Realistic Alternative Technologies and Climate Change

While most of the world acts as though it denies climate change and while climate change is assaulting the planet with ever-more-frequent extreme weather events, Prem Shankar Jha argues that it can be stopped in an 80-year time span provided that action is taken now. A small number of long-known technologies (under rapid refinement around the world either in prototypes or developed to scale in local applications) can replace fossil electricity and transport fuel without massive disturbance to existing physical infrastructure, lifestyles and structures of consumption.

Invoking Occam’s razor, two massive policy instruments would incentivise this assault: a global carbon tax and a global commitment to long-term stabilisation of prices for energy and transport fuel. The narrow time horizon required could be met: four decades would be needed to reduce carbon emissions to zero and another four to suck 800 gigatonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Collateral benefits would range from improved health, through a massive boost to employment of all kinds, a check to deforestation and savings in foreign exchange, to an ending of resource wars.