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Under Pressure From Trump, UN Shipping Regulator Delays Vote on Net-Zero Rules
“With climate warming impacts being felt everywhere on Earth, kicking this decision down the road is simply evading reality," says one campaigner.
Oct 17, 2025
Advocates of establishing an international framework for decarbonizing global shipping on Friday decried a postponed vote on proposed rules—a move that came amid pressure from the administration of US President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia.
Members of the United Nations International Maritime Organization's (IMO) Marine Environment Protection Committee gathered in London for a special meeting, MEPC 83, to vote on its Net-Zero Framework (NZF), a new set of global regulations aimed at slashing the shipping industry's greenhouse gas emissions.
A Saudi proposal to adjourn the meeting and delay a final decision on the NZF narrowly passed by a vote of 57-49, with 21 abstentions, Mongabay reported.
The NZF—whose goal is net-zero shipping by 2050—has two main interconnected components, a global fuel standard requiring ships to gradually reduce emissions, and a pricing mechanism meant to encourage the industry to voluntarily slash greenhouse gas output.
"The delay leaves the shipping sector drifting in uncertainty."
The NZF was approved at the last MEPC meeting in April, then shared with member nations for review, with an eye toward final assent during the current special meeting. However, while the European Union and nations including China and Brazil have been pushing for the NZF, the world's two largest oil producers—the United States and Saudi Arabia—are working to scupper the proposal, which Russia also opposes.
Trump took to his Truth Social network Thursday to pressure MEPC members to vote "no" on the NZF:
I am outraged that the International Maritime Organization is voting in London this week to pass a global Carbon Tax. The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping, and will not adhere to it in any way, shape, or form. We will not tolerate increased prices on American Consumers OR, the creation of a Green New Scam Bureaucracy to spend YOUR money on their Green dreams. Stand with the United States, and vote NO in London tomorrow!
The one-year postponement drew sharp rebuke from supporters of the NZF.
“We are disappointed that member states have not been able to agree a way forward at this meeting," International Chamber of Shipping secretary general Thomas Kazakos said following Friday's vote. "Industry needs clarity to be able to make the investments needed to decarbonize the maritime sector, in line with the goals set out in the IMO [greenhouse gas] strategy."
"As an industry we will continue to work with the IMO, which is the best organization to deliver the global regulations needed for a global industry," Kazakos added.
John Maggs, who represents the Clean Shipping Coalition at the IMO, said in a statement, “By delaying adoption of its Net-Zero Framework, IMO has today squandered an important opportunity to tackle global shipping’s contribution to climate breakdown."
“With climate warming impacts being felt everywhere on Earth, kicking this decision down the road is simply evading reality," he added. "Governments serious about climate action must spend the next 12 months rallying every nation that supports the framework, convincing those who are on the fence, or opposing, that its adoption is the only sane way forward.”
Elissama Menezes, co-founder and director of the advocacy organization Equal Routes, said: "Delay costs the climate—and coastal Indigenous peoples and Arctic communities are already paying the price for inaction. This week’s non-outcome should mean that states and the marine sector should double down on related efforts to reduce the impacts from the triple planetary crisis.”
Faig Abbasov, director of shipping at the green group Transport & Environment, told Reuters that "the delay leaves the shipping sector drifting in uncertainty."
Global shipping accounts for approximately 3% of the world's CO2 emissions. Approximately 90% of all international trade is conducted at sea, and proponents of the NZF warn that emissions will soar without the regulations.
While leading shipping companies including Maersk and CMA CGM have taken steps to transition their fleets to zero emission vessels, they are still falling short of the goals laid out in the landmark Paris climate agreement or even the IMO’s own 2023 emissions reduction strategy.
”However, all is not lost—not by a long shot," said Maggs, "as there is an immediate opportunity to slash [greenhouse gas] emissions from shipping, minimize fuel burn, and the overall cost of the energy transition, and that is to strengthen and make enforceable the carbon intensity indicator (CII), the IMO’s cornerstone energy efficiency measure."
CII is a shipping industry regulatory metric that measures a vessel's annual carbon intensity.
