The Philippines Is Energy Insecure. Officially. Although We Already Knew.

This week, the government's own research arm — the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) — finally said plainly what many Filipinos already feel every time they fill up their gas tanks or pay their electricity bill: the Philippines is energy insecure.

1) We import nearly all of our oil, almost all of it from the Middle East, a region currently at war
2) Our fuel self-sufficiency has fallen to roughly 45%
3)And because liquefied natural gas has become too expensive to import right now, the government quietly told coal power plants to ramp up generation to keep electricity rates from rising even faster.

The country declared a national energy emergency four months ago. The declaration was used primarily to fast-track the purchase of one million barrels of crude oil for reserve, and to give the energy department broader authority to direct fuel supplies across the grid. It gave the government more legal tools to manage the crisis. It did not change what the crisis is made of: Fuels that come from somewhere else, that the Philippines does not control, and that a world at war can cut off at any time.

[Mainstream] Manila Bulletin / Reuters ◦ [Research & Data] PIDS — Energy Security Study / East Asia Forum — Oil Deregulation Analysis

On July 7, diesel prices went up again — ₱3.30 per liter, the second consecutive weekly hike. For a small fisherman in Batangas or Zamboanga who burns diesel just to reach the fishing grounds, that is a compounding pressure on top of the fact that the sea on which their livelihood depends is already being emptied faster than it can refill.

As we have tracked over the weeks, the Philippines is losing an average of 45,000 metric tons of fish every year because we are taking more than the ocean can replace. The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources — the agency responsible for enforcement — has 28% fewer personnel today than it did in 2017, with more than two-thirds of its remaining staff on short-term contracts rather than permanent positions. Fewer people, less job security, the same waters to cover. More illegal fishing vessels operating unchecked, more municipal waters raided by commercial boats that are not supposed to be there, and less chance that the boats destroying the fish stocks will ever be stopped.

[Mainstream] GMA Network / ABS-CBN ◦ [Research & Data] Oceana Philippines via Business World / BFAR Statement on Vessel Monitoring

This week, El Niño arrived in earnest. The latest government weather report put the probability at 79% that it had already begun, likely to persist into early 2027. The national statistics office reported that the number of jobless Filipinos reached 2.5 million in May — and that 905,000 of those job losses over the past year happened in farming and forestry.

Specifically: 734,000 rice workers and 428,000 corn workers stopped working, largely because of drought conditions. Fishermen, separately, said the cost of fuel was preventing them from going out to sea at all.

[Mainstream] Manila Bulletin — El Niño Jobs / Khaleej Times — Unemployment ◦ [Research & Data] DA Region XII El Niño Advisory / PAGASA El Niño Alert — Inquirer

In Mankayan, Benguet — in the Cordillera mountains — a court on July 10 ordered a community of indigenous residents to stop blocking a mining company's drilling equipment from entering their land. The community — the Ibaloi and Kankanaey from Bulalacao and Guinaoang — has been holding that barricade for months. They say the government renewed the mining company's 25-year permit to dig in their ancestral domain without actually getting their genuine consent.

Several elders had formally withdrawn their support for the project in late June 2026, alleging that they were misled into signing a manifesto of approval. The mining company says all its permits are in order. A court sided, at least temporarily, with the company.

[Mainstream] Inquirer — Court TRO / Daily Tribune — Indigenous Leaders Retract ◦ [Research & Data] MGB Q1 2026 Production — Context.ph / Philippine Resources Journal — 2025 Mineral Output

In Subic Bay, an interagency meeting was finally held on July 6 to deal with the reported dumping of 234 containers of electronic waste from the United States.

E-waste contains lead, mercury, cadmium, brominated flame retardants, and other toxic substances that threaten human health and ecosystems. The government had known about the shipments since March 2025 as the Basel Action Network had been sending alerts for over a year. The Philippines is a signatory to the Basel Convention, which strictly prohibits hazardous waste imports from non-signatory countries like the US.

