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

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The Climate Change Committee (CCC) is an independent, statutory body established under the Climate Change Act 2008. This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s.

Despite their net zero pledges and claims of climate leadership, the overwhelming majority of these corporations are simply not delivering the goods they promised. The Net Zero Strategy contains warm words on the wider enablers of the transition, but little progress. Bottlenecks, such as skills gaps and planning consents for infrastructure, should be anticipated and tackled early. The CCC welcomes the new Local Net Zero Forum, but it remains unclear how central, devolved and local Government will operate in concert to deliver Net Zero.

Despite claiming to be champions of climate action, two dozen of the world’s largest and richest corporations are hiding their climate inaction behind the fig leaf of green-sounding ‘net zero’ plans, concludes the 2023 edition of the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor. You're probably familiar with the argument, made repeatedly by scientists, campaigners, and countries most vulnerable to climate breakdown, that a 2050 target is much too late. However, given the scale of denial and deception around climate breakdown, we also need to be careful in our use of language.

Those working at the climate science and policy interface desperately wrestle with an increasingly difficult problem.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. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes. C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century.

Today’s report makes over 300 recommendations for filling out policies over the next year, reflecting the scale of the task at hand as the Government moves from strategy to implementation. 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.There must be no further development of these resources, and existing fossil-fuel infrastructure must be phased out as soon as possible, based on a just transition for workers and communities that depend on them. The reason for this is a rebracketing, whereby "a nought" and "a naught" have been misheard as "an ought" and "an aught". Among the major emitters, both the United States and the European Union have promised to achieve this goal by 2050, while China intends to become carbon-neutral before 2060.