Carbon net zero is a risky response to the climate emergency. One reason is how we plan on getting there — largely by paying somebody somewhere to plant or not cut down trees, while we ourselves enjoy business pretty much as usual (but battery-powered). The risks of overdependence on tree planting and preservation offsets as a climate emergency response are increasingly well-appreciated (and satirised).
A recent investigation found more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by the biggest certifier were worthless. Another found that since 2015, close to seven million tonnes of carbon was released from wildfires in six forest projects in California’s carbon-trading system. Some projects involve militarised policing of tropical reserves, surely politically unsustainable long term.
Nostalgically freezing our societies at roughly their current stage of organisation and development and offsetting their carbon emissions mostly by planting trees would require more than all the farmland on the planet. And so on.
Another important reason is the way net-zero (or net any-number) carbon accounting may conceal the true picture.
If you reported your business had been "financially net zero for the year" you wouldn’t be revealing much (was it $10,000-$10,000 = 0? Or $1,000,000-$1,000,000 = 0?).
To mint your "net carbon zero" sticker, did you emit and offset one tonne of CO2e, 1000 tonnes of CO2e or 1,000,000 tonnes of CO2e?
It makes a big difference to the planet which it was, because while the emissions side of the ledger is robustly up in the atmosphere for several centuries, give or take, the robustness of the offsets side is much less certain.
"Carbon net zero" deploys a flawed accounting paradigm on a planetary scale with which we may inadvertently defraud ourselves out of existence. The "net zero" notional single carbon account, with alleged sequestration simply netted off emissions (further obfuscated by a fancifully exact balancing of debits and credits to emissions and offsets), hides the true picture. So we miss red alerts that could spur technological and social innovation, and changes in patterns of consumption and production.
We should dismantle the net-zero façade, and disclose and target both gross emissions and mitigations, in separate carbon accounts, each rigorously audited. When these show as they surely will that few, if any, businesses are truly carbon net zero, they should brag about it.
We all need to own the emergency with less air travel, more plant-based food, less cars in garages, more public transport and a whole lot more (and less). The fate of the planet depends on it.
From governments, the emergency needs a constitutional response, not just executive and legislative tinkering, so the rights of future generations and present ecosystems at risk of extinction get baked into the constitution. In the meantime here are some constitutionally flavoured legislative and executive initiatives for government action:
— Introduce climate emergency asset bonds (CEABs), subscription payable on purchase of house or other asset with interest payable from government to asset holder for the duration. Not a tax, but an investment, to help fund climate stabilisation, and hence protection of the long-term value of newly purchased house or other asset, which as recent events have shown, is no longer assured (thereby, incidentally, rendering capital gains tax based climate funding aspirations moot). Very large long-term loans to government and industry for infrastructure retooling and compensation will (as in past upheavals) be key to overcoming the climate emergency.
— Bake the climate emergency into our tax system from top to bottom. Replace GST with CECD, the climate emergency contribution and dividend. Taxpayers own the emergency by directing how their CECD contribution is used when filling out their tax return, voting who is to receive CECD dividends, from a wide range of certified private and public retooling, research, compensation, offsetting, biodiversity protection and biochar production (so we can hook carbon farming up to food farming via soil sequestration and fertility) projects and providers.
— Dunedin software engineer Alan McCulloch is a member of Citizens’ Climate International and the Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