However, enforcement was still paralyzed by a 2025 Manila RTC ruling that classified the Subic Freeport as a separate customs territory. After more than a year of alerts going unanswered, the agencies agreed on July 6 to submit position papers. Meanwhile, the containers are already there, and whatever is leaching out of them for the past year is already in the ground.

[Mainstream] Daily Tribune — Interagency Meeting / Inquirer — Gov't Inspection ◦ [Research & Data] Basel Action Network / Sustina Earth / Makabayan Bloc — Bulatlat

There was one piece of news this week that did not follow the usual pattern. The government's environment bureau launched the final stage of its plan to fully eliminate a class of chemicals — used in air conditioners and refrigerators — that damage the ozone layer and accelerate warming.

The Philippines committed to this phase-out under an international treaty decades ago, has been working toward it in stages, and is now in the last push: full elimination by 2030.

The bureau pledged to retrain refrigeration technicians and help industries switch to safer alternatives so that workers are not simply left behind by the transition. A regulatory commitment being honored, on schedule?  That’s a win for all of us.

[Mainstream] Daily Tribune — HCFC Phase-Out / PNA via The Star ◦ [Research & Data] Context.ph — DENR EMB Workshop / DENR-UNIDO Montreal Protocol Report

On July 9, Mt. Kanlaon on Negros Island erupted — moderately explosive, lasting three minutes, sending a plume three kilometers high. Ashfall blanketed agricultural areas across Negros and reached Cebu. The government's environment office in Central Visayas issued an acid rain warning: the sulfur dioxide being carried by south-southwest winds, combined with the ongoing rain, could damage crops, contaminate open water sources, and cause mild skin irritation. Air quality readings returned to safe levels by July 12, but the warning remained active. Pharmacies in Cebu City ran out of N95 masks.

[Mainstream] GMA Network — Saksi Report / Cebu Daily News — Acid Rain Warning ◦ [Research & Data] GDACS — Kanlaon Eruption Data / PHIVOLCS via Wikipedia — 2024–2026 Kanlaon Eruptions

And on July 10, in Malapatan, Sarangani, a landslide buried two families. The ground had been shaken loose by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake a month earlier, and the habagat brought the rain that sent the mountain down. By July 12, the death toll had risen to 10 — including two children. That same day, flooding displaced hundreds more families across Sarangani and Sultan Kudarat, inundated rice fields, and collapsed a bridge in Kalamansig. Sarangani has now absorbed two mass-casualty events in five weeks, simply by being at the intersection of a fault line, a monsoon, and a typhoon track.

[Mainstream] Inquirer — Landslide /GMA Network — Death Toll Rises to 10 ◦ [Research & Data] Khaleej Times — Typhoon Bavi Toll / Rappler — Sarangani Floods

What it means when the government's own think tank says the country is energy insecure and that a prolonged price shock could push 1.34 million more Filipinos into poverty is that: there is a fisherman in Sarangani who cannot afford the diesel to launch his boat, there is a rice farmer in Cagayan who skipped a cropping season because the rains did not come, and there is a family in a Batangas that is now spending a larger fraction of income on fuel for cooking and transport, than a year ago. 

Our energy crisis is a resource crisis — because across many decades, many administrations chose to build our economy on imported fossil fuels rather than on the renewable energy that the sun and the wind and the sea around our islands could supply. Without foreign dependence.

In Mankayan, people who live on the land, drink the water that flows under it, and farm the soil above it were ordered by a court to step aside so a company with a government-issued permit can drill. In Subic, foreign waste entered our lands through a legal loophole for over a year before a single formal meeting was held. In Sarangani, ten people died under a hillside that was weakened by seismic, climatic, and meteorological conditions that no single agency was coordinating to monitor as a compound risk. All of these? Cumulative consequences of a system that consistently pits resources for private revenue before it considers the people who live closest to them.

One of our stories this week was a win, however — a government agency following through on a decades-old environmental commitment, on schedule, without a crisis forcing its hand — and that is a start.

Remember, reading and tracking this week after week is not a small thing. Once you begin to see who is being paid and who is paying, over and over again, I doubt you will be able to stay comfortable without doing at least something.