| Summary: | The past year has seen an explosion in the number of companies announcing they are now â??net-zeroâ? or â??carbon neutral,â? or at least plan to be in the next 30 years. Unilever, Uber, and Facebook are just a few of the recent additions to the club, and even major oil companies like BP and Shell say they are on board. If youâ??re rolling your eyes and thinking this is just the latest PR stunt, youâ??re not wrong â?? if you read the fine print, companies have defined those terms for themselves in a number of different, and often not very meaningful, ways. But youâ??re also not entirely right, because â??net-zeroâ? is more specific than â??sustainableâ? or â??eco-friendly.â? It's measurable, at least in theory. At the most basic level, net-zero means that a company (or state, or country) has reached a point where it doesnâ??t put any more carbon into the atmosphere than it takes out. And it's a crucial metric for staving off the most catastrophic effects of climate change. In 2018, a groundbreaking report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the world's best chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C over pre-industrial levels is by cutting emissions nearly in half by 2030 and zero-ing out the rest by 2050. If every company has a different idea about what net-zero means and how to get there, that chance could soon slip out of reach. New efforts are emerging to try to vet these claims and make them easier for people to understand. Last week, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a collaboration between several major international environmental nonprofits that helps companies align their emissions reduction goals with the Paris Agreement, announced they planned to create a global standard for corporate net-zero pledges. â??The reality is that targets usually, and especially public announcements, don't have the level of detail that is needed to be able to assess if a target is good enough or not,â?... |