“There’s no time to waste," Maggs added. "At MEPC 84 in April 2026 member states need to focus all their attention on transforming the CII into the energy efficiency powerhouse needed to quickly right this ship and put it back on route to being a climate solution.”
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Morgan Stanley Latest Wall Street Giant to Ditch Net-Zero Coalition
Earlier this week, Bank of America and Citigroup also said they were leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance.
Jan 02, 2025
On Thursday, the Wall Street titan Morgan Stanley became the latest financial institution to leave the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-convened group of banks committed to "aligning their lending, investment, and capital markets activities with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050."
The defections keep piling up. Earlier this week, Bank of America and Citigroup said they were leaving the alliance, and earlier in December Goldman Sachs Group and Wells Fargo announced they were doing the same.
“We will continue to report on our progress as we work towards our 2030 interim financed-emissions targets,” Morgan Stanley told Bloomberg in an email.
While Morgan Stanley didn't offer an explanation for the exit, according to Reuters, financial firms have repeatedly found themselves in the crosshairs of some members of the GOP who argue that corporate efforts to limit fossil fuels run afoul of antitrust law.
Last summer, the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee published a report accusing financial institutions colluding to impose "radical environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals on American companies." Their probe was largely focused on another climate group, Climate Action 100+, which is made up of financial institutions who strive to engage companies they invest in on climate issues. That coalition has also experienced a number of defections.
In December, 11 GOP-led states sued three asset managers in federal court, arguing that the firms had "artificially constrained the supply of coal, significantly diminished competition in the markets for coal, increased energy prices for American consumers, and produced cartel-level profits" for the firms in violation of antitrust law.
Despite the stated goals of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, Morgan Stanley and other firms who are a part of the alliance have remained a major financial life lines for fossil fuel companies.
According to a report published by a group of NGOs in 2023, 56 of the largest banks in the Net-Zero Banking Alliance—including Morgan Stanley—have provided nearly $270 billion in the form of loans and underwriting to more than 100 "major fossil fuel expanders," from Saudi Aramco to ExxonMobil to Shell.
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Big Oil Should Pay for the US to Reach Net Zero
The cost of climate action must shift from taxpayers to fossil fuel producers, in other words, to those who profit from the products that pollute the air.
May 08, 2024
The Biden administration is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order for the U.S. to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050, an important goal, in the opinion of most climate scientists, for saving our planet.
As immense as this spending seems, it is only a small fraction of what will ultimately be required. If America is to achieve Net Zero without massive tax increases, the cost of climate action must shift from taxpayers to fossil fuel producers; in other words, to those who profit from the products that pollute the air. Government regulation is essential to make this happen.
ExxonMobil’s CEO recently said “the people who are generating the emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for that.” Unfortunately, he was pointing to consumers, not producers. These fossil fuel producers are actively avoiding paying the price for cleaning up these emissions.
Fossil fuel companies make tremendous profits off of products that cause GHG emissions and should be the ones to take responsibility for these emissions.
Let’s consider an example. Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $6 billion to support 33 projects aimed at reducing emissions. One of the largest awards, $332 million, was for an ExxonMobil project to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at its Baytown, Texas, chemical plant by 2.5 million metric tons per year—a mere 0.04% of U.S. emissions. This award came after ExxonMobil warned the project might not continue due to unsatisfactory government incentives.
ExxonMobil’s net profit in 2023 was over $36 billion, more than 100 times the government award. Why does it need taxpayer funds to decarbonize? Can’t ExxonMobil reduce its emissions at its own expense as a cost of doing business? Fossil fuel companies make tremendous profits off of products that cause GHG emissions and should be the ones to take responsibility for these emissions. But the reality is they won’t unless they are required to do so.
With the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the government took the “carrot” approach: Give companies an incentive to act and hope that they’ll do the right thing. Some companies have been very complimentary of the IRA because it allows them to decarbonize at taxpayer expense. Their only complaint is that they want even larger incentives so they can make greater profits on their decarbonization investments. These companies now see the atmospheric carbon problems as opportunities, but they still want the U.S. taxpayer to pay for their new decarbonization business ventures.
