By Chris Lang
Net zero is the latest climate craze. According to Net-Zero Tracker run by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, two countries have already achieved net zero, six countries have net zero targets in law, five countries and the EU have proposed legislation, 20 countries have net zero in a policy document, and 98 countries have a net zero target under discussion.
The UN has a net-zero coalition. World Resources Institute has a Net-Zero Tracker website. The International Energy Agency has a Net Zero by 2050 Roadmap. The UNFCCC has a Race to Zero campaign.
And 160 firms with US$70 trillion in assets have jointed the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
Net zero is not zero
But net zero is yet another illusion aimed at giving the impression of taking action on the climate crisis, while in fact doing as little as possible to change business as usual. Setting net zero targets for several decades in the future is a distraction from the urgent need for governments to find ways to leave fossil fuels underground now.
And net zero is not zero. A report published in 2020 by Action Aid, Corporate Accountability, Friends of the Earth International, Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, Third World Network, and WhatNext? notes that,
Far from signifying climate ambition, the phrase “net zero” is being used by a majority of polluting governments and corporations to evade responsibility, shift burdens, disguise climate inaction, and in some cases even to scale up fossil fuel extraction, burning and emissions. The term is used to greenwash business-as-usual or even business-more-than-usual. At the core of these pledges are small and distant targets that require no action for decades, and promises of technologies that are unlikely ever to work at scale, and which are likely to cause huge harm if they come to pass.
In April 2021, three academics – James Dyke (University of Exeter), Robert Watson (University of East Anglia) and Wolfgang Knorr (Lund University) – published a detailed look at net zero. They describe net zero as a “dangerous trap” that “helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now”.
We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.
And in June 2021, Corporate Accountability, the Global Forest Coalition, and Friends of the Earth International, published a report titled “The Big Con: How Big Polluters Are Advancing a ‘Net Zero’ Climate Agenda to Delay, Deceive, and Deny”.
Big Polluters are responding with the same tricks they have used as part of a decades-long campaign that involves greenwashing themselves as the solution on one hand and deceiving the public while delaying real action on the other. Instead of offering meaningful real solutions to justly address the crisis they knowingly created and owning up to their responsibility to act beginning with drastically reducing emissions at source, polluting corporations and governments are advancing “net zero” plans that require little or nothing in the way of real solutions or real effective emissions cuts. Furthermore, and as this report helps illustrate, they see the potential for a “net zero” global pathway to provide new business opportunities for them, rather than curtailing production and consumption of their polluting products.
There is no net zero!
Recently Graeme Maxton, climate change economist and author wrote a short piece explaining why net zero is nonsense.
Climate people! There is no net zero!
I get the basic maths. If you have something, and you offset it with negative something, you have nothing. If all those damaging climate emissions can be cancelled-out with ‘negative climate emissions’ the party can continue. Only this is a fantasy. There is no way societies can offset carbon emissions in the time left, even with John Kerry’s magic beans.
First, let’s look at the target. To avoid catastrophic and unstoppable climate change, societies need to keep the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm). If humanity breaches that level it sets off a series of chain reactions which will make most of the planet uninhabitable, with large parts it unlivable by 2050.
In May 2021, the concentration hit 420 ppm. That’s nearly 4 ppm higher than the year before. So, it’s really very simple. If we keep on generating emissions at the current rate, it’s game over in less than eight years – 2029.
That’s a bit of a worry, when there are no serious plans for countries to cut emissions until 2030.
It also means that setting a carbon neutral date – a net zero target – of 2050 is a complete waste of time. It’s too late.
Yet that is what the world is doing.
I strongly suspect those spouting this net-zero nonsense know all this. What they are doing is greenwashing, telling people who don’t understand how serious the situation is that there are tough emissions targets, and though these are far off in the future, and those making them will be long retired by then, there is the appearance of action and so no need for any change now.
Planting trees is a popular way to meet these targets. The most ambitious reforestation plans suggest that trees could remove 200 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere in 50 to 100 years. To put that in context, annual equivalent carbon emissions (that is, accounting for the other main greenhouse gases as well as CO2) are just over 40 gigatonnes. So all those trees could absorb five times today’s carbon emissions, which is really good, but 75 years too late. Trees also have an irritating habit of dying, or burning when they get too hot, and releasing all the carbon they’ve stored back into the atmosphere.
Trees store carbon for a while, and then release it. That’s what I call net zero.
