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As companies feel the pressure to decarbonise over the next decade, many have announced what they say are bold plans to achieve net zero, often by 2030 to 2050. As a concept, zero net is relatively simple: canceling these carbon emissions, most of which can be achieved through mechanisms such as carbon offsets or tactics such as sequestration. Defining a net zero timeline is the easy part; what is difficult is to achieve these distant goals.
On the one hand, setting a goal in nine years may seem like sitting on its hands when it comes to climate action when it’s pretty clear that if the point of no return was not passed, it was there. almost. A flip side to this argument is that even if a government or business cannot meet its net zero goals, putting in place such a bold plan requires a different way of doing business or doing day-to-day tasks, a process that becomes more efficient, sustainable or innovative or all of the above.
But a recent report casts doubt that this plethora of net zero plans could even make a difference, and in fact, there could be a huge risk that these could cause even more damage to people and the planet. .
Corporate Accountability, Friends of the Earth International and the Global Forest Coalition recently released a report that describes net zero plans as offering little or nothing in terms of real solutions or actually effective emission reductions.
From the perspective of these three NGOs and the few dozen more organizations that have endorsed this report, many companies riding the net zero bandwagon are far from achieving any kind of meaningful climate action. Furthermore, the biggest problem, write the authors of the reports, is that net zero is a means of generating profits. in addition [businesses] see the potential of a net zero global pathway to provide them with new business opportunities, rather than reducing the production and consumption of their polluting products, the report’s authors say.
Groups are not holding back in their critiques of net-zero strategies, as the title of the report summarizes: The Big Con.
So what is the problem, one might ask?
The authors of the report compile a long list of tactics that drive many net-zero technologies, which they summarize as smoke screens. They include: bioenergy (they call it burning trees or biomass); carbon capture and storage (mainly used to extract what were previously inaccessible oil reserves underground, according to the report); carbon markets (proven to lead to fraud and speculation, and have not significantly reduced emissions); and carbon offsets (often displace the communities they are meant to benefit from).
If this sounds like another long list of criticisms of energy companies, it’s partly true that some of the world’s best-known fossil fuel producers are cited in the report. But these companies are also joined by their peers in the aviation, finance, retail and food industries.
The authors do not hesitate to share how, from their perspective, these companies are simply moving forward, as usual, masked behind a net-zero plating. In what the report describes as major failures, behaviors range from issuing commitments that are too vague to mean anything to reliance on unproven technologies and finally, outright and blatant rejection of systemic change.
Some of the culprits that allow the behavior of these companies to go unnoticed are not surprising: corporate lobbying, for example, is obvious. The next step after lobbying is to get policymakers, as well as United Nations leaders, to adhere to a net zero agenda. But the report is particularly scathing in its criticism of leading universities that accepted hundreds of millions of dollars that funded net-zero. no research that led to the results that these same companies were hoping for in the first place.
Now that the climate denial kraken is about to be killed, this report concludes that another has emerged, one that is hampering any meaningful progress on climate change and this kraken has a net-zero tattooed all over it.
On the face of it, the answers are ones that many boards don’t hear about, like listening to what citizens want, which is to listen to the people and push for a strategy focused on climate justice.
The first suggestion is problematic, because the reality is that many people say they want to tackle climate change until they realize that changing their behavior on a daily basis is part of that solution. It’s a long-term battle, involving education, consumer awareness, and overall persistence. The second, well, until boards of directors and senior executives become more diverse not only in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, but also leaders who offer different perspectives, don’t hold your breath for bold climate justice plans. Still, at least one event that happened in the past month offers some hope.
The solutions to this net zero dilemma are not directly mentioned in this report, but they are already around us and they are not untested or problematic technologies such as the direct capture of the air or the original hydrogen. fossil. Instead, they include tactics like more investment in renewable energy, ending fossil fuel subsidies, and reassurance from companies that principles of environmental justice are aligned with business decisions. And finally, deploy these strategies in places that can absorb them first: like in richer countries.
Image credit: Andreas Felske / Unsplash
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