BYM drops term ‘net-zero’
Expression is ‘the latest corporate greenwash given currency by many well-intentioned users’.
Quakers in Britain no longer use the term ‘net zero’ in advocacy and campaigning work, a staff member has said.
Writing on the Quakers in Britain website, Olivia Hanks sets out why ‘net-zero’ ‘no longer appears to be a step in the right direction’ but is instead ‘a weasel word’.
A ‘net-zero’ target contains two responses to rising temperatures. ‘The first is to stop releasing GHGs [Greenhouse gases] in the first place, by cutting emissions’, says professor Duncan McLaren at Lancaster University’s Lancaster Environment Centre. ‘The second is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using “negative emissions technologies” (NETs). A net-zero target is met when these two balance.’
The reason for dropping the term, writes Olivia, is that it is ‘the latest corporate greenwash given currency by many well-intentioned users (including us)’.
‘The term arises from the likelihood that whatever action we take, there will be some residual emissions which we need to deal with by removing carbon from the atmosphere,’ says the ‘Net Zero is Not Zero’ document, on the Quakers in Britain website.
‘This is where the problem now lies. Current plans to reach “net zero” rely on geoengineering technologies that are not proven at scale and that try to solve the symptoms rather than the causes of climate breakdown. It has come to represent a way of taking action without addressing the injustices that created climate breakdown. Instead, it perpetuates these injustices. And it has become a form of corporate greenwashing.’
Other campaigners and climate scientists have raised concerns about ‘net zero’ targets. The problems lie in the interaction between cutting emissions and removing CO2, says professor Duncan McLaren. ‘If we pay more attention to removals, how might that affect releases?’
‘Net-zero’ pledges have ‘one major flaw in common’, says Greenpeace: ‘the assumption that carbon safely stored in fossil fuels is equal to the carbon in the atmosphere, living organisms, top soils, and the oceans. It is not.’
