ABSTRACT
Almost every institution (leading consulting organisations, think tanks, or Government bodies) has come up with staggering estimates of the capital needed to manage climate change, ranging from 100 billion USD per year to trillion USD per annum, depending upon the methodology or scale.
While these numbers, by their sheer size, are fundamentally jaw-dropping and make a perfect screaming headline, they have harmed the overall cause rather than helping it. When the budget request for climate finance is multifold bigger than the overall government spending on Health care, Education, or Defence, the climate finance budget is bound to be a non-starter. This also eliminates the possibility of allocating smaller budgets to tech innovation/alternate techs that can solve climate change. The chapter discusses how these large numbers make the climate finance discussion more of a parable, limiting the discussion to conferences and summits rather than the actual allocation in the real world. The chapter looks at major technological innovations of the last 50 years, how they have shaped the world and brought changes at much lower costs due to paradigm shifts, and why the think tanks/policy institutes should look at this framework while building for climate finance.
