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NEUTRALIZING THE ATMOSPHERE
SHELLEY WELTON Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law and Energy Policy
Heeding scientists’ conclusions that the world must reduce its overall atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, corporations and state actors across the globe have begun pledging to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions. In “Neutralizing the Atmosphere,” published in the Yale Law Journal, Welton explains why these net zero pledges raise “underdiagnosed” normative risks and offers guidance on how to alleviate them as the world works together to implement meaningful, life-saving climate solutions.
The Rise of Net Zero
Welton begins by reviewing recent historical events contributing to the prevailing contemporary paradigm of the “net zero pledge,” which essentially translates to a carbon emission-producing entity’s promise to invest in technology and/or natural resources that remove a comparable amount of carbon from the atmosphere.
In the 1990s, Integrated Assessment Models illustrated how global carbon emissions can be counterbalanced by carbon “sinks” that bring overall atmospheric emissions levels down. Drawing on these models, the U.S. advocated for a global framework — eventually incorporated into the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — which included both sinks and offsets in its calculation of countries’ emissions reductions targets.
In the two-plus decades since, this balancing exercise has been translated into thousands of individual pledges from countries, states, cities, and companies, each of which promises to net out its own emissions. But the translation of this global goal into a program of atomized net zero pledges presents significant practical and political challenges.
The Accounting Risks
Experts have expressed many concerns related to “accounting risks” of net zero pledges, or in other words, “whether pledges on paper will translate into atmospheric emissions changes in practice.”
First, on greenwashing, Welton notes that because companies “are largely pledging within a legal void, unconstrained by binding reductions requirements, there is nothing beyond norms and public pressure to hold them to their word.” Without any formal legal mandates, companies are free not only to fail to meet their goals, but also to navigate around liability by choosing to claim responsibility for only a fraction of the emissions they contribute.
Second, entities manifest “a problematic degree of self-serving optimism in their net zero planning.” For example, some entities plan to delay near-term action based on the assumption that yet-to-beviable technologies will become available in the future. Others aim to continue to grow their emission-producing activities with the nearsighted plan that a continued reliance on offsets and sinks will be enough to ensure their actions are sustainable.
Lastly, net zero pledges incorrectly assume that all carbon is fungible, such that carbon removed from the atmosphere perfectly counterbalances carbon emitted into it. But this assumption is wrong for several reasons, including challenges in measuring “additionality” (whether an entity’s offsets would have occurred
anyway); “permanence” (whether carbon removal is durable through time); and “leakage” (whether a carbon-removal project merely shifts emissions from one parcel of land to another). Each fungibility risk creates real complications in measuring the genuine impact of investments meant to offset a source’s emissions.
The Neutrality Mirage
Crucially, climate change and net zero emissions plans implicate significant social justice concerns. Welton underscores the need to move away from frameworks that attempt to treat emissions as “neutral,” explaining that source-by-source carbon neutrality “is a framing device; the end goal is to stabilize atmospheric emissions and collectively achieve a livable planet. Yet we have an overarching global framework, replicated in thousands of subjurisdictional and private pledges, that embraces atomized carbon neutrality as the central aim.”
Welton criticizes both the American regulatory cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and the net zero paradigm alike for their shared lack of mechanisms to ensure democracy and equity. Though the CBA “pretends to be neutral” it “actually vaunts an economic conception of the good. Moreover, CBA has frequently been strategically deployed as a deregulatory tool, only to be abandoned by its previous champions when its economics counsel in favor of regulation”; nonetheless, net zero’s failures supersede even the CBA, due to the paradigm’s failure to incorporate citizen preferences “at all.”
To stem the climate crisis, not only must the world “neutralize” difficult-to-abate emissions, but it must also eliminate every emission that can be eliminated. Yet, under the current net zero pledge framework, individual emitters maintain autonomy over their individual strategies, and many are likely to over-rely on emission offsets instead of cutting their internal emissions.
A few standard-setting organizations are now requiring entities to “demonstrate that they are eliminating all emissions deemed feasible,” but in the absence of such guidance or mandate, it is unlikely that private entities voluntarily will choose reduction — especially when it is cheaper to neutralize rather than reduce emissions.
whether new technology can be developed quickly enough and political concerns about the collateral consequences of devoting significant land to offset measures such as afforestation.
Additionally, the Paris Agreement is vague about how voluntary carbon markets are calculated into the system of “Nationally Determined Contributions.” As a result, some countries may choose to cede “the cheapest, easiest cuts within their borders to other countries and companies — potentially making their own eventual pathways to net zero more expensive and complex than they otherwise would have been.”
Institutionalizing Net Zero: The Private and Public Role
In an ideal world, “governments would legislatively establish appropriate binding targets and accompanying policy goals (be those equity, labor, or innovation-focused) and would dictate the roles of various sectors in helping to achieve those targets through emissions reductions.” Absent this kind of overarching framework, however, governance of the net zero project will have to proceed more piecemeal.
A central question lies in how vital corporate action might be achieved without the risks presented by the highly-marketized net zero project. Instead of prioritizing private net zero accomplishment, Welton emphasizes the importance of considering the collective and proposes a multi-faceted solution wherein standard-setting organizations require pledges that focus on internal emissions reductions but not emissions netting, carbon removal, or offsets. She describes her suggested solution as a “reduce and support” strategy, in which private corporations would promise to establish and obtain an emissions reduction goal, declare any residual emissions, and contribute to a global fund at a level commensurate with unabateable emissions.
In addition, Welton calls for more attention to the institutional design of public net zero strategies, to ensure the administrative apparatus of net zero meaningfully incorporates “more collaboration, public guidance, and holistic thinking into the netting of carbon emissions wherever possible.” The rapid evolution of both politics and technology makes emissions regulation difficult; nonetheless, given the serious implications the emissions transition will have on both the economy social equity, “focusing on the public institutions that control net zero — and placing more of the program under public control — will be critical to the success and legitimacy of the project.”