Dream big not small
All those seemingly dramatic claims by big corporates are drops in the ocean too. Shell wants to offset 120 m tonnes of emissions by 2030(!). Nestle wants to cancel 13 m tonnes and (wow) make KitKats carbon neutral by 2025. BA says 10% of its flights will be carbon-neutral by 2030, while the shipping industry brazenly admits it will actually increase emissions in the next ten years.
Combined, these (not even vaguely) ambitious goals will have almost zero effect on global emissions.
The 40+ gigatonnes of emissions generated today come from a bewildering array of man-made sources, from buildings and vehicles, to cement production and deforestation. To slow the pace of climate change societies need to cut these emissions to ACTUAL zero as fast as possible – regardless of the cost.
Then they have to invest in new technologies (John Kerry’s magic beans) to try and offset the additional ONE gigatonne of emissions that are now being released each year AS A RESULT of human activities – from the wildfires around the world, from under the warming oceans and from melting permafrost, for example.
To do this, societies will have to build HUNDREDS of carbon capture plants and run them at full blast for more than century to bring the atmosphere into better equilibrium. And, even then, even having done all that, they will have maybe a 50:50 chance of avoiding the worst.
Forget net zero, climate people. Just as you can’t offset a 20-a-day smoking habit with 20 minutes on a treadmill, you can’t cancel 40+ Gt of CO2 emissions each year by planting a few saplings next week.
Societies need to embrace radical change if they are to avoid a climate catastrophe, or there is no point in making any change at all.
Dear Colleagues, congrats for another excellent call to real action–put in the real context of where things actually stand today. Perhaps it is also worth noticing that today, compared to the some 40 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted from fossil fuels annually and another 10 billion CO2eq from non-CO2 sources, the so called ” anthropogenic land-based sink”, already working at full steam and in the mind of many net zero proponents the model to emulate, provides no more than 2-3 billion tonnes CO2 in sequestration annually, mainly happening over the full range of the roughly 4 billion ha of forestland where countries compute it. Net zero basically –magically– would require that this sink increased twenty times in the next 10 years, through the sum of myriads of new micro projects –leaving aside the issue of whether they would in fact work or not (they won’t). That is clearly a huge pipedream. For one, even the accounting of the current anthropogenic land sink is dubious. Secondly, it has been decreasing over the last 20 years or so. Third, it is likely to be obliterated by climate change in the next decade anyway. Carbon neutral kit kats and other products are only those that will not be produced and eaten –against a reference base of the business-as-usual associated profits.
Thanks Chris, this is excellent! Obviously all burning must stop AND negative emissions must begin. Although, the best negative emission program would entail stripping just the carbon from the atmosphere and putting the O2 from the CO2 back into the atmosphere, since we are also destroying the planet’s capability to produce oxygen. And, you would not want to be living near a liquid CO2 burial site that fails!
Dr. James Hansen recently posted that the planet will go over 1.5C in the next El Nino!
Planting trees is meaningless until their stored carbon is actually sequestered in their decay into bog or coal. The pandemic was an example and opportunity to see a real reduction in human excesses, but with the easing of the pandemic we see again humans succumbing to their urge to relieve their boredom, which I say is the greatest driver of the human economy.
I should say one other thing about planting trees – a forest will draw weather to it, but planting trees might or might not result in a forest, see Dr. Hansen’s post at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2021/20210611_SilentForests.pdf
Net zero is a negative number operation that will zero out human life. Sandblasting masquerading as greenwashing.
“Carbon Capture: Five Decades of False Hope, Hype, and Hot Air,” Andy Rowell, 06-17-2021, Oil Change International, http://priceofoil.org/2021/06/17/carbon-capture-five-decades-of-industry-false-hope-hype-and-hot-air/
“Carbon Capture and Storage: An Expensive and Dangerous Proposition for Louisiana Communities,” Center for International Environmental Law, 06-25-2021, https://www.ciel.org/carbon-capture-and-storage-an-expensive-and-dangerous-proposition-for-louisiana-communities/
“The ‘Big Con’ Revealed: Report Details Fossil Fuel Industry’s Deceptive ‘Net Zero’ Strategy,” Brett Wilkins, 06-09-2021, Common Dreams, https://www.corporateaccountability.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/The-Big-Con_EN.pdf
Which cites a 4 page 2020 report from the U.S. Treasury Department’s inspector general found that fossil fuel companies improperly claimed nearly $1 billion in Q45 credits,” available at https://www.menendez.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/TIGTA%20IRC%2045Q%20Response%20Letter%20FINAL%2004-15-2020.pdf
And:
“The Big Con: How Big Polluters Are Advancing a “Net Zero” Climate Agenda to Delay, Deceive, and Deny,” 24 pages, published June 2021 by Corporate Accountability, the Global Forest Coalition, and Friends of the Earth International, available at https://www.corporateaccountability.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/The-Big-Con_EN.pdf
NextDecade is greenwashing its proposed Rio Grande LNG project targeting the Port of Brownsville TX as a “clean energy company accelerating the path to a net-zero future” (https://www.next-decade.com/).
