The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report highlighted that we need to end carbon emissions by 2050 to keep global average temperature rise below 1.5°C. Even before the United Nations released this report, a number of countries announced “net zero” pledges. These pledges are powerful, visible, simple… and utterly insufficient. At best, we still over-emit. At worst, these discriminate against poor, low-emitting countries, and could even push greenwashing — creating the false impression that countries’ policies are more environmentally friendly than they actually are.

There are several major problems with these so-termed “net zero” or “carbon neutrality” pledges that we need to fix.

First, what does “net” mean? Will carbon emissions really be zero, or are they “net” through not just futuristic offsets (which are expensive or unproven at scale) but offsets that are unfair or, even worse, based on accounting tricks?

Offsets can span a wide range of possibilities. Some are based on pulling out carbon through land-use changes (afforestation, or establishing forest on previously unforested land, and more), but others aim to use more exotic and expensive technologies including direct air capture. The act of simply planting a tree — which we should be doing anyway — takes years or decades to bear fruit (no pun intended), not to mention a lot of land. Today’s proven carbon capture technology at the point of emission has a high imputed carbon price, except where there is a specialized user of the CO2 such as for enhanced oil recovery.

Other offsets rely on avoiding future emissions. There are carbon credit instruments where a high emitter takes credit for helping someone else avoid a future emission. If only my dieting could also involve other people eating less! While these techniques reduce the growth of carbon emissions, many of them are accounting tricks because they still don’t get us toward global zero. Offset markets are favored by corporations announcing net zero plans, but for national accounting they remain contentious, and were a sticking point at the 2018 United Nations Climate Change conference at Katowice (COP24), under Article 6 of the Paris Accord. The issue isn’t just how efficient or effective they are, but also who should get the credit: the person paying for the carbon offset, or the person avoiding the emission.

Read the full article about net-zero carbon emission pledges by Rahul Tongia at Brookings.