Of Fossil Fuels and Climate Change
Published on : Wednesday 03-11-2021
Rising fuel prices is a serious concern for an economy that has already suffered the harsh impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
With heavy dependence on imports it is a Catch-22 situation for the government with rising crude prices in the international market and the need to maintain high taxes to shore up revenues. Though governments across the world are talking about renewable energy and the need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, the fact remains that the world is too heavily dependent on them for its energy needs. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), emissions from fossil fuels are the dominant cause of global warming. In 2018, 89% of global CO2 emissions came from fossil fuels and industry.
It is against this backdrop that Frankie the Dinosaur made a dramatic entry in the UN General Assembly on October 27, 2021, on the eve of the COP26 global climate conference taking place at Glasgow. The CGI dinosaur proceeded to the podium and addressed the delegates. "I know a thing or two about extinction, and let me tell you, and you'd kind of think this would be obvious, going extinct is a bad thing," the dinosaur says. "At least we had an asteroid. What's your excuse?" Speaking passionately, Frankie urged humanity to save their species and not choose extinction. The irony of the situation is compounded by the fact that governments across the world are subsidising fossil fuels to a great extent. According to a report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on fossil fuel subsidies, every year, governments worldwide spend a whopping US$423 billion to prop up fossil fuel companies. This amount should logically be spent on promoting clean and renewable energy.
The Cover Story of this edition, Edge Computing Vs Cloud Computing – The changing trends, explores the advantages of Edge Computing vis-à-vis cloud models. Historically, Cloud computing, wherein data is transferred to off-site servers for processing and analysis, has been a major focus for many applications. On the other hand, in Edge computing data is collected, processed and acted upon closer to the source. Edge computing has increasingly been seen as a valuable component of a holistic industrial automation strategy across many industries. It particularly suits applications where real time monitoring plays a vital role as in process industries, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, traffic management, healthcare and financial services, to name a few, powered by mobile devices enabled by IoT. With such devices multiplying rapidly, and the data generated by them mostly needed for immediate analysis and decision making, Edge computing is better suited here. But it is not an either or situation. Edge computing will exist along with Cloud, and applications alone will decide which technology is preferred.