By creating its NEXT Carbon Solutions project and partnering with Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, Mitsubishi, and Project Canary. NEXT Carbon Solutions is to be built on the same lease site as the Rio Grande LNG project. It’s to capture the CO2 from the LNG project to make it a net zero project by using Mitichibushi technology.
Oxy is to locate an abandoned natural gas well, make it into an injection well, and transport the CO2 by means of a pipeline running from the Port of Brownsville to the yet to be determined injection well site.
Project Canary is to “deploy its TrustWell™ certification process to confirm each element of the natural gas value chain – from the wellhead to the ship at Rio Grande LNG – has achieved low emissions targets and utilized the highest standards of environmental performance and social responsibility” (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210419005130/en/).
All this is to make the Rio Grande LNG produced LNG more marketable and a part of the solution to lowering global CO2 emissions. It’s also to make NextDecade a more profitable through the use of Section 45Q Tax Credits and the sale of CO2 offsets to companies seeking a place at the net zero gaming table.
On 06-21-2021 NextDecade announced the appointment of Ivan Van der Walt as its Chief Operating Officer effective 07-01-2021, responsible for all project management, engineering, construction, commissioning, and operation of both its Rio Grande LNG and its NEXT Carbon Solutions projects (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210621005736/en/).
The announcement noted that Van der Walt “has management experience on multiple LNG projects including Darwin LNG, Woodside LNG Train 5, Pluto LNG, Gorgon LNG (as well as the associated carbon capture and storage project), and Cameron LNG.”
Interested in how the Gorgon LNG and associated carbon capture and storage project Van der Walt had worked out, I did a Google search and found, among other things, “Carbon Capture: Five Decades of False Hope, Hype, and Hot Air,” Andy Rowell, 06-17-2021, Oil Change International, http://priceofoil.org/2021/06/17/carbon-capture-five-decades-of-industry-false-hope-hype-and-hot-air/. Here’s what it say about the Gorgon operation:
QUOTE:
Gorgon’s Failure: A Sign of Things to Come
Meanwhile, over twenty years after Chevron first touted its Gorgon project, it remains bedeviled by problems. Despite receiving $60 million of taxpayers’ money, it was nearly three years after gas was first extracted before the first CO2 injection occurred on August 6th, 2019.
By this time, Australian government data showed that due to the technical problems, Gorgon emitted over 7.7 million tons of CO2 in 2016-17, wiping out all the savings made by rooftop solar across Australia in the same period.
This led Western Australia’s Environmental Protection Authority to conclude that Chevron should be held accountable for venting gas from the Gorgon project, arguing that due to the two-year delay in storing emissions, Chevron was likely to fail to meet the requirement to capture and store at least 80% of the project’s emissions.
But after all the delays, Chevron hoped the project was back on track. It promised that the project would be “full speed in 2020”. The new dawn for CCS was just over the horizon.
But that didn’t happen. Just as the API was lobbying for further tax breaks in the US, the Australian press reported further problems at Gorgon: “Greenhouse gas emissions from Chevron’s Gorgon LNG project will increase after the safety regulator curtailed burial of carbon dioxide as wells to control underground pressure are not working,” reported the Boiling Cold website (https://www.boilingcold.com.au/chevrons-gorgon-co2-emissions-to-rise-sand-clogs/).
“The ongoing problems revealed by Boiling Cold will add to concerns about how easily and quickly CCS can be deployed more widely.” Indeed the problems were so bad that The Conservation Council of West Australia said Chevron should be forced to shut the plant down until it can demonstrate its CCS was working. The council’s director, Piers Verstegen, was quoted saying the project had been “a disaster from the beginning”.
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