It is time for the IRA’s carrots to be followed by a regulatory stick. If oil companies want to continue to produce fossil fuels, we should phase in a requirement that they address the emissions that result from their production and use. Companies that reduce emissions most cheaply will be more profitable than those who are less efficient, and this will accelerate the deployment of climate solutions. Oil companies will, of course, pass some of those costs on to their customers. This will prompt consumers to seek alternatives to fossil fuels and to use less—exactly what needs to happen if we are to achieve Net Zero emissions.
This regulatory approach is nothing new. When society needed gasoline to be produced without toxic lead, it was required by regulation and oil companies did it. The same thing happened when low sulfur fuels were required to reduce pollution. Companies spent billions to produce better fuels, and we have cleaner air and fewer deaths as a result. Similar regulations should, and must, be used to drive decarbonization.
This approach—requiring oil companies to decarbonize—should have supporters on both sides of the political aisle. It both improves the environment and reduces taxes—a win-win. The Big Oil lobby will be strongly opposed, just like they were to previous regulations. But in the end, they’ll do what needs to be done.
Oil companies like to talk about the and equation: Meeting society’s energy needs and reducing emissions. But there’s one more requirement they prefer not to discuss: doing it at their own expense. If they won’t do these three things at once, fossil fuel companies need to go the way of the dinosaurs. Our grandchildren will see their logos in museums and will be amazed that these giants were once so powerful that they were allowed to put our planet at risk.
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'Dangerous and Desperate': Sunak's Net-Zero Flip Condemned by Left, Right, and Center
"Sunak's U-turn today will be devastating for the people of the U.K. and for the planet we call home," warned one Scottish Green. "It's nothing short of evil."
Sep 20, 2023
Critics across the political spectrum—from Conservative members of Parliament and corporations to Greens and climate campaigners—reacted with anger and resolve Wednesday following the announcement by U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that his Tory government would retreat from some of its key net-zero commitments.
Speaking Wednesday at the Downing Street Press Briefing Room in London, Sunak said his government is still committed to reaching net-zero by 2050, but in a "more proportionate way" that would bring a "greener planet and a more prosperous future."
The rollback will reportedly include delaying a ban on the sale of petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles from 2030 to 2035, pushing back the phaseout of gas boilers, scrapping energy efficiency targets for some homes, dropping recycling plans, and canceling a planned air travel tax.
"This is a U-turn that will leave the Tories facing in the opposite direction of almost everyone, and finally end their hopes of reelection."
"No one can deny climate change is happening," Sunak said, adding that the county needs "sensible green leadership" instead of false choices that "never go beyond a slogan."
However, Conservative peer Lord Zac Goldsmith—who resigned his ministerial post earlier this summer due to what he called Sunak's climate "apathy"—called the prime minister's reversal "a moment of shame."
"His short stint as PM will be remembered as the moment the U.K. turned its back on the world and on future generations," he added.
Shadow Climate Secretary Ed Miliband led Labour condemnation of the reversal, which he called "a complete farce from a Tory government that literally does not know what they are doing day to day."
Brighton Pavilion Green MP Caroline Lucas slammed what she called Sunak's "coordinated, calculated, and catastrophic rollback."
"What this all reveals is that Sunak really doesn't seem to care about the climate in the slightest—it's little more than an afterthought," Lucas wrote in a Guardian opinion piece published Wednesday.
Sunak must call a general election by January 2025, and his Tories are trailing the opposition Labour Party in opinion polls amid persistently high inflation, slow economic growth, and rising inequality.
"If Sunak mistakenly thinks the climate is merely a political device to draw dividing lines between his party and Labour, he will fail on his own terms," wrote Lucas. "All it will do is draw an ever-greater divide between him and the people he seeks to govern."
Climate campaigners roundly condemned Sunak's decision.
"The government needs to double down now, not U-turn," Kennedy Walker, a U.K. organizer with the climate action group 350.org, said in a statement. "We have the opportunity to show what a transition to a greener economy that works for people and the planet can look like; we need to hold leadership to account to make sure it happens and they follow through on their own promises."
