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| Carbon Emission at the heart of Climate Change. Image Credit to GeekSnack |
Like it or not, most of the world people depends on crude oil and its products and other heavy carbon-emitting fossil fuels such as coal for one of the most important needs in life-energy (from petrol and diesel for cars and other vehicles through gas for power plants to generate electricity for cities to other fuel products used in many other dimensions). Every day hundreds of millions of litres of gas and other related fuels are burnt in one way or the other to meet this basic need for energy. While the basic need, energy, is being met, the basic need of our environment -including the atmosphere of which the ozone layer is part; the water bodies; and the green lands--which demands moderate waste output from us, that is within its recycling capacity, were neglected from the very beginning.
However, the world started to realise the consequences of this neglect and efforts to make amends went into motion. That was when global consolidations to tackle the problem of climate change began to take shape in various parts of the world and from various strata of the society--from the political line, through various social groups to the academia and various research and development industry groups. Significant progress began to materialise in the form of environment-conscious government policies; a change of attitude towards energy use by people in various parts of the world; and technological adventures and innovations and inventions from the academia and research and development industry groups. We began to hear about less carbon-emitting fuel alternatives such as biomass fuel; then came the green energy in the form solar electricity that emitted zero carbon into the atmosphere. These breakthroughs found their way into the various purposes that were being served by the heavy carbon-emitting fossil fuels and the result was solar powered homes and communities; electric cars and trains and power plants that generate electricity with biomass fuel.
Even with all this, the dependence on fossil fuels did not witness a marginal decline. But the need to meet the need of the environment began to experience unprecedented surge. Global conferences by the world's political representatives on addressing climate change issues became almost an annual mandate. However, the truth is that the fossil fuel industry is a multi-billion, if not multi-trillion, dollar one; and a complete shift from it to green energy will be almost impossible (though there are already campaigns going on in several UK Universities and institutions for divestment from future fossil fuel), the least reason being that most of the green energy alternatives have limitations such as low conversion ratio and low carrying capacity--conversion of solar energy into electrical energy is at a less than 2% rate and I'm yet to learn of a solar powered heavy machinery factory. And secondly, countries like the US and Russia are ever expanding their technologies in exploring shale gas from rocks and natural gas in the Arctic region of the planet respectively, never minding the fact that about 80% of the remaining coal reserves, 50% of gas and 30% oil must remain unburnt if the world is to remain below the 2ºC global warming beyond which catastrophes may start manifesting.
