by Graeme Maxton
Climate people: there is no “Net Zero”! by Graeme Maxton
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. 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 of it unliveable by 2050. In May 2021, the concentration hit 420ppm. That is nearly 4ppm higher than last year. So, it’s really very simple. If we keep on generating emissions at the current rate, it’s game over by 2029 so setting a net zero targetof 2050 is a complete waste of time. It’s too late. I strongly suspect that what we are seeing is greenwashing, telling people who don’t understand that there are tough emissions targets, and though these are far off in the future, and those making them will be long retired, there is the appearance of action and so no need for any change now. Planting trees is a popular way to meet these targets. Yet, even with the most ambitious targets, tree planting might remove 200 giga tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere in 50-100 years. To put that in context, annual equivalent carbon emissions (that is, accounting for the other main greenhouse gases as well as CO2) exceed 40 giga tonnes. So, all those trees will absorb five years’ worth of carbon, 75 years too late. The 40+ giga tonnes 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 to try and offset the additional giga tonne of emissions that is 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 year. 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.
Graeme Maxton is a climate change economist who worked in Hong Kong and now lives in Taiwan. With his partner, Bernice Maxton-Lee, he published "A Chicken can't lay a Duck Egg: how covid-19 can solve the climate crisis." John Hunt, 2020. More details
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