Riffing on the government's "long-term decisions for a brighter future" slogan, Extinction Rebellion U.K. wrote on the social media site X: "Short-term decisions for a shitter future. Remember, this government took £3.5 million in donations from Big Oil and other industries before licensing new gas and oil."
Many companies including automaker Ford and energy giant E.ON joined in criticism of the rollback.
"Our business needs three things from the U.K. government: ambition, commitment, and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three," Ford U.K. chair Lisa Brankin said Wednesday. "We need the policy focus trained on bolstering the EV market in the short term and supporting consumers while headwinds are strong: infrastructure remains immature, tariffs loom, and cost-of-living is high."
Some critics noted that Sunak's announcement came on the same day the leaders of many nations—but not Britain or the world's two top carbon polluters, China and the United States—gathered in New York for the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit.
"We're in a climate emergency. The deadly impacts of climate change are here now and we have to act urgently," Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan—the only U.K. speaker at the summit—told The Guardian Wednesday. "We have seen record high temperatures in London earlier this month and the hottest ever July. Over the last two years, we have experienced unprecedented wildfires and flash floods, destroying homes and livelihoods."
"This government's response flies in the face of common sense and shows they are climate delayers," Khan added. "It beggars belief that not only are they watering down vital commitments, but they are also passing up the opportunity to create green jobs, wealth, and lower energy bills—as well as failing to give investors the certainty they need to boost the green economy."
Sunak's reversal also infuriated many people in Scotland.
"Rishi Sunak has blood on his hands," National Union of Students Scotland president and Scottish Young Greens co-convener Ellie Gomersall told The National. "His excuse? It's too costly. Well then all the more kudos to the Scottish government who are still moving forward with net-zero policies like low-emission zones, phasing out gas boilers, cheaper public transport, all the while on a budget severely restrained by the confines of devolution."
"And of course when the Scottish government does try to implement simple yet effective measures like a deposit return scheme, Westminster comes along and blocks it," she added. "Sunak's U-turn today will be devastating for the people of the U.K. and for the planet we call home. It's nothing short of evil."
Alistair Heather, a Scottish writer and TV presenter, told The National that he was "almost pleased" by Sunak's announcement.
"This is a U-turn that will leave the Tories facing in the opposite direction of almost everyone, and finally end their hopes of reelection," he explained. "For mainstream voters, who understand that a clear, urgent movement of travel towards a green future is the best chance we have of mitigating the worst effects of the climate collapse, the Tories have made themselves completely unelectable. Good... Fuck the Tories. Mon the independence."
"With the Left AWOL, our species is being quick-marched to extinction."
The outrage was felt far beyond U.K. shores.
"At a time when the U.K. should be providing global leadership in transitioning off fossil fuels, especially in recognition of the impact its historical emissions have had in bringing about the climate crisis, the U.K. government is considering backtracking on already insufficient commitments," 350.org Europe regional director Nicolò Wojewoda said in a statement.
Yanis Varoufakis, a former Greek finance minister who heads the left-wing MeRA25 party, wrote on X that "Sunak's U-turn is a reflection of the total Europe-wide collapse of the market-based, neoliberal consensus on how to tackle the climate crisis. It marks the center‐right's new path."
"And with the Left AWOL," he added, "our species is being quick-marched to extinction."
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Study Finds Carbon Offset Schemes 'Significantly Overestimating' Deforestation Claims
"These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction," said one study author. "If you exaggerate or get it wrong, intentionally or not, you are selling hot air."
Aug 24, 2023
Most carbon offset schemes significantly overestimate their impact on reducing deforestation, with many of the carbon credits purchased by polluting corporations amounting to little more than "hot air," according to a researcher behind a study released Thursday that could portend billions of dollars in losses for speculators.
"Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) projects are intended to decrease carbon emissions from forests to offset other carbon emissions and are often claimed as credits to be used in calculating carbon emission budgets," explains the study, which was published in the journal Science.
However, according to the study:
We examined the effects of 26 such project sites in six countries on three continents using synthetic control methods for causal inference. We found that most projects have not significantly reduced deforestation. For projects that did, reductions were substantially lower than claimed...
