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Curb climate change: Strike the right balance

carbon dioxide emissions

Policymakers, scientists and officials told a Reuters summit this week that climate change will likely cost every global citizen something in the years ahead, although the payback will be much greater.

Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program said,

I think it will be every citizen, (but) that bill may not in the end be as high for the individual as it’s often made out to be.

Avoiding overt expenditure on the fight against climate change would become taxing as it would effectively lead to borrowing from the future. This in turn would mean bartering our future’s safety and prevention against widely expected extreme weather including floods, drought and sea level rise.

Cognizing the uncertainty about the degree of havoc global warming may cause in the future, striking the right balance has become a daunting task.

The other difficult balance to weigh is deciding how to divide among the present generation the cost of trying to prevent climate change now.

This cost will be especially felt in higher energy bills, to pay for more expensive energy derived from renewable sources like the wind and sun. Unlike fossil fuels, renewable sources of energy do not produce carbon dioxide, the gas which plays the chief role in causing global warming.

It is rich, industrialized countries which are expected to shoulder that cost most.

Sunita Narain, a leading Indian environmentalist who is on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s climate change council, in referring to the fact that the poor are more vulnerable to extreme weather, explained,

There has been a system all over the world in which you tax the rich to help the poor — this is what any civilized society does…the rich have to pay but they are not, it is the poor who are paying today and they are paying with their lives.

The good news, however, is that these costs now may only be short-term, as people reap a payback from using energy more frugally, and investors earn returns from funding rapidly growing clean energy technologies.

All in all, its all worth the effort and as the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri has wisely observed, if one were to really carry out a proper balancing of costs and benefits, the plus side totally outweighs the negative.

Image: britannica

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