“There are big flaws in how net zero is being implemented in some cases,” Black said. And auditing whether they do so is particularly difficult where those pledges involve offsetting their continued emissions by buying paper certificates from other organizations that claim to have prevented emissions elsewhere or absorbed CO2 in forests. In March, he was lead author of an analysis of net-zero commitments that argued that “the global momentum on net zero represents an exciting window.” Besides 124 national governments committing to adopting various versions of net zero as targets, he found net-zero pledges from more than 1,500 major companies, representing $14 trillion in revenues.īlack agrees that not all these governments and businesses intend to honor their pledges.
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In a riposte published this month, Richard Black at Imperial College London said it makes little sense to attack net zero when it is “the defining lens through which many governments, businesses, NGOs and other types of entity view decarbonization.” Black told Yale Environment 360, “high-carbon advocates have always found excuses to delay, and would do so whatever the policy framing.” But “it has nothing to do with net zero per se.” Watson’s stand - especially coming from a former IPCC boss - has angered some fellow researchers. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual.” But “the time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society… Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5 degrees, because they were never intended to. “We admit that it deceived us,” he and fellow climate scientists James Dyke of Exeter University and Wolfgang Knorr of Lund University in Sweden wrote. Watson and his colleagues admit to their own roles. He and his co-authors wrote last month that while net zero might be “a great idea, in principle,” in practice it “helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.” Scientists who support the current push for net-zero, they contend, have “licensed a recklessly cavalier ‘burn now, pay later’ approach, which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar.” Since then he has worked as an academic, currently at the University of East Anglia. Bush refused to nominate the former NASA climate scientist for a second term. Watson was chair of the IPCC from 1997 until 2002, when the U.S. The debate is as much about the politics of driving down emissions as about climate science or the potential of technology. But some fear the safety net will become a cover for business-as-usual in highly polluting industries. The negative emissions might be achieved by increasing CO2 take-up by forests and other ecosystems, or by using industrial chemistry to capture CO2 from the air. The hope is that allowing negative emissions to balance continued CO2 emissions as part of net-zero policies will provide a safety net for industries where it is technically impossible to eliminate all emissions - in aviation and agriculture, for instance. But in a blistering commentary last month, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Robert Watson, and two co-authors denounced net zero as a trap set by industrialists and governments to hoodwink the world and lambasted climate researchers for showing “cowardice” in not calling them out. Some see the rush to make net-zero pledges in the run-up to Glasgow as a huge success for climate action. They are being applauded for finally getting a grip on climate change.īut while the net-zero strategy has united policymakers, it has divided climate scientists and activists.
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More than 100 countries, including the biggest three emitters - China, the United States, and the European Union - have pledged to achieve net-zero targets in the coming decades. But are they the key to fulfilling the promises to hold warming to 1.5 degrees made at a similar climate summit in Paris six years ago, or, as some scientists and activists are now saying, are they a dangerous delusion to which climate scientists have become complicit?Īchieving “net zero” requires that any carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions are balanced by absorbing an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere - sometimes called negative emissions. Those two words have become the near-universal language for policymakers intent on sealing a deal at the UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland in November.