Mitigating Climate Change

 COP 28 is at an end with a weak kind of acknowledgement of the hard reality that fossil fuels will have to be phased out but without any firm commitment or financial allocation from the developed nations to ensure the same. Whatever, allocations are there are for the fraudulent carbon trading mechanism which allows Governments to slink out of their responsibility to strictly enforce the polluter pays principle and use the funds garnered to invest in green energy, carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and storage.

Incidentally, it is estimated that currently only about 2 billion tonnes of CO2e are being removed (Carbon Dioxide Removal or CDR) mainly through conventional methods like afforestation and plantation and only about 0.1 % of this is by newer technological methods (https://lnkd.in/dNZuYaMJ). As opposed to this 37 billion tonnes of CO2e are being emitted annually from fossil fuel use and 55 billion tonnes of CO2e are being emitted from all sources. CDR can at best go up to 5 billion tonnes of CO2e by conventional methods as shown in the graph below. Thus, even if there is genuine generation of carbon credits and they are traded properly they cannot remove more than 10 % of current emissions at best. So there is clearly no alternative to phasing out fossil fuels urgently by a combination of developing green energy and reducing overall energy demand. Only then will the limit of 1.5 degrees centigrade increase in temperature set in COP 21 in Paris in 2015 be met. One major option in India is the communitarian afforestation followed by sustainable harvesting of biomass for distributed generation of electricity through gasification which also yields biochar that can be ploughed into the soil. This will both remove carbon dioxide and reduce its emissions by phasing out fossil fuel energy. It will also provide massive employment in rural areas solving the problem of livelihoods.
However, there is extensive hypocrisy among both corporations and governments as they do not want to phase out fossil fuels and instead it is being falsely touted that trading of carbon credits will solve the problem.
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