Methodologies used to construct deforestation baselines for carbon offset interventions need urgent revisions to correctly attribute reduced deforestation to the projects, thus maintaining both incentives for forest conservation and the integrity of global carbon accounting.
"Carbon credits provide major polluters with some semblance of climate credentials. Yet we can see that claims of saving vast swathes of forest from the chainsaw to balance emissions are overblown," study co-author Andreas Kontoleon, from the University of Cambridge's Department of Land Economy, said in a statement.
"These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction," he added. "If you exaggerate or get it wrong, intentionally or not, you are selling hot air."
Kontoleon added that overestimations of forest preservation have driven an increase in the number of carbon credits on the market, resulting in artificial price suppression.
"Potential buyers benefit from consistently low prices created by the flood of credits," he said. "It means that companies can tick their net-zero box at the lowest possible cost."
This could mean that carbon speculators stand to lose billions of dollars in the future as offsets become stranded assets.
"It's currently a buyer's market and buyers are, rightly, prioritizing quality. There are over a billion tons of issued but not retired credits in the market—this suggests lots of credits can be written off, and there will remain a large supply for buyers to tap into," Anton Root, head of research at AlliedOffsets, told The Guardian Thursday.
"A correction like that could help to orient the market toward fundamental supply-demand dynamics, which we don't currently tend to see, and drive up the price for credits that are deemed to be above the quality threshold," he added.
The new research follows other scientific research and journalistic investigations, including a January study by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial that concluded that over 90% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by Verra, the nonprofit organization that sets the world's leading sustainability standard, "are largely worthless and could make global heating worse."
While some scientists argue that CO2 extraction, either via natural or technological means, is needed in order to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, opponents call the technology a "false climate solution."
Green groups including Extinction Rebellion and Food & Water Watch have for years warned against carbon capture and storage, which critics call a "scam" and "greenwashing."
"Carbon offset markets are widely discredited," Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said earlier this year. "Their only benefit lies in enriching the middlemen charged with selling the lie."
Despite this, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with a plan to invest $2.5 billion in a pair of major carbon capture and storage projects, which it claims will "significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation and hard-to-abate industrial operations" as part of the "effort critical to addressing the climate crisis and meeting the president's goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050."
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'People & Planet Won!': Swiss Vote to Tax Corporations, Reach Net-Zero by 2050
"Swiss voters demonstrate that progressive measures can be approved via direct democracy," noted one observer.
Jun 18, 2023
By wide margins, Swiss voters on Sunday approved a global minimum corporate tax and a law mandating carbon neutrality in the alpine nation by midcentury.
Swissinfo reports 1.8 million voters in Switzerland—78.5% of the electorate—approved a constitutional amendment raising taxes on multinational corporations with more than $750 million in annual profits to the 15% minimum agreed upon in 2021 by around 140 nations, led by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) bloc. Switzerland will become the first country to implement the tax.
Many of Switzerland's 26 cantons boast some of the world's lowest corporate tax rates, a policy proponents argue is needed to attract international businesses to a country with high labor and location costs.
Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter, a member of the center-right Free Democratic Party, said Sunday's vote "ensures that Switzerland will not lose any tax revenue to foreign countries."
"It will on top also create legal certainty and a stable framework," she added, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, the Climate and Innovation Act was adopted as 59.1% of the electorate, or nearly 1.4 million people, voted to commit the country to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To accomplish this, the government will rely more upon incentives than bans, offering financial assistance for people transitioning to climate-friendly energy sources.
"The Swiss understood that the climate law is essential to take a first step and inscribe in Swiss law a clear objective for 2050. When you have a clear objective, you can then put in place the necessary measures," Céline Vara, a Green Party parliamentarian, told Swiss public broadcaster RTS.
As Swissinfo reports:
Shrinking glaciers, less snow, heavy rains, and drought—Switzerland is particularly vulnerable to the climate crisis. The average temperature has already risen by 2.5°C over the past 150 years, double the global average. Yet national policies have been deemed "insufficient" by the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent group that analyses countries' climate policies.
