Carbon is the fourth most abundant element on our earth and is mainly found as fossil fuels and in all forms of plant and animal life. Carbon available in plants and animal life is a part of the all important ecosystem and is reserved exclusively for food chain and carbon cycle so very essential to all life on our planet.Carbon of fossil fuels is the only Carbon available to mankind to fulfil its overall requirements of metallurgy, hydrocarbons, plastics and the much sought after strong and light materials. For energy and electricity requirements the use of fossil fuels should be the last priority.
In the light of limited resources of fossil fuels available to this world, barely sufficient to last, may be for five decades at the most, it is mandatory that we start curbing the use of fossil fuels for energy requirements which is terribly harmful to environment and tempers with the carbon cycle by enhancing green house effect thus contributing to global warming. All electricity requirements can be met easily by non fuel clean energy sources.In metallurgical industry,carbon should be used exclusively for metallurgical requirements of reduction of various ores to metals and the heating part should be looked after by energy from a renewable source.
Transport industry is another guzzler of carbon fuels and in transport/ traction industry the efficiency is highly dependent upon the weight of the vehicle. This weight can be drastically reduced by switching over to light weight high strength carbon fibres thus achieving an almost 50% increase in the fuel efficiency resulting in a two way advantage of reducing hot CO2 emissions and using carbon for a better use.
Hydrocarbons, plastics, solvents,organic fibres have a unique place in the advanced society and the world in future will be incomplete if it does not have access to these materials because the present generation depleted carbon resources by burning them recklessly.
