved deeper into poverty, the DENR and Zambales’s local government are not simply passively derelict but are in effect actively offering sacrificial Filipino fisherfolk to fatten an invading hostile military power’s literal occupation of Philippine territory.
Dean de la Paz is a former investment banker and a managing director of a New Jersey-based power company operating in the Philippines. He is the chairman of the board of a renewable energy company and is a retired Business Policy, Finance and Mathematics professor.
