Fresh Vision

1. Simplifying the concepts of Carbon budget and un-burnable carbon.

Climate change has been a topical issue since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit.  Indeed climate change is happening, as can be witnessed as increased in global warming, decreasing ice caps, flooding of low lands and other ripple effects on humans and the natural environment. Amongst other deliberations in the Summit was for alternative sources of energy to replace fossil fuels, which delegates linked to climate change. Following this was an agreement on the Climate Change Convention, which has garnered global support of its conclusions – there global warming does exist, and that it is causes by human activities emitting CO₂ – formulating the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 and the Copenhagen Accord in 2009. However, real commitments were only made in 2015 Paris Agreement, signed by 196 countries and by November 2016, have been ratified by 115 countries. In doing so they have committed in Article 2 to significantly reduce the impact of climate change by

“holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2^oC above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit temperature increase to 1.5^oC above pre-industrial levels,” (UNFCCC 2015).

Scientists believe that the 1.5 °C goal is will require zero emissions sometime between 2030 and 2050. (Sutter et al 2015) In the light of this commitment, it is obvious that present carbon emissions have to be curtailed. Thus, a