At the same time, the small alpine country imports almost 75% of its energy, mostly crude oil, gas, and coal.
Work will now begin on implementing the new law. Beyond financial support, the new law defines intermediate CO2 emissions goals to attain carbon neutrality by 2050. By 2040, Switzerland must reduce emissions by 75% compared to 1990 levels. Indicative CO2 targets are also set for the construction, transport, and industrial sectors. The remaining emissions will have to be offset.
Swiss glaciologist Matthias Huss said Sunday's vote "sends out a strong signal."
A third measure on Sunday's national ballot extending Covid-19 emergency measures was approved by 61.9% of voters.
Voters in Geneva Canton also rejected a proposal to levy a "solidarity tax" on the wealthiest 1% of residents in Switzerland's second-largest city.
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Fossil Fuel Companies' Net-Zero Plans Are 'Largely Meaningless,' Report Finds
Existing pledges tend to ignore emissions caused by the distribution and consumption of petroleum products, and not a single fossil fuel company has committed to ending oil and gas production by 2050.
Jun 12, 2023
A growing share of fossil fuel corporations have pledged to reach "net-zero" greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, but a new report reveals that the vast majority of them are doing "nothing concrete" to achieve such goals.
Climate justice advocates have long denounced the concept of "net-zero" because, they say, allowing planet-heating pollution to be "canceled out" via questionable carbon offset programs or risky carbon removal technologies is an accounting gimmick that doesn't guarantee the deep emissions reductions needed to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. Net Zero Stocktake 2023, unveiled Monday at the United Nations Bonn Climate Change Conference, shows that even if one accepts the premise that entities can negate, rather than eliminate, their pollution, they are still failing to deliver on the framework's own terms.
Based on publicly available data compiled by the collaborative research outfit Net Zero Tracker, the third comprehensive annual analysis of "net-zero target intent and integrity" finds that 75 of the world's largest 114 fossil fuel companies have now made net-zero by 2050 commitments, up from 51 a year ago.
However, most of those commitments don't fully cover or lack transparency on the coverage of "scope 3" emissions, rendering them "largely meaningless," the report says. In contrast to "scope 1" and "scope 2" emissions—resulting from production and the operation of company-owned property, respectively—scope 3 emissions stem from the distribution and consumption of products, making them by far the most significant for fossil fuel companies.
To make matters worse, not a single fossil fuel company has committed to phasing out oil and gas production by 2050 nor have any committed to ending exploration for new oil and gas fields or halting the extraction of existing reserves, notes the report. Only two have vowed to stop building or enlarging coal mines and another two have rejected new coal-fired power stations. Just four have promised to end coal-fired power generation by 2030 in rich countries and by 2040 in all nations.
The International Energy Agency made clear in 2021 that any new investment in coal, oil, and gas is inconsistent with its net-zero by 2050 roadmap. Since then, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeated its warning that expanding fossil fuel supply is incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has condemned the status quo as a civilizational "death sentence" and called the aforementioned actions currently being ignored by all but a few dirty energy firms a "survival guide for humanity."
Despite all of those alarm bells, oil and gas corporations—long aware of their contributions to the climate emergency, swimming in record profits, and empowered by policymakers who have continued to lavish the industry with trillions of dollars in subsidies each year while failing to agree to a global fossil fuel phaseout—are still planning to ramp up drilling in the coming years.
During last year's COP27 summit, a group of U.N. experts outlined the parameters of a high-integrity net-zero strategy for companies and sub-national governments. In addition, the U.N. earlier this month launched the Global Climate Action Recognition and Accountability Framework for non-state entities.
As the latest Net Zero Stocktake, citing the U.N.'s guidance, points out:
Achieving credible net-zero requires the phasing down and out of fossil fuel extraction and use, with any residual emissions being removed by like-for-like carbon dioxide removal later in the century. For the 77 fossil fuel companies with net zero targets, as well as those without them, they should reflect on the U.N. Expert Group's fifth recommendation that a fossil-fuelled future is incompatible with what 195 nations agreed to in 2015 when they signed the Paris agreement. The U.N. expert group also clarified that the focus should not just be on transitioning away from fossil fuels by mid-century, but "must be matched by a fully funded transition toward renewable energy."
