Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap
Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap
Prominent academics, including a former IPCC chair, round on governments worldwide for using the concept of net zero emissions to ‘greenwash’ their lack of commitment to solving global warming.
I read the article and essentially the authors shot down every attempt at reducing or removing carbons from the atmosphere. Apparently, no method is useful because they all are not 100% perfect. As a former scientist myself, I feel the authors have fallen to a common blindside of scientists: idealism. In science, we strive for the "95% significance" when in reality, even a small percentage improvement is already good. It is very likely that there will be no single one solution to the problem of global warming; rather it will require a whole slew of new technologies, economic models and even the social sciences to combine their effects into measurable change.
An old engineering saying is "Perfect is the enemy of good".
It's very old and not just for engineering, before engineering was a word old. It's a great proverb though regardless.
It's true that net zero as it is now doesn't work, because companies mostly buy "contracts" to preserve existing forests... That is what is happening. All companies have been net zero for years, and co2 levels are still increasing. Net zero doesn't account for the fact that our ecosystem already produce co2. Existing forests are not able to compensate natural co2 + our co2. One can pay to preserve existing forests as much as they like, but in practice it is doing nothing other than marketing.
It is pretty trivial, and I don't understand why governments allow companies to still do it
Hello, companies have not be net zero for years? In fact the US is anticipating increased reporting reqs on green house gas emissions. What you might be referring to is the fact that some companies went the "easy route" and bought a bunch of these sketchy recs and are now being told by certain committees they cannot claim carbon neutral. I want to say it was CDP who was having these discussions?
The biggest issue I think we see from a clarity standpoint is that there is currently balkanization over industry terms. CDP may say that carbon neutral claims have to be proceeded by operations decarbonization and then the remainder can be bought down but the layperson doesn't see that.
Layer in that countries have to go by each jurisdiction on what they report in (Businesses in the EU have one emissions factor set, another in the UK has another, Asia a third etc) And you get some confusing estimates.
I promise you though, most companies may have committed to Net0 but a very large portion ended up buying RECs to offset. The arguments that are happening now are good because that's the easy way and once everyone is doing it that doesn't work.
Back to carbon sequestration, we are repeatedly seeing that new hype developments in this space are bunk or generate more carbon then they develop OR are too hard to track and prove (can't think of examples for that one, forest?).
Some of the only ways companies are decarbonizing right now are greening of the grid and purchases of emissions free energy. Unless we spend more time adding to the grid with electricity that will not generate emissions, we will never be able to hit net zero. (Without a significant cultural change in consumption).
Pragmatically I think we have a lot to be gained on focusing on logistic improvements via a cost of carbon built in (to later be force spent on recs or sequestration tech/R&D). Consider that some companies buy an entire fleet of gas and then ship that overseas for their fleet simply because it makes their audit and accounting easier. That is such a net deficit in energy we're producing with that fuel it's an oxymoron. (I mean this as smaller distro networks will always be less efficient)
Sorry I didn't mean to wall of text you but I find this stuff fascinating.
Because emissions accounting is pretty new and a lot of large companies have some serious problems with it. Intresstingly a lot of other large companies are for it as well, as it allows them to beat competitors in certain fields. Also more accounting is good for accountants. One huge group are insurance companies, who really want proper data, to reduce risk and so they are pretty pissed at this as well. So it is not a big oil vs some small activist groups.
I really don't think that's what the article is saying at all. For the most part this is not even a forward looking article. Most of it is how carbon neutral schemes were used to avoid significant green investment over the past few decades. It has very little to say about current carbon storage except that we should be wary of the same schemes with claims that they've scaled to the size of the current crisis because it is most likely that they were simply not doing anything to begin with.
To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilisation on no more than promises of future solutions
A casual implication of climate change ending human civilization. I don’t think this is backed by science, like at all. Why should I trust anything else the authors have to say if they can’t stick to facts from the start?
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