Accounting Tricks Won’t Save the Planet

Net-zero pledges make solving climate change look easy. It isn’t.

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

Pretty much every major corporation has a page buried somewhere on its website touting its efforts to combat climate change. Usually, this takes the form of a “net-zero” pledge. The net-zero pages are usually larded up with a particular kind of vaguely positive but not legally actionable corporate-speak:

• McDonald's promises, “As a global brand, we are embracing our unique opportunity to mobilize the entire McDonald’s System to act now. We are collaborating with Franchisees, suppliers and producers to catalyze change and help create a brighter, better world for the future.”
• Delta Airlines says, “Last year, we became the first carbon neutral airline on a global basis. We’re committed to carbon neutrality from March 2020 onward, balancing our emissions with investments to remove carbon across our global operations.”
• And ExxonMobil assures us that “we are developing comprehensive roadmaps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our operated assets around the world, and where we are not the operator, we are working with our partners to achieve similar emission-reduction results.”

Apparently, these corporations are hoping that we’ll read statements like these (or, who am I…