First we had climate denial, now we have the great net-zero con

Is there a more debased concept than net-zero emissions? The pledge is now so thoroughly greenwashed that the biggest polluters on the planet are signing up.

According to a report by think tank Net Zero Tracker, 75 of the world’s largest 112 fossil fuel companies have now committed to reaching net zero – the point at which greenhouse gas emissions are cancelled out by cuts in output or at least balanced with the removal of carbon from the atmosphere via carbon sinks.

The report noted that no major energy producer had committed to phasing out fossil fuels and that there was a failure to adequately address Scope 3, or end use, emissions, making the targets “largely meaningless”.

Even Exxon Mobil, the US oil major, which spent decades trying suppress information about climate change despite the fact that its own scientists had found clear evidence that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels were warming the planet, has signed up to a 2050 net-zero target.

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The company, now a defendant in multiple US lawsuits that accuse it of misleading the public on climate change, funded the climate change denial movement in the US that succeeded for decades in politicising climate policy and delaying meaningful action in the world’s second-largest polluting economy.

The increasingly vague, too-far-into-the-future pledges have allowed energy companies a last-minute, and in many cases a completely dubious, conversion to the climate cause.

Achieving a credible net-zero target requires – at the very least – the phasing out of fossil fuel extraction with perhaps residual emissions being offset by carbon extraction methods.

However, energy firms are signing up to net zero in the hope that embryonic or unproven technologies will bail them out somewhere up the line or in the hope they can simply buy their way around the emissions through the purchase of carbon credits. The 2050 timelines also allow for little action to be taken to reduce “emissions at source” for decades.

Take Shell’s net-zero ambition or what’s left of it (the company’s new chief executive has already jettisoned a significant tranche of it). The strategy involves continuing to invest in oil and gas production – $40 billion between 2023 and 2035 – while using what it calls nature-based solutions (NBS) to compensate for the emissions it produces.

The original plan was to mitigate for total emissions of around 120 million tonnes a year by 2030. But that would have meant buying a huge slice of the carbon offset market, which critics claimed was unrealistic.

A central part of the plan was to cut oil production each year for the rest of the decade but that was dropped in June and then in September it emerged the company had also dropped its carbon offsetting strategy. It still maintains a 2050 net-zero target.

A recent European Commission study found that 85 per cent of offset projects failed to reduce emissions

Shell’s U-turn echoes similar ones by rivals BP and Total and – coincidentally or not – comes alongside a sea change in UK government policy on climate change.

Under prime minister Rishi Sunak, the UK has announced a series of climate policy reversals including delaying by five years the target to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars and the expansion of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, a strategy Sunak claims is “entirely consistent” with the country’s 2050 net-zero target.

There is, however, a troubling rationale behind Shell’s decision to dump its offsetting plan. The global carbon offset market has been discredited by several high-profile investigations, which appear to cast serious doubt on the efficacy of the offsets being purchased. Buyers – in this case companies – can purchase carbon credits (the right to emit more carbon) if they invest in green projects such as afforestation.

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However, a recent European Commission study found that 85 per cent of offset projects failed to reduce emissions. A separate investigation by the Guardian newspaper, Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper and SourceMaterial, a non-profit investigative journalism group, revealed that more than 90 per cent of rainforest carbon offsets were worthless.

Delta Air Lines is facing a lawsuit in the US for misrepresenting itself as a carbon-neutral airline precisely because the credits it was buying were, in many cases, worthless.

Russia’s war in Ukraine appears to have given fossil fuel companies licence to continue to develop oil and gas on the grounds of energy security. Shell’s boss Wael Sawan says the company is “investing to provide the energy security that customers need”.

At the same time the International Energy Agency is warning that we’ve reached a tipping point and that the development of new oil and gas fields has to stop immediately to meet the goal of global net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and avoid climate breakdown.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation says a combination of heat-trapping emissions and the weather phenomenon known as El Niño means there is a 98 per cent chance that at least one of the next five years – and the period as a whole – will be the warmest on record.

About 4,000 countries, states, cities and companies globally have now committed to net zero but a UN report, released at the Cop27 climate conference in Egypt last year, insists that many of the pledges amount to little more than greenwashing amid what experts describe as a “surplus of confusion and deficit of credibility”.

It’s obvious that in the absence of proper vetting and monitoring, certain companies are intent on gaming the process.