Coal affected communities and civil society organizations held a lightning rally in front of the San Miguel Corporation (SMC) Headquarters in Pasig City last Monday, March 13 calling for the conglomerate to shut down its coal plants in Limay, Bataan and shift to renewable energy.<\/p>\n
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The rally kicked off Break Free 2017, a series of peaceful community mobilizations across the country, as part of the second global wave of actions against the use of fossil fuel.<\/p>\n
\u201cRich fossil fuel companies like SMC surely have the wherewithal to understand why coal is bad for the planet and for local communities. But these companies choose to pursue profits from fossil fuels instead of truly caring about people\u2019s lives,\u201d said Yeb Sa\u00f1o, Executive Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Bataan community\u2019s struggle symbolizes the global movement of frontline communities and climate impact survivors standing together and resisting greed, to take back their rights to a healthy environment and a viable future,\u201d Sa\u00f1o added.<\/p>\n
Joining Greenpeace were contingents from several civil society and environmental organizations, including Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-Philippines), Coal Free Bataan Movement,\u00a0and the Freedom from Debt Coalition.<\/p>\n
Climate change in the country, on the other hand, has recently gone in a direction that environmental activists in the country lauded. President Rodrigo Duterte signed<\/a> the Paris Agreement, which the Senate later concurred<\/a>. These, however, will not signal the end of activities for Break Free 2017.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source: Rappler<\/a>, Greenpeace Southeast Asia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Coal-affected communities and civic organizations staged several activities last Monday, March 13 in Pasig City to kickoff #BreakFree2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2783,2784,2785],"class_list":["post-14261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-current-events","tag-break-free-2017","tag-coal-plants","tag-greenpeace"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/14\/2017\/03\/featured-21.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14261"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64891,"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14261\/revisions\/64891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primer.com.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}