Climate change bogey, a ploy to bolster corporations

Almost everyone has an opinion on climate change irrespective of any scientific background in general or climate science in particular and is ready to jump on the bandwagon to be an ambassador of the climate brigade. It is not hard to visualise who is behind this heightened hype and responsible for creating and setting up such an emotive narrative based on the post-truth and who has an axis to grind.

If you fall in this category, I have some questions for you to contemplate and ponder upon. If the climate is changing for bad or good, can you or the politicians change its course? Can you visualise the time-lapse in hours, days, years, centuries, millennia and geological time scale of millions of years? Are you aware of the origin of the earth, the origin of the universe, the origin of life on earth, and the evolution of life propounded by Charles Darwin? Are you aware of why the dinosaurs became extinct and so many other plants and animals will go extinct?

Do you know the human race (homo sapiens) is still evolving and what form it will take? Do you know marine fossils can be found in the higher ranges of the Himalayas and what it means? Do you know the continents are still moving, and this phenomenon is called continental drift? Do you know when it all happened? The human race had not appeared by then yet. Do you know there have been intermittent ice ages indicating that the earth has been warming and cooling in phases? If you had known all this, you would never believe that humans have anything to do with climate change or that humans can ever change the course it is taking or going to take. Enlighten yourself before creating any noise holding the human race responsible for climate change.

If you don’t have the capacity, tenacity, time or patience to undertake all the research and find the facts, don’t fall prey to the scaremongers. What you can do at best is to try to find out who is going to benefit from this rabble-rousing and who has an axis to grind. It is the corporations who are always looking for the opportunities during any calamity like the COVID-19 pandemic to make money and create such bogeys like climate change on a post-truth narrative in case there is no natural calamity.

Plate tectonics and continental drift are a continuing process and lead to new mountain building and submergence of areas and control the climate of the area and sea currents. These changes are minute and take millions of years. Earthquakes and volcanoes are the manifestations of and adjustments to these movements of drifting continents. The Himalayas, the highest mountain range in the world, was once a sea by the name Tethys sea. By the way, the Himalayas are still rising because of the pushing of the Indian plate against the Eurasian plate.

Humans are responsible for air, water and soil pollution, not climate change. The bogey of climate change due to human activity is absurd and is the creation of either a skewed mind out of sheer ignorance or a shrewd mind out of cunningness of greedy corporations in connivance with corrupt politicians to scare the shit and fleecing the ordinary law-abiding citizens going along with their normal life and finding means and ways to make money from them directly or indirectly by creating and running a scandalous and unconscionable business.

The business of carbon trading is their latest toolkit to create out of the bogey of climate change to generate a new stream of income. Carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels is taken care of by the carbon cycle, a simple phenomenon, easy to understand taught in primary schools.

It is a good idea to innovate and develop alternate sources of energy like wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydrogen or nuclear not because of any danger of climate change but merely because the fossil fuel is of limited quantity and not going to last forever.Going by the arguments of scaremongers, even if human activity is causing climate change, there is no way they can exercise any control on its course by levying any amount of tax. Surprisingly this lobby had not proposed any plans to counter, arrest or reverse climate change by carbon trading or any other means.

The Carbon market provides an opportunity for investors and corporations to trade both carbon credits and carbon offsets in the garb of the climate crisis and to save the planet. This opportunity was created on December 11, 1997, through Kyoto Protocols created by the United Nations Framework. The main objective of the Kyoto Protocols adopted at the Convention on Climate was to establish a mechanism to enable trade emission permits. Continuous efforts have since been made to change the public attitude and perception favourable to the industry. As a follow-up of the Kyoto Protocols of 1997, a legally binding agreement was made between 196 participating countries in Paris known as The Paris Agreement 2015 on 12 December 2015.

In the parlance of the carbon market, CO2 emission is turned into a commodity by giving it a price tag. These emissions fall into two categories: carbon credit or carbon offset, and both can be bought or sold in the carbon market. The terms carbon credit and carbon offset are generally used interchangeably, but they work on different mechanisms. Carbon credits work as permission slips or quotas to generate emissions, and these permits are usually bought from the government to emit, say, one tonne of carbon. On the other hand, carbon offsets are obtained by removing a unit of carbon from the atmosphere as part of their normal business activity, and they can sell this carbon offset to other companies to reduce their carbon footprint.

The number of the credit issued depends on the emission target set known as a cap-and-trade program by a particular country. These cap-and-trade programs exist in Canada, the EU, the UK, China, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. The companies are then incentivised to reduce carbon emissions and stay under their allowed cap