Additional Test (Part - 3) - UPSC MCQ

HOW CARBON PRICING YIELDS BENEFITS FOR BUSINESSES

• Companies employing an internal carbon price can better manoeuver in regulatory environments where GHG emissions reductions are mandatory - such as EU, Canada, and are more responsive to external carbon prices.

• Many companies find that after setting absolute emission reduction and intensity goals, internal carbon price helps them evaluate returns on related investments and incentivize employees to meet established corporate targets.

• Internal carbon pricing encourages innovation and sustained economic competitiveness. It also helps companies identify organizational inefficiency that is adding to overall costs.

• It helps prepare for the forecasted low carbon economy and to increase their efficiency and market profitability.

• Ecology is the study of interactions between organisms, organisms and the surroundings occurring within an ecosystem or environment.

• An ecosystem is a functional unit of the environment (mostly biosphere).

• An environment is a group of ecosystems.

• Vehicles are mainly responsible for more than 80 per cent of total air pollution. The major pollutants released from automobiles, locomotives, aircraft, etc., include Carbon Monoxide (CO), Unburnt hydrocarbons and nitrogen monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, suspended particulate matter emissions.

• In metropolitan cities, vehicular exhausts account for most of the CO, hydrocarbons, oxides, and suspended particulate matter emissions.

• The most dominant greenhouse gas overall is water vapour, but it has a very short atmospheric lifetime (about 10 days). Water vapour is also a variable gas in the atmosphere, which decreases with altitude.

• Water vapour also decreases from the equator towards the poles. In the warm and wet tropics, it may account for four per cent of the air by volume, while in the dry and cold areas of desert and Polar Regions, it may be less than one per cent of the air.

• One unique feature about this greenhouse gas is that it absorbs both incoming and outgoing solar radiation.

• Earth’s climate system is considered to be composed of five components, which include atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere.

• Any change in climate arising due to automatic changes in these is considered to be ‘internal variability’. Evolution of life and Ocean-atmosphere interaction falls in this category.

• On the other hand, climate change resulting from sources other than Earth’s climate system is considered a result of external forcing.

• Orbital variations of Earth and Anthropogenic GHG emissions fall in this category. It can be noted that GHG emission can also be natural (e.g. from peatlands) in which case it will not be part of external forcing.

• The coral reefs that India has in its biosphere reserves are also saline sensitive and thus the rising sea level threatens their existence.

• Mountain ecosystems are hot spots of biodiversity. However, the increase in temperature and human activities are deteriorating biodiversity.

• Carbon sequestration describes short- term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming.

• Green carbon is the carbon stored in the biosphere. We call it ‘green’ because carbon is taken up from the atmosphere by plants through the process of photosynthesis, which is dependent on the green chlorophyll pigment found in plant leaves.