"We haven't yet seen a huge move from fossil fuel companies or other companies on meeting those [guidelines], so there's still a lot of work to do to come up to that level," report co-author Thomas Hale, a professor at the University of Oxford, told Reuters.
Fossil fuel corporations aren't the only entities examined by Net Zero Tracker.
Researchers are keeping tabs on all countries, all states and regions in the 25 highest-emitting nations, all cities with more than 500,000 residents, and the largest 2,000 publicly listed companies worldwide, leading to a database with over 4,000 entries. Of those, at least 1,475 have set a net-zero target, up from 769 in December 2020. However, as with oil and gas firms, "there are very limited signs of improvement in the robustness of sub-national and corporate net-zero targets and strategies" overall, the report notes.
Progressive critics might say the analysis provides further evidence that despite the U.N.'s best efforts to establish high standards, corporate net-zero pledges still amount to little more than a greenwashing tactic—one that threatens to delay the transformative action needed to save millions of lives this century.
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UK Report Shows Promise of 100% Clean Energy—Without Nuclear Power—by 2050
"All public and enforced consumer spending on new nuclear power and carbon capture and storage should be scrapped and instead funding should be put into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and storage capacity," said one expert.
Apr 19, 2023
A best-case scenario in which the United Kingdom fully transitions to renewable energy with no nuclear generation would save more than £100 billion—over $124 billion—toward achieving net-zero by 2050 and produce 20% fewer carbon emissions, an analysis published this week concludes.
The report—entitled 100% Renewable Energy for the United Kingdom—was authored by Philipp Diesing, Dmitrii Bogdanov, Rasul Satymov, Michael Child, and Christian Breyer of LUT University in Lappeenranta, Finland. The publication compares a set of potential scenarios with the U.K. government's current net-zero pathway, which includes nuclear power and fossil fuel carbon capture and storage. The report was released ahead of a Saturday seminar hosted in London and online by 100% Renewable U.K.
"While the effects of the climate emergency can be observed more and more clearly through increasingly frequent extreme weather events and other climate change impacts, there is still a lack of dedicated countermeasures by decision-makers," a summary of the report states. "The government of the United Kingdom... has self-committed to climate neutrality in 2050, but without initiating the essential steps and without eliminating fossil fuel-based technologies and high-risk nuclear power."
"The U.K. does, however, benefit from the availability of renewable energy resources, namely onshore and offshore wind, which are considered the best in Europe," the publication continues. "Based on this background, this study presents several energy system transition pathways to 100% renewable energy in 2050 in high-spatial and temporal resolution, by describing the energy system of the U.K. in full detail from the starting point of today in five-year time steps until 2050."
The study's authors modeled four scenarios:
- The "Best Policy Scenario" (BPS) shows a 100% renewable energy system by 2050, with offshore wind as the main resource, limiting onshore wind and solar photovoltaics according to available land area;
- The "Inter-Annual Storage Scenario" adds to the BPS the required inter-annual storage needed to provide good levels of insurance against the possibilities of low-wind years;
- The "BPS Plus Scenario" tested the limits of higher land area availability for onshore wind and solar photovoltaics, and includes some renewable electricity-based e-fuel imports; and
- The "Current Policy Scenario" adopts the U.K. government's strategy for net-zero as published in 2020.
"The benefits of a fully renewable energy system in achieving net-zero are clear," 100% Renewable U.K. director David Toke, who supervised the new report, said in a statement. "Far from simply keeping the lights on, they ensure secure and reliable energy for the U.K., with huge economic savings compared to other options and incredible job creation opportunities."
"The implications of this report are huge," he added. "All public and enforced consumer spending on new nuclear power and carbon capture and storage should be scrapped and instead funding should be put into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and storage capacity."
The new report comes as Extinction Rebellion U.K. and dozens of other groups prepare for a four-day demonstration in London beginning Friday to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects and citizens' assemblies to discuss solutions to the climate emergency.
