Prominent academics, including a former IPCC chair, round on governments worldwide for using the concept of net zero emissions to ‘greenwash’ their lack of commitment to solving global warming.
Because emissions accounting is pretty new and a lot of large companies have some serious problems with it. Intresstingly a lot of other large companies are for it as well, as it allows them to beat competitors in certain fields. Also more accounting is good for accountants. One huge group are insurance companies, who really want proper data, to reduce risk and so they are pretty pissed at this as well. So it is not a big oil vs some small activist groups.
The whole thing is a scam. The only way on can claim 0 net emissions. Is to plant local to the emission (nearby), a number of new trees that net immediately consume an amount of co2 equal to the one produced by a factory. Same for roads.
Everything else is marketing.
Worst is that most of these scam contracts are to prevent forests in some remote country to be cut for 30 years. How does that even help. How can anyone even think this can compensate co2.
The EU requires all companies listed on EU regulated exchanges to provide emission data on a regular bases. The UK does that as well. The US requires indutstrial facility based data.
Wall Street is in the money business and they really want to know, how much of a risk your company has, by governments introducing climate legislation. That is a real risk and some very real money involved in this. So Wall Street is extremly unhappy about this greenwashing, as it hides very real risk. Hence they do everything to stop it. However for managment this is really attractive, as “lower” risk means higher share prices, which means higher pay for them.
So it should not be illegal marketing, but a massive financial crime and there are people actually looking for folks like that.
Because emissions accounting is pretty new and a lot of large companies have some serious problems with it. Intresstingly a lot of other large companies are for it as well, as it allows them to beat competitors in certain fields. Also more accounting is good for accountants. One huge group are insurance companies, who really want proper data, to reduce risk and so they are pretty pissed at this as well. So it is not a big oil vs some small activist groups.
The whole thing is a scam. The only way on can claim 0 net emissions. Is to plant local to the emission (nearby), a number of new trees that net immediately consume an amount of co2 equal to the one produced by a factory. Same for roads.
Everything else is marketing.
Worst is that most of these scam contracts are to prevent forests in some remote country to be cut for 30 years. How does that even help. How can anyone even think this can compensate co2.
Should be illegal marketing
The EU requires all companies listed on EU regulated exchanges to provide emission data on a regular bases. The UK does that as well. The US requires indutstrial facility based data.
Wall Street is in the money business and they really want to know, how much of a risk your company has, by governments introducing climate legislation. That is a real risk and some very real money involved in this. So Wall Street is extremly unhappy about this greenwashing, as it hides very real risk. Hence they do everything to stop it. However for managment this is really attractive, as “lower” risk means higher share prices, which means higher pay for them.
So it should not be illegal marketing, but a massive financial crime and there are people actually looking for folks like that.