GS Paper: GS1

The Bill to amend the Energy Conservation Act, 2001 seeks to establish a domestic carbon market and facilitate trade in carbon credits.

What are Carbon Credits?

• Carbon credits are measurable, verifiable emission reductions from certified climate action projects.
• These projects reduce, remove or avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
• But they also bring a whole host of other positive benefits, for example, they empower communities, protect ecosystems, restore forests or reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
• Projects must adhere to a rigorous set of criteria to pass verification by third-party agencies and a review by a panel of experts at a leading carbon offset standard.
• After an organization or an individual buys a carbon credit, the credit is permanently retired so it can’t be reused.

What are Carbon Markets?

• Carbon markets are regulatory structures that allow, in particular, oil and gas-intensive companies or heavy industry (or, in the case of COP25, countries) to reduce their economic footprint through a series of incentives.
• The idea behind this system is that the most polluting countries can purchase the right to pollute more from countries that have not reached their emissions limits.
• The 1997 Kyoto Protocol turned polluting emissions into a commodity.
• For example, the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the largest in the world and has been in operation since 2015.

How is the concept evolved?

• When the world evolved the ‘clean development mechanism’ (CDM) after the Kyoto Protocol agreement of 1997 as companies in the developing world could put up projects.
• These include renewable energy or afforestation — that helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and earn ‘credits’ that could be sold in the market.
• It was expected that these credits would be bought by the developed countries that had committed to emissions cuts under the Protocol.
• Thus emerged the CDM market, aka ‘compliance market’. Alongside, environmentally conscious entities also started buying these carbon credits (or offsets) — the ‘voluntary market’.

What is the status now?

• This system functioned well for a few years.
• But the market collapsed because of the lack of demand for carbon credits.
• As the world negotiated a new climate treaty in place of the Kyoto Protocol, the developed countries no longer felt the need to adhere to their targets under the Kyoto Protocol.
• A carbon market was envisaged to work under the successor Paris Agreement, but its details are still being worked out.

Global successes

• Domestic or regional carbon markets are already functioning in several places, most notably in Europe, where an emission trading scheme (ETS) works on similar principles.
• Industrial units in Europe have prescribed emission standards to adhere to, and they buy and sell credits based on their performance.
• China, too, has a domestic carbon market.

Mechanism in India

• A similar scheme for incentivizing energy efficiency has been running in India for over a decade now.
• This BEE scheme, called- Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) Scheme allows units to earn efficiency certificates if they outperform the prescribed efficiency standards.
• The laggards can buy these certificates to continue operating.

What does new Amendment seeks to bring?

• The new carbon market that is proposed to be created through this amendment to the Energy Conservation Act, would be much wider in scope.
• Although the details of this carbon market are not yet known, it is likely to be on the lines of the European ETS, facilitating the buying and selling of carbon credits.

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On June 29, the Earth completed one full spin — a day — in 1.59 milliseconds less than its routine 24 hours. It was the shortest day recorded since the 1960s.

Note: A millisecond is one-thousandth of a second.

Earth spinning faster

• While the Earth has been completing its rotations faster in recent years, when looked at over a much longer period of time, our planet is actually spinning slower.
• Every century, the Earth takes a few milliseconds longer to complete one rotation — and on average, days are actually getting longer.
• So, 1.4 billion years ago, a day would have ended in less than 19 hours,

How did scientists find that?

• Scientists got to know by using precise atomic clocks to measure the Earth’s rotational speed.

Why are days getting shorter these days?

• Scientists aren’t entirely sure.
• Something has changed and changed in a way we haven’t seen since the beginning of precise radio astronomy in the 1970s.

Factors attributing Earth’s Spin

(1) Tidal Braking

• The research attributed the larger trend of the Earth’s slower spin mostly to the gravitational pull of the Moon, which causes tidal friction and slows down the Earth’s rotations.

(2) Climate change-induced surface variations

• Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica
• Changes in ocean circulation

(3) Geomorphic factors

• Movements in the planet’s inner molten core
• Seismic activity
• Wind speed, and shifting atmospheric gases

(4) Chandler wobble phenomenon

• This refers to the small deviation in the movement of Earth’s geographical poles.
• The normal amplitude of the Chandler wobble is about three to four metres at Earth’s surface, but from 2017 to 2020 it disappeared.

