Climate Awareness
One of the reasons this business is important to me is that I strongly believe that the older generation has to make every effort it can to fix the problems that we have created, so that our children are not left with an insoluble problem/inhospitable planet. Bee Solar Tech is aiming to be a B-Corp company in due course. COP 26 actions have only been partially implemented and global progress to lower emissions and halt global warming is far too slow. Large parts of the world are now suffering major fires, glacier melts, floods, ocean damage, land slides and drought, exacerbated by plastic pollution and climate change. Melissa Briggs, July 2022
Update August 2023
This year we have seen scores of severe floods and wild fires in many more areas - Pakistan, China, California, Canada, most of the Mediterranean with disasters unfolding in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Much of the USA is sitting under a "heat dome" which is affecting millions of daily lives. The UK has had a very wet summer as we sit at the edge of the weather system to the east of us - but that is a lot easier to deal with than being on fire. Millions of people have been displaced and this will continue for the foreseeable future without a massive increase in global cooperation. COP 28 is on the horizon - sadly, the leading nation has just signed a five year deal to sell gas to Japan.
Update August 2023
This year we have seen scores of severe floods and wild fires in many more areas - Pakistan, China, California, Canada, most of the Mediterranean with disasters unfolding in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Much of the USA is sitting under a "heat dome" which is affecting millions of daily lives. The UK has had a very wet summer as we sit at the edge of the weather system to the east of us - but that is a lot easier to deal with than being on fire. Millions of people have been displaced and this will continue for the foreseeable future without a massive increase in global cooperation. COP 28 is on the horizon - sadly, the leading nation has just signed a five year deal to sell gas to Japan.
Text by Adam Vaughan of the New Scientist from his Fix The Planet blog.
"Last week, the UK’s climate change advisers warned that the country is unlikely to meet its goal of having net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. What’s more, there’s a growing backlash against the idea of net-zero targets, typified by a viral comment piece last year criticising the “fantasy of net zero”.
But love them or hate them, net-zero targets by governments, corporations and other groups aren’t going away. That’s why this week’s Fix the Planet is about an international effort to improve them, led by a former Canadian environment minister and backed by the head of the United Nations.
What exactly is a net-zero target?
Typically, one that plans to eliminate all but the hardest-to-cut carbon emissions of a company or entity, and balance out the remaining difficult rump of emissions by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Here’s a more detailed explainer.
So what’s new?
This week just happens to be “net zero week”, an awareness-raising exercise backed by the UK government, energy firms and others. However, today’s newsletter is all about an initiative launched by UN secretary general António Guterres at the COP26 climate summit to help improve the net-zero targets of non-state actors, such as companies and cities. The Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities, as it’s formally known, launched in March. Last week, it held its first meeting with the public and journalists in a “call for evidence”.
What’s the group hoping to achieve?
To “increase ambition that we desperately need on climate”, says the group’s leader, Catherine McKenna, who served as Canada’s minister of environment and climate change until 2019. While welcoming the “avalanche” of net-zero pledges in recent months and years - such as the one made by B&Q owner Kingfisher in the UK this week - she says pledging is the “easy part”. The hard part is doing the work to get there. “We have a deficit of credibility and of concrete delivery plans, and a surplus of confusion about the various types of pledges that have been made, and what they mean in practice,” she says. Other observers, such as the NewClimate Institute, have reached similar conclusions. The German-based non-profit organisation found that net-zero goals set by 25 of the world’s biggest firms would only cut emissions 40 per cent on average, rather than the 100 per cent you’d expect.
So how will they improve net-zero goals?
The aim isn’t for the group to be a watchdog scrutinising individual companies’ targets itself, but to set widely agreed criteria or standards for what good targets should look like. To that end the group is working on: defining net zero; ensuring pledgers set interim targets along the way to net-zero goals set for far-off dates like 2040; how to measure and report emissions cuts; and governance, including how to verify progress.
A key issue will be ensuring companies and cities are all counting the same stuff. That’s because the “scopes of emissions” that firms count differ. That may mean one oil company only counts emissions from producing oil and the indirect emissions from those operations, while another also counts the far larger emissions from when the petrol made from that oil is burned in someone’s car. If this all sounds dull but important, that’s because it is. This is the time-consuming nitty-gritty of getting a handle on existing emissions and then measuring the reductions.
Beyond those reductions, one of the key questions will be how the remaining emissions are cancelled out or offset, says Bill Hare at the non-profit organisation Climate Analytics. “We can't afford offsetting to be a greenwashing technique, rather than a way towards achieving real net-zero emissions. We all know, the science is very clear, that we have to achieve a fairly radical decrease in reductions,” he says. For example, one existing standard for what a good net-zero target looks like, known as the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTI), requires 90 per cent of the emissions savings to come from an absolute reduction rather than offsets. For some firms, that will be extremely tough.
How will the expert group ensure its standards get taken up?
