Beware the plump kitty — on details and devils in net zero
Plans matter. As we’ve suddenly become starkly aware thanks to a pandemic, it isn’t enough to hear the promise of good times in the future. We need to know the detail of how we’ll get there without making things worse. It is normal to want good plans paired with good promises. It is a healthy and important thing.
It is, of course, pretty important to distinguish between promises and plans. The former only specify a single piece of information: a destination. The latter provides a framework to get there.
For climate change, concepts of ‘net zero’ plans emerged around 2013, originally created by a group of passionate women working in climate negotiation, such as Farhana Yamin and Christina Figueres. The destination for these is a massive reduction in the burning of fossil fuels by 2050, with any un-decarbonisable sectors offset through the planting of trees or technologies that suck carbon from the air. The European Commission's plan looks like this:
It is a noble promise, but too often, the plans are lacking. LobbyWatch covered Shell’s net zero plan here, in which there is too heavy a reliance on the distant future, and not enough action in the coming months and years. Many other companies heavily invested in the extraction or burning of fossil fuels have come up with varying net zero plans, such as BP, Total, Equinor and Repsol.
A recent report from the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) that looked at European ‘supermajors’ found them all badly insufficient to keep Earth below two degrees celsius of warming by 2050:
The pandemic has not put a brake on this slew of insufficient net zero plans. There are a range of ways these promises have turned into bad plans. It is a good time, then, to dig into one of the many features used to diffuse ambition.
Time matters
The way the weight of effort is distributed within net zero plans often serves as a valuable clue about ambition. Often, effort is offset far into the future. This is perfectly illustrated within Australia’s political debate on climate plans.
At Australia’s 2019 federal election, the incumbent government took its 2030 Paris climate targets to the vote. The opposition party took a more linear trajectory, lining up the 2030 target to the 2050 one so the snooker shot was a straight line:
Australia’s Paris targets are insufficient. If we rely on them as our climate ambition, we’re off track, and the curve grows steeper as we spend valuable time and effort correcting in the future. The government’s targets bend the straight line into a wonky curve:
Not only are Australia’s government Paris targets insufficient, the government’s own projections show they’re unlikely to be met. To make matters worse, the government has still not excluded using a loophole to essentially take those insufficient targets and make them even less sufficient (functionally the same as including them, to be honest).This bends the post-2030 line even further upwards, as we need to scramble at the last minute to make up for lost time:
In the ultimate coda to spats about Australia’s wonky snooker-shot line-up of targets over the coming decades, the government has just confirmed there will be no 2050 net zero target, opting for a smattering of ineffectual investments in ineffective technologies instead.
The focus on future promises of technological change are another rapidly emerging risk around net zero targets. Too often, these plans rely heavily on technological promises rather than immediate change, such as an over-reliance on removing carbon from the atmosphere and a weird, intense blindness to the possibility of simply leaving it in the ground.
A potential solution for this is splitting out the act of avoiding emissions, and the act of sucking emissions from the air. “Clear separation would expose interests and politics, meaning deliberate efforts to substitute negative emissions for emissions reduction could not be hidden behind net-zero rhetoric”, wrote Professor Duncan McLaren.
So what about time? How do we get better at recognising delay tactics, too?
A taxonomy for net zero can-down-the-road-kicking
Some time later this year, the ‘Science Based Targets’ initiative is going to release a solid framework for what comes between the present and the promise. Until then, it is incredibly important to give delay tactics names, so that we might recognise them more easily.
The ‘shifted’ net zero plan for Australia — where action is put off until the future — can be rendered like this:
With the deepest of apologies to Professor Leah Stokes and her ‘Narwhal curve’, I have to give this a animal name. And I cannot see anything other than this specific cat:
This the the plump kitty curve: where climate action is not denied, it is delayed. The end result is the same, where emissions continue to rise in both the short and long term, because the delay process simply keeps repeating. Net zero plans cannot bend upwards into the plump kitty; if they do, they become ineffective.
Ideally, plans ought to place the weight of action in the present, not the future. Roughly, something that looks a lot more like this slinky kitty:
It is no easy task to simultaneously be pleased at the newfound prominence of climate goals while working hard to tease apart their inadequacies. The first step is knowing what the look for. In this case, beware the plump kitty, and demand the slinky kitty. Our future depends on it.