(5) Other propositions

• Activities that push mass towards the centre of the Earth will hasten the planet’s rotation.
• Anything that pushes mass outwards will slow down the spin, a report noted.

What can happen if the Earth continues to spin faster on a sustained basis?

• To ensure that the time on clocks matches the speed of the Earth’s rotation, a system of leap seconds has been used since the 1970s.
• They involve one-second adjustments to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), the time standard used to synchronize clocks around the world.
• Due to the long-term slowing in the planet’s spin, 27 leap seconds have been added to UTC.
• However, if the Earth continues to spin faster and days subsequently become shorter, scientists may have to introduce the first ever ‘negative leap second,’ which involves subtraction of a second from clocks.

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India ratified pledges made by Prime Minister in Glasgow to accelerate the country’s reliance on renewable energy to power the economy and be effectively free from use of fossil fuels by 2070.

Why discuss them?

• The approved pledges were fewer than those PM committed to.

What is NDC (Nationally Determined Commitments)?

• NDCs are at the heart of the Paris Agreement and the achievement of these long-term goals.
• They embody efforts by each country to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
• The Paris Agreement (Article 4, paragraph 2) requires each Party to prepare, communicate and maintain successive NDCs that it intends to achieve.
• Parties shall pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives of such contributions.
• The agreement requests each country to outline and communicate their post-2020 climate actions, known as their NDCs.

India’s NDC

• India’s NDC, or nationally determined commitments, have been updated with these two promises, both of which are enhancements of existing targets, and would be submitted to the UN climate body.
• The 2015 Paris Agreement requires every country to set self-determined climate targets which have to be progressively updated with more ambitious goals every few years.
• India’s first NDC was submitted in 2015, just before the Paris Agreement was finalised.

India’s original NDC contained three main targets for 2030:

1. A 33 to 35 per cent reduction in emissions intensity (or emissions per unit of GDP) from 2005 levels
2. At least 40 per cent of total electricity generation to come from non-fossil renewable sources
3. An increase in forest cover to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent

Commitment made at Glasgow

• At the Glasgow meeting last year, Modi promised to strengthen India’s climate commitments.
• He made five promises, and called it the ‘Panchamrit’, the nectar that Indians prepare using five ingredients.
• Two of these were upward revision of existing targets, the ones that have been made official and put in the updated NDC. Accordingly,

1. India will now reduce its emission intensity by at least 45 per cent, instead of just 33 to 35 per cent, from 2005 levels by 2030.
2. Also, it would now ensure that at least 50 per cent of its total electricity generation, not just 40 per cent, would come from renewable sources by 2030.
3. The forestry target has not been touched.

India’s climate targets: Existing and New

• PM had said that at least 500 GW of India’s installed electricity generation capacity in 2030 would be based on non-fossil fuel sources.
• Also, he had promised that the country would ensure avoided emissions of at least one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent between now and 2030.
• These two promises have not been converted into official targets.
• But these are closely linked with others, and any progress on official targets would get reflected in these goals as well.

What about Net Zero?

• Modi had also announced a net zero target for India for the year 2070.
• Net zero is a situation in which a country’s greenhouse gas emissions are offset entirely, either by absorption of carbon dioxide.
• This may be done through natural processes like photosynthesis in plants, or through physical removal of greenhouse gases using futuristic technologies.
• But net zero is a long-term target and does not qualify to be included in the NDC which seeks five to 10 year climate targets from countries.

India’s progress

• The upward revision of the two climate targets — those relating to reductions in emissions intensity and proportion of non-fossil sources in electricity generation — do not come as a surprise.
• India is on way to achieve its existing targets well ahead of the 2030 timeline.
• India’s emissions intensity was 24 per cent lower than the 2005 levels in the year 2016 itself, the last year for which official numbers are available.
• It is very likely that the 33 to 35 per cent reduction target has already been achieved, or is very close to being achieved.
• A further reduction of 10-12 per cent from here, to meet the new target, does not appear too challenging, even though these reductions get progressively tougher to achieve.
• The other target — having at least 40 per cent of electricity coming from non-fossil fuels — has officially been reached.

Tricky Glasgow promises

Two promises that Modi had made in Glasgow have not been converted into official targets:

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