McKenna says “high level champions”, a group of UN climate ambassadors around the world, will help promote them. But it’s far from clear whether the UN expert group’s net-zero standards and views will become the universally accepted norm. The SBTI has been around for years and has already gained huge traction among corporations setting targets. Meanwhile, French president Emmanuel Macron and former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg are planning some form of online portal for people to track net-zero targets. “There's a lot going on in this space. We're aware of these initiatives,” says McKenna.
What’s the endgame here?
Regulation of net-zero targets, probably. Helena Viñes Fiestas, a Spanish economist and member of the UN expert group, says: “We're working on the road map to translate the standards and criteria [for net-zero targets]… into international and national level regulations,” she says. So, one day governments may impose laws dictating the standards for net-zero targets. In the meantime, the group is taking evidence from the public and interested parties until the end of August. The panel’s recommendations will then be shared with Guterres ahead of the next big UN climate summit in Egypt this November, known as COP27. McKenna hopes her team’s ideas will bring “clarity and practical ambition to the space of net-zero commitments”. We’re certainly going to need both of those."
"Last week, the UK’s climate change advisers warned that the country is unlikely to meet its goal of having net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. What’s more, there’s a growing backlash against the idea of net-zero targets, typified by a viral comment piece last year criticising the “fantasy of net zero”.
But love them or hate them, net-zero targets by governments, corporations and other groups aren’t going away. That’s why this week’s Fix the Planet is about an international effort to improve them, led by a former Canadian environment minister and backed by the head of the United Nations.
What exactly is a net-zero target?
Typically, one that plans to eliminate all but the hardest-to-cut carbon emissions of a company or entity, and balance out the remaining difficult rump of emissions by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Here’s a more detailed explainer.
So what’s new?
This week just happens to be “net zero week”, an awareness-raising exercise backed by the UK government, energy firms and others. However, today’s newsletter is all about an initiative launched by UN secretary general António Guterres at the COP26 climate summit to help improve the net-zero targets of non-state actors, such as companies and cities. The Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities, as it’s formally known, launched in March. Last week, it held its first meeting with the public and journalists in a “call for evidence”.
What’s the group hoping to achieve?
To “increase ambition that we desperately need on climate”, says the group’s leader, Catherine McKenna, who served as Canada’s minister of environment and climate change until 2019. While welcoming the “avalanche” of net-zero pledges in recent months and years - such as the one made by B&Q owner Kingfisher in the UK this week - she says pledging is the “easy part”. The hard part is doing the work to get there. “We have a deficit of credibility and of concrete delivery plans, and a surplus of confusion about the various types of pledges that have been made, and what they mean in practice,” she says. Other observers, such as the NewClimate Institute, have reached similar conclusions. The German-based non-profit organisation found that net-zero goals set by 25 of the world’s biggest firms would only cut emissions 40 per cent on average, rather than the 100 per cent you’d expect.
So how will they improve net-zero goals?
The aim isn’t for the group to be a watchdog scrutinising individual companies’ targets itself, but to set widely agreed criteria or standards for what good targets should look like. To that end the group is working on: defining net zero; ensuring pledgers set interim targets along the way to net-zero goals set for far-off dates like 2040; how to measure and report emissions cuts; and governance, including how to verify progress.
A key issue will be ensuring companies and cities are all counting the same stuff. That’s because the “scopes of emissions” that firms count differ. That may mean one oil company only counts emissions from producing oil and the indirect emissions from those operations, while another also counts the far larger emissions from when the petrol made from that oil is burned in someone’s car. If this all sounds dull but important, that’s because it is. This is the time-consuming nitty-gritty of getting a handle on existing emissions and then measuring the reductions.
Beyond those reductions, one of the key questions will be how the remaining emissions are cancelled out or offset, says Bill Hare at the non-profit organisation Climate Analytics. “We can't afford offsetting to be a greenwashing technique, rather than a way towards achieving real net-zero emissions. We all know, the science is very clear, that we have to achieve a fairly radical decrease in reductions,” he says. For example, one existing standard for what a good net-zero target looks like, known as the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTI), requires 90 per cent of the emissions savings to come from an absolute reduction rather than offsets. For some firms, that will be extremely tough.
How will the expert group ensure its standards get taken up?
McKenna says “high level champions”, a group of UN climate ambassadors around the world, will help promote them. But it’s far from clear whether the UN expert group’s net-zero standards and views will become the universally accepted norm. The SBTI has been around for years and has already gained huge traction among corporations setting targets. Meanwhile, French president Emmanuel Macron and former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg are planning some form of online portal for people to track net-zero targets. “There's a lot going on in this space. We're aware of these initiatives,” says McKenna.
What’s the endgame here?
Regulation of net-zero targets, probably. Helena Viñes Fiestas, a Spanish economist and member of the UN expert group, says: “We're working on the road map to translate the standards and criteria [for net-zero targets]… into international and national level regulations,” she says. So, one day governments may impose laws dictating the standards for net-zero targets. In the meantime, the group is taking evidence from the public and interested parties until the end of August. The panel’s recommendations will then be shared with Guterres ahead of the next big UN climate summit in Egypt this November, known as COP27. McKenna hopes her team’s ideas will bring “clarity and practical ambition to the space of net-zero commitments”. We’re certainly going to need both of those."