Climate pledges that play games with net-zero math and rely on make-believe offsets may be good PR, as oil and gas companies have found, but they’re not addressing the real challenges we face. Serious climate commitments recognize that we need to bring emissions to zero, not “Net Zero”, as quickly as we can. We cannot achieve this with imaginary offsets, carbon trading schemes, or vague “pollute now and remove it later” promises. The world needs better climate pledges
Climate pledges, or Nationally Determined Contributions, are the pledges each country made in Paris to reduce their carbon emissions to prevent global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius. To accomplish this, global emissions must be halved by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. The deadline to submit these pledges to the UNFCCC was July 31.
The AP reported earlier this month in China, India miss UN deadline to update emissions targets, that the two countries are “among dozens who “failed to provide an update on their targets for curbing the release of planet-warming gases to the U.N. climate change agency by July 31.” (The US met the target for submitting its NDC.)
Many nation’s pledges are too small, with deadlines for reductions too far in the future to address the crisis in time. Others rely on technologies that are disputably effective when scaled up and which could be dangerous or utilize questionable carbon offsets.
But Inside Climate News reports in Fossil Fuel Companies Are Quietly Scoring Big Money for Their Preferred Climate Solution: Carbon Capture and Storage:
The federal government has poured billions of dollars into carbon capture demonstration projects that were never completed. The only commercial power plant in the country to use carbon capture and storage shut its emissions-cutting operations last year during the pandemic, and later announced it would suspend them indefinitely. This hasn’t stopped some companies from continuing to try to implement the technology.
And last month a group of progressive climate activists renounced the use of CCS in the climate segment of the President’s Infrastructure plan.
“Carbon capture is not a climate solution,” the groups wrote in the letter, which was accompanied by an advertisement in the Washington Post. “To the contrary, investing in carbon capture delays the needed transition away from fossil fuels and other combustible energy sources, and poses significant new environmental, health, and safety risks, particularly to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities already overburdened by industrial pollution, dispossession, and the impacts of climate change.” Will the Democrats’ Climate Legislation Hinge on Carbon Capture?
Project Drawdown Executive Director Jonathan Foley in The world needs better climate pledges notes that many of the pledges are not “focused on bringing real emissions to zero, helping others do the same, and equitably addressing historic climate pollution.”
As a cornerstone of climate leadership, the weakness of today’s pledges is particularly troubling. Without clear, robust, and scientifically-sound goals, it is impossible to raise climate action to the level Earth needs.
Today it seems “net zero” pledges are all the rage. And in the lead-up to the next big climate conference—the “COP26” meeting in Glasgow—we will see even more politicians, CEOs, and celebrities make net-zero pledges.
Unfortunately, net-zero commitments—which once seemed like a good idea—have become so distorted and abused they are now largely meaningless. Sadly, the net-zero concept has been misused by bad or indifferent actors, allowing them to make bold-sounding climate pledges without really reducing emissions at all.
Foley explains that “net zero” in reality means that the entire planetary atmosphere is not accumulating greenhouse gases. But businesses, governments, and agencies are designing pledges using “accounting tricks(link is external)—usually relying on problematic “carbon offsets” to make the books look better than they are. And what’s worse: Of the Fortune 500 companies that have made public net-zero commitments, only ~20% have robust frameworks(link is external), and very few are reporting their progress.
“Oil and gas companies design greenwashed net-zero scenarios, often investing in carbon offsets to “cover their operational emissions (but not the emissions from burning the oil and gas they sell)” with no plans to “actually reduce the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.”
In fact, to date, companies rely on sales of carbon to oil and gas firms to use in enhanced oil recovery.
And then there is the dubious carbon sink.
Science is telling us that the relative efficiency of sinks — the earth’s natural cleaning system, the oceans, forests and soils, will go down in the coming years as emissions continue to rise.
Currently, oceans, land and forests together absorb some 50 per cent of the emissions that we release into the atmosphere each year. In other words, without these sinks, we would have already breached the 1.5oC warming by now.
But what this report also tells us is that we cannot ‘bank’ on the sinks to clean up the emissions in the future at this same rate. This means the ‘net zero’ plans of countries will have to be revisited. IPCC’s new report on climate change is a call to action
Saleemul Huq, chair of the expert advisory group of the Climate Vulnerable Forum of 48 countries, says the status of climate pledges is “absolutely abysmal” adding that countries' progress should be measured by the real-world action they are taking to cut emissions - not just their targets for future years.
"What the countries are doing or not doing is what matters," Huq said, "and what they're doing is not keeping us below 1.5 degrees."
Closing that gap between what is being pledged and what is ambitious enough may require a combination of more ambitious pledges and for some nations to surpass their pledges.
Foley presents a five-step “Emissions 360” climate pledge framework:
- (1) Cut your own emissions towards zero, not “net zero,” as quickly as possible.
- (2) Only use carbon removal as a last resort—for truly unavoidable emissions.
- (3) Pay the “Social Cost of Carbon” for your ongoing pollution.
- (4) Don’t stop here: Address your historic emissions too.
- (5) Carefully weigh issues of climate justice in everything you do.
“Corporate emissions reductions pledges — however ambitious they may be for a particular company — completely miss the deeper issues that the climate crisis demands we grapple with, and only play at the edges of the revolutionary change we need.” Jamie Alexander.
The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis around the world while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality, politics, and the arts.
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