Wouldn’t our entire planet need to be covered in trees for this to even be close to realistic?
In: Planetary Science
Well the company is claiming that their company will be carbon neutral in 10-20 years, not that the entire world will be.
Also the majority of those companies will not actually be carbon neutral in that time. They can say in now because everyone will have forgotten in 20 years.
Perhaps you have a misunderstanding of what net-zero means?
These companies are not saying that any emissions they have previously produced will be captured.
They are saying that they will make their business as low carbon as possible, so that they don’t continue adding to the problem. What’s more, anything that they can’t completely decarbonise, will be offset by some sort of equivalent financial investment into helping others decarbonise.
A lot of the journey to net zero will happen automatically for these companies. For many companies, emissions boil down to electricity use and transport. In many countries electricity generation is producing far less emissions than before (and is continuing to decrease each year). Also, many countries plan to ban the sale of petrol cars in the near future, too. That doesn’t leave much for the companies to change.
Carbon neutral is a fancy way of saying they will make their products and manufacturing slightly greener but will also be spending a fuck ton donating to companies that plant trees and recycle.
Long story short, ultimately it helps but really not as much as people think. Its basivally just forced PR by the government
They get away with it because the public has a short memory so any promises they make now for 10+ years in the future don’t really need to be realistic.
Many of the companies that claim this are not actually going carbon neutral. They’re simply buying carbon credits from shady companies that sell existing forests over and over again as “carbon credits”. John Oliver had a whole special on it.
Trees won’t be enough. If a company is relying on trees they are greenwashing at best and completely unsustainable at worst.
The ability of a company to go carbon free varies a lot, and most can only hope to be carbon neutral, where their current emissions are offset by carbon capture technology, which may be biological, but even at lower emissions levels would eventually take over much of the earth with nature preserves. Leaving little for us.
So to track and evaluate the SEC now requires [ESG reports](https://esgthereport.com/what-is-esg-reporting/) that standardize reporting on environmental impact across all sectors. These aren’t perfect, and are still being rolled out, but they do let investors compare multiple companies adherence to commitments. As self imposed deadlines approach, the theory is companies that are unable to meet their commitments will loose value and be replaced by more sustainable alternatives. A market solution to unchecked capitalism, a CEOs dream.
So, if you have investments, moving them to environmental portfolios is a great way to vote with your dollars. If someone would summarize and score the ESG reports, we could use them when evaluating purchases as well.
If neither investors nor consumers care about ESG reports, then the promises companies are making don’t matter.
In an ideal world we would simply tax companies based on negative externalities like carbon emissions. Then, companies unwilling or unable to reduce emissions would end up paying so much in taxes that they would need to create extremely useful products to operate at scale. Those products would be expensive, ensuring consumers are more judicious in the product’s use.
If XY and Z happen we will be carbon neutral in 20 years.
Then after 2-3 years they stop doing that
1. Lying is generally not illegal, nor is failing to live up to non-contractual promises
2. Consumers forget about long-term promises
3. Fewer consumers care strongly about carbon emissions than they do about prices
They all have plans to reach the target, planning is easy achieving is difficult, so the current claim is fairly easy to justify in an advert.
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