Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)

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Making long-term net-zero pledges enables governments and businesses to avoid drastic emissions cuts now. The Insights team generates long-form journalism and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges. This devastating and detailed demolition of the case for committing Britain to Net Zero should be compulsory reading for everybody in government and the media. Strengthening and securing their land rights is one of the most effective ways to protect ecosystems, biodiversity, and the climate. Policy should be driven by unmassaged data and a realistic approach to technical feasibility and risk management.

While carefully restoring natural ecosystems is crucial in addressing both the climate and the biodiversity crises, it must not serve to prolong the lifetime of polluting industries. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1. With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century.Similarly, those that champion net zero as a way of breaking through barriers holding back effective action on the climate also work with the very best of intentions. By making such outlandish carbon neutrality claims, these corporations are not only misleading consumers and investors, they are opening themselves up to increasing legal and reputational liability. There is simply not enough available land on the planet to accommodate all of the combined corporate and government “net zero” plans for offsets and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) tree plantations.

For their part, corporations should voluntarily desist from making these disingenuous claims to avoid the growing reputational damage involved and to reduce the risk of litigation that accompanies such misleading advertising. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future. It is a major driver of deforestation, and the resulting destruction of ecological barriers and buffers probably contributed to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.

When assessing “net zero” targets, we must remember key questions of fairness and ethics: Whose land? Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. A young woman protests the UK’s target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, which many believe is too late.When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. As the UK prepares for a winter of extraordinary fuel bills, the Government has recommitted to Net Zero. The tragedy is that their collective efforts were never able to mount an effective challenge to a climate policy process that would only allow a narrow range of scenarios to be explored.