What’s the Difference Between ‘Net-Zero’ and ‘Zero Carbon’ — And Why Does It Matter?
Net-zero climate change targets could be doing more harm than good
Often you’ll see government climate change targets which are centred around ‘net-zero emissions’, or businesses that claim to be ‘carbon neutral’. It sounds impressive, but what does that term ‘net-zero’ really mean?
Net-zero is effectively creating a balance between the amount of greenhouse gases which are released into the atmosphere, and the amount which are taken out. This means that as well as reducing existing carbon emissions, there is also a reliance on carbon offsetting or technology which actively removes carbon emissions from the atmosphere — known as negative emissions technologies (NETs).
This comes in contrast to the term ‘zero carbon’ which is purely focused on reducing existing carbon emissions to zero.
Taking the energy sector as an example, zero carbon energy would be that provided by a 100% renewable energy supplier. Net-zero carbon energy, on the other hand, could be energy produced by burning fossil fuels, but with carbon offsetting to neutralise the emissions created by the process.
Net-zero, zero carbon, carbon neutral — why does the term used matter?
Don’t get me wrong, a target of net-zero carbon emissions is a good target. But it’s also a potentially risky target.
Let’s take the UK as an example. In June 2019, the UK parliament passed legislation which created a legal requirement for the UK to reduce its net emissions of greenhouse gasses to zero by 2050. Keeping to this requirement would keep the UK’s emissions in line with the commitments the country made as part of the Paris Agreement in 2016, committing to keep global warming under 2 degrees.
One year on from this legislation, there’s been little progress.
78% of emissions in the UK come from four sectors: transportation, energy supply, business (commercial energy use) and residential (home energy use). Progress has been made in the energy sector, phasing out coal and increasing renewable energy generation. But there seems to have been little progress elsewhere. During COVID-19 we’ve seen relief packages that bailed out airlines, carmakers, and oil & gas companies, ensuring that the industries responsible for these emissions just keep on emitting.
The government, has, though, pledged £800 million on carbon capture and storage — that ‘net’ side of net-zero which tries to balance out the damage done by removing carbon from the atmosphere.
And this gets us to the core issue with net-zero carbon emission targets. Net-zero allows us to delay direct emissions cuts because we can focus instead on carbon removal technology. The problem being that that technology either doesn’t yet exist, or isn’t reliable enough to give any assurances.
One tactic is putting carbon back into forests, soils, and geological stores, but there are fears from scientists that this could simply leak back into the atmosphere. Other prospective technologies are still in development, and do not exist on the scale that would be needed to remove enough carbon to mitigate for the vast amount of emissions we generate.
The danger is that we continue emitting at the same rate, assuming that at some point in the next 30 years technology will mean that we can simply remove it all from the atmosphere. But, for all we know, that may never come to fruition.
Climate change plans that rely on carbon removal, capture, and storage are playing an incredibly risky game.
So risky, in fact, that research undertaken by researchers at the University of Lancaster suggests it could lead to an additional temperature rise of up to 1.4°C. That’s because net-zero targets and the assumption that we can rely on carbon removal leave us complacent, feeling that we’ll be able to sort the problem out later down the line through carbon removal — meaning that we could actually increase emissions.
What would more productive targets look like?
It seems to me that we need to separate the two elements of ‘net’ and ‘zero’, instead of having targets which combine the two as ‘net-zero’. So, we should have separate targets on:
- Reducing direct carbons emissions from human activity
- Removing carbon emissions from the atmosphere.
And for me, the focus should always lie on the first. We know exactly how to reduce carbon emissions — decreasing the use of cars and planes, reducing consumption of meat and dairy, reducing energy demand and moving to a renewable energy system, improving the energy efficiency of our buildings — so let’s focus on that, instead of relying on uncertain technologies to come along and fix our mess.
