10 Big Initiatives To Avert The Climate Catastrophe

10 big initiatives to avert the climate catastrophe

- Raj Chengappa

British prime minister Boris Johnson has a penchant for the dramatic. At the inaugural of the global climate change summit in Glasgow on November 1, he compared the situation to that of Scotland’s most famous son, the fictional secret agent James Bond, being strapped to a “doomsday device” that will destroy the planet. With the countdown timer rapidly ticking towards zero, Bond desperately tries to defuse it. Johnson then went on to say, “We are in roughly the same position my fellow global leaders as James Bond today except that the tragedy is this is not a movie… the doomsday device is real... it’s ‘one minute to midnight’ to prevent climate catastrophe.”

The annual climate change summit of world leaders was expected to be another “blah, blah, blah” event as the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg had dubbed it. But it was upgraded to the ‘Last Chance Saloon’ after the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warned that in recent decades the earth was warming at a rate that could result in an irreversible climate catastrophe as early as 2050 rather than at the end of the century as estimated earlier. Levels of Green House Gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere—mainly carbon dioxide—that cause global warming have almost doubled in the past 100 years because of the burning of enormous amounts of fossil fuels like petroleum and coal to produce energy for human use (see