What is Zero?
Net Zero. It’s a term we’re hearing a lot of at the moment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (the UN body responsible for such things, commonly known as the IPCC), came to the clear conclusion that the human race needs to reach Net Zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 in order to avoid the worst consequences of our climate crisis.
That’s good, a fixed goal can help motivate us all. But what is Net Zero and is it really possible in that timescale?
To ‘go net zero’ is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or to ensure that any ongoing emissions are balanced by removals.
Source: netzeroclimate.org
Net Zero is not the same as Zero. And that’s also a good thing. A gross zero target (I.E. no emissions at all) is totally unrealistic. There’s no point having a goal we can never reach, that doesn’t help anyone. Instead, Net Zero means that when we balance emissions of greenhouse gases against the total amount of those gases removed from the atmosphere, we end up at zero. Think of it as a set of scales needing to balance.
In June 2019 the UK government updated its legally binding emissions reduction target. The goal is now to reduce net emissions of greenhouse gases by 100%, compared to 1990 levels, by 2050. The previous goal had been an 80% reduction so that improved target is a step in the right direction. Currently, UK emissions stand at approximately 57% of that 1990 number. Definitely progress but we are slipping off track and much of the early gains were a result of a move from coal fired power stations to cleaner gas ones that was driven less by climate policy and more by the destructive effects of Thatcher’s war on the miners in the 1980’s.
Upsetting Offsetting
So, if you’re a country, company, or individual you need to think about how you can make the set of scales you’re responsible for, balance. Logically you have two ways of doing that, you either reduce emissions or increase how much you remove. Removing greenhouses gases in this context is known as offsetting. Again, this a word you’ll be hearing a lot of over the coming decades. And, as with so many things in life, it’s problematic. The first challenge is how you measure the size of your offset, how much carbon have your actions really removed from the atmosphere? The second is timescale. One of the most common ways of offsetting is tree planting but a tree absorbs carbon over its lifecycle, not straight away. If you planted 500 saplings tomorrow should the total carbon captured over 20 years by your trees all count towards your offsetting target for this year? On top of all this we have the problem of unproven technological saviours. Large, polluting companies expect that technology known as ‘carbon capture’ will become widely adopted over the next couple of decades. This will allow them to keep using the same industrial process but just capture the emissions on the way out and then store them deep underground. The problem with this is that we don’t know that we can scale carbon capture up to that level yet. It is still very early days for this technology. If it doesn’t work we could have big problems.
So, the offsetting part of our scale balancing is a challenge. A big challenge. Sadly it gets worse. We also have a realism issue. Energy giant Shell has released its plan to reach carbon neutral. Unsurprisingly it involves huge amounts of tree planting to act as a balance for all its emissions. In fact its plan calls for Shell to plant enough trees to cover an area the size of Spain. Scientists calculate this would use 20% of the total viable land available for reforesting on the whole planet. One company. 20% of all potential forested land. That’s clearly unrealistic. This is a Net Zero plan not worth the recycled paper it’s printed on.
Imperfect Messenger
Bill Gates is an obscenely wealthy, 60 something year old, white guy. The world has had a lot of 60 something, rich white guys writing the rules for a long, long time. It’s men who have a lot in common with Bill Gates who are in many ways responsible for the world as it is now and all the problems that go with it. When it comes to climate change he is a man with a career long carousel of baggage dragging behind him. In his own, understated, words he is ‘an imperfect messenger’.
And yet. Gates has written a fascinating book called ‘How to avoid a Climate Disaster’ which focuses almost entirely on the challenge of net zero. His approach is not that of activist or politician. He doesn’t pretend to be what he isn’t. He views the problem like an engineer with enough money to invest in any promising technology company he wants.
And this engineer is both optimistic and worried. The scale of challenge is huge. We need to electrify large parts of our economy but that is only worth doing if we have enough renewable electricity generation to match that increased demand. We need to devote large sums to research and development in that hope that science can produce answers to the toughest of issues. We need new laws, new taxes, a price on carbon and so on, and on, and on.
In his book, Gates puts a clear number on the challenge. 51 Billion. That’s how many tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent are pumped into the atmosphere each year by human activity. The great economic paralysis caused by the Covid pandemic knocked about 2 or 3 Billion off that total for 2020. Just wrap your head around that, a global pandemic knocked maybe 5% off our total emissions. Now we can really see the size of the problem we’re faced in reaching net zero by 2050.
The other half of the scales
Let’s get back to our scales analogy. Right now, we’re totally out of balance. The side of the scales housing our emissions is almost touching the floor it’s that much weightier than our offsets. Getting those two sides of the equation in balance by 2050 can feel a long way off.
We’ve looked at the offsetting side of the equation and seen how hard that can be, imperfect measurements, meaningless promises and nascent, unproven technologies all standing in the way of meaningful carbon capture in one form or another.
But what about reducing our carbon output? Could we just get to zero that way?
To quote Gates:
Did you brush your teeth this morning? The toothbrush probably contains plastic, which is made from petroleum, a fossil fuel.
If you ate breakfast, the grains in your toast and cereal were grown with fertilizer which releases greenhouse gases when it’s made….
He goes on, through the day, the lunch you ate, the clothes you wore, the car you drove in. All of it the product of processes that emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It simply isn’t realistic to think we can remove all of that from our lives in under thirty years.
However, the good news is we can remove plenty. We know how to produce more than enough green electricity from renewable sources to meet our future demand in a net zero world. To get to that point needs investment, regulation changes and political will. None of those things is easy, but all are possible.
We can change our individual footprints. We can fly less, eat differently, shop in a more sustainable way. We can make a conscious decision to move away from a lifestyle based on seemingly consequence free consumerism. None of that is impossible or dependent on not yet invented technologies.
And thirdly, and most importantly, every step in the right direction counts. Net zero isn’t a zero sum game. If we get 99% of the way there that is fantastic, not a failure.
However, even if we do all this, we’ll still have emissions we haven’t managed to reduce. They may be in aviation, farming, fertilizer production, steel or cement manufacture of some other carbon dependent sector of our modern lives. And it’s for these hard to reach replace areas that we’ll need to save our offsetting capacity. There’s no use squandering them on fossil fuel multinationals who can’t understand that pretty projections of economic growth and another couple of decades of reassuring profits based on gas and oil extraction are worth nothing where planet earth is heading.
In short we need to maximise both sides of those imaginary scales to have a chance of reaching our goal.
The price of everything…
Hitting that point of balance is going to cost a lost. Hundreds of billions globally, at least. These are huge sums of money in world that has been piling on the debt through the pandemic. This presents a real barrier to us hitting net zero by 2050.
Some of that spending needs to be direct government spending, things like R&D investment in long shot technologies, electricity grid infrastructure, truly national charging networks for electric vehicles. But plenty of that spending needs to come from us as consumers. We need to change what we spend our hard earned cash on.
In order to do that effectively we need to know the true cost of what we’re buying. This means, as we mentioned earlier, carbon being taxed effectively so that those currently hidden costs become visible to us as consumers at the shelf edge. Then, driven by our household finances, we will make different choices based on a new sort of value. One that puts the needs of our planet first. One of the most memorable snippets from the Bill Gates book is that we currently live in a world where a gallon of oil can cost less than the same amount of Diet Coke. This is lunacy. The embedded carbon costs of fossil fuels need to move out of the shadows and into our buying decisions. Only then do the true value of the alternatives become apparent. And only then will we all make the decisions that eventually add up to that goal of net zero.
Now more than ever we need to prioritize our values and the value we place on those ideals. Net Zero by 2050 is possible, only maximum effort from all of us will make it probable.