Climate change is perceptibly affecting people now: people from the coastal region of Nigeria to the toxic neighborhoods in Niger Delta where oil companies continue to dump their poisonous gases together with their greenhouse gases on communities; from the growing number of refugees in Africa, made homeless because of unprecedented drought followed by floods, erosion, storms, heat waves, to those losing their land in the insatiable corporate demand for further extraction of fossil fuels and minerals.
Climate crisis is closely tied to the burning of oil, coal and gas. A third of all carbon dioxide emissions come from burning coal. Fossil carbon is being taken out of the ground, run through combustion chambers, and transferred to a more active and rapidly circulating carbon pool in the air, oceans, vegetation and soil. Some of this active carbon builds up in the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, trapping more of the sun’s heat, warming the earth and destabilizing the climate.
Yet, in spite of the evidence of global warming and considerable knowledge of possible paths to take, our societies are hesitant to combat it. It is not that they lack the political will to do anything about it. They have surplus political will for dealing with the climate crisis, just as they have plenty of political will for trying to turn any other crisis to their advantage. The problem is that almost all of this “will” is directed towards technical, informational, or ‘market’ fixes entrusted to a handful of undemocratic institutions and corporations. The powers-that-be prefer profit to people and planet. So, business as usual continues and disaster brings even more profit through the displacement of poor people and the grabbing of resources that the poor and the vulnerable are unable to access or return to.
The Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) repeatedly confirm that the world’s largest industrial powers have refused to meaningfully reduce their climate emissions, shifting attention to what they called climate’s Plan B “Net Zero” and finding value in corporate plantations and slower forest destruction. The term “net zero” has recently burst onto the scene, backed by some major players. The World Bank, the G7, a coalition of business leaders led by Richard Branson, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) and oil companies like Shell have all endorsed it. Talk has begun to shift from “emission reduction” to “net zero emissions”.
The latest IPPC report on climate change says that action must be taken to ensure that the store of carbon in the atmosphere is brought to net zero, what is meant is that the amount of carbon released from excessive consumption and burning of fossil fuels and the like must be equal to the amount of carbon that is captured and stored somewhere, locked in sinks or deflected by some other means. Rather than actually reducing emissions to zero, ‘net zero’ means that some emissions can keep rising but be offset via the removal of emissions from the atmosphere (‘negative emissions’). The suggested aim is to reach ‘net zero’ emissions, and deadlines range from 2050 to the end of this century.
Why the sudden consensus?
From the beginning, climate technocrats have been under heavy pressure to try and operate a ‘system of credits and debits wherein emission or sequestration of carbon in the biosphere is equated with emission of carbon from fossil fuels. They have been pushed into trying to prove that a world with which closes a certain number of coal mines or oil wells will be climatically equivalent to one which keeps them open but plant more trees, ploughs less soil, fertilise oceans with iron and so forth. On closer examination, net zero is actually a shiny package for variations on old geoengineering schemes. The idea of net zero depends on the massive use of offsets, which in turn means that fossil fuels will keep being burnt, while corporations promote themselves as carbon-neutral, green, sustainable or any other adjective that sound environmentally friendly but do more than green wash destruction.
So, what is to be done?
In 2015, the Paris agreement on climate change agreed to limit the increase of the global temperature to “well below 2 degrees”, including to “pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre industrial level” before the end of this century. The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius would require “rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050.
This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air, for example, a company emitting 10 tonnes of CO2 in place A, would need to buy credits from an offset project that absorbs 10 tonnes of CO2 in place B. This logic ignores the uniqueness of any one place and is based on the false assumption that the life and the interconnectedness of a place can be swapped, replaced or recreated. All of the scenarios put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) for net zero involve extensive use of Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS)
Is this dangerous?
The International Energy Agency (IEA) whose core missions has been to promote and secure affordable energy supplies to foster economic growth, recently issued a report with the intent to end fossil fuel expansion and transition to net zero energy emissions by 2050. The report sets out clear milestones on how it will transform the global economy from one dominated by fossil fuels into one powered predominantly by renewable energy. It also described the pathway to building a net zero energy sector in the next 30 years with extensive use of geoengineering techniques such as Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCC).
The reality is that, not all projects that go under the name of ‘renewable energy schemes’ promote real climate solution, foster autonomy, or help in the transition away from fossil fuels. Other types of ‘renewable energy’ projects may turn out to be of equally questionable climatic or social value when integrated into the carbon market as supports for a system dominated by fossil fuel technologies and corporate expansion.
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCC) is a multi-phase process that, in theory, removes carbon from the atmosphere. It involves harvesting biomass, burning it for energy, capturing the resulting carbon emissions before they enter into the atmosphere, and then permanently storing these underground. The idea is that because the biomass crop absorb CO2 while they grow, repeated use of BECCC will reduce the amount of carbon from the atmosphere. However, this technology is purely hypothetical and many scientists have raised the alarm about the implications of basing a plan to address climate change on BECCC.
Keeping global warming below 2 degree Celsius with BECCS would require about 500 million and 6 billion hectares of land to keep climate emissions from heating the earth by more than 2 degrees. The total area of India is 328 million hectares, which means that according to the most conservative estimate, the land grab required to get the planet to “net zero” is over one and a half times the world’s seventh-largest country. Farmland that people rely on for their livelihoods and ecosystem worthy of protection would be sacrificed for the gigantic BECCS plantations and other carbon capture approaches. Land conflicts would ensue. The consequences of today’s land-grabbing illustrate how this would impoverish people, stoke violence and destroy communities.
The claim that dangerous climate solutions like Bio-energy with Carbon Capture and Storage, Carbon Offsetting, REDD+, Nature-based Solutions, Climate Smart Agriculture, Clean Development Mechanism+, land use change offsets will halt the climate crisis is false. This crisis has been caused more than anything else by the mining of fossil fuels and the release of their carbon to the ocean, air, soil and living things. This excessive burning of fossil fuels is now jeopardizing Earth’s ability to maintain a livable climate.
No to Net Zero, real climate solutions exists.
“Net Zero” is a false climate solution which entrenches and magnifies social inequalities in many way. People around the world need to be made aware of this commodification and privatization and actively intervene to ensure the protection of the Earth’s climate. The much-lauded goal of net zero emissions by 2050 isn’t zero at all. It is based on ‘offsetting’ emissions, not cutting them, and relies on unproven technologies to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. The developed countries must commit to real zero. Not net zero. We demand legally binding targets, not promises from big business. ‘Offsetting’ will result in poorer countries, pushing communities from their homes to make way for ‘carbon farm’ forest. The transition we need is not only out of fossil fuels, but also away from capitalism. The renewable energy that we should promote is not big plantations of BECCS projects, solar panels or wind farms that evict indigenous and rural populations. Instead we should promote family, community and municipal renewable energy projects that empower society and transform people from being mere consumers to becoming producers of energy.