It also comes as ministers in the Conservative government of U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are considering a revamp of the bidding process for new renewables projects in an effort to create more green jobs. Opportunities in the low-carbon job sector have shrunk significantly since then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, also a Conservative, eliminated what he reportedly called "green crap" policies in 2012.
Like the United States and other nations, the U.K. continues to develop fossil fuel projects despite the climate emergency. Climate campaigners warn that the country's entire carbon budget could be blown on just one oil and gas project: Rosebank, the North Sea's largest undeveloped oilfield, has the estimated potential to produce half a billion total barrels of oil.
Earlier this week, Germany drew applause—and some criticism—from climate campaigners as its last three nuclear power plants were permanently shut down.
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Big Ag Exploiting Carbon Markets to Intensify Grip on Food System: Report
"Corporations are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and that's exactly what these carbon offsetting schemes will do," said one researcher.
Mar 01, 2023
Climate and agricultural policies aimed at bolstering carbon markets will fail to curb planet-heating emissions while enabling powerful agribusiness corporations to greenwash their polluting operations and augment their control over the food system.
That's according to Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments, and Data: Big Ag's Latest Power Grab, a report published Wednesday by Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy group, and the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank.
While farmers could play a key role in mitigating the climate crisis by adopting agroecological practices capable of sequestering more carbon in the soil, the report warns that U.S. lawmakers from both major parties have embraced a "market-based" approach—centered around the buying and selling of so-called "carbon offset" credits generated through minor tweaks to industrial monoculture production—that is likely to tighten Big Ag's chemical-intensive stranglehold on the food system and disenfranchise small-scale farmers, all while failing to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
"Carbon markets have become a top strategy for agriculture and climate, despite a history of fraud, failure to reduce emissions, and corporate greenwashing," report co-author Jason Davidson, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Such corporate schemes will strengthen the power of the largest agribusinesses, hand over private farm data, and fail to address the climate crisis."
"Instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing proven climate solutions."
As the report explains: "The idea begins with granting credits to farmers who adopt certain practices, such as planting more trees and cover crops, that are supposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Farmers then receive compensation for their efforts by selling these credits to other entities, typically large corporations. These corporations, in turn, use their purchases of such credits to justify claims of environmental responsibility."
Though these corporations "may still be emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they claim to have 'offset' these emissions by paying others to pollute less or actively sequester carbon, often to the point of asserting that they now have a 'net-zero' climate impact," states the report.
A recent investigation revealed that 94% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by a leading market player provided no measurable climate benefits, casting further doubt on the very notions of 'net-zero' and 'carbon neutrality' that corporations promote in a bid to maintain or expand their own polluting activities while portraying themselves as green.
Despite mounting evidence of the ineffective or counterproductive nature of 'net-zero' commitments, one-fifth of the world's biggest corporations have made them, meaning that demand for carbon offsets is growing, the report notes. Meanwhile, the federal government is providing key support to such programs, including indirectly through the Inflation Reduction Act and directly through a pair of bills embedded in the Fiscal Year 2023 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.
The first, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, instructs the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to "list private carbon market facilitators on its website and broadly list protocols for measuring carbon sequestration," the report explains. The SUSTAINS Act, meanwhile, threatens to lend government legitimacy to "fledgling soil carbon offset schemes," which "could influence their value in voluntary exchanges" and "fan the flames of a speculative industry that stands to divert resources from effective pollution reduction and regulation." Moreover, through its so-called Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities pilot program, the USDA is poised to offer more than half a billion dollars in grants to several agribusiness giants.
According to the report:
Big agribusiness corporations are using the system to deepen their own monopolistic power. Programs run by corporations such as Cargill, Bayer, Nutrien, and Corteva pay farmers for adopting specific farming practices that either depend on the companies' proprietary technologies or require farmers to use their digital agriculture platforms.
[...]
Under these private carbon offset programs, agribusiness giants define climate-smart agriculture and promote large-scale, monoculture, chemical-dependent farming methods that can harm the environment in the long run and further entrench their market power. By controlling the same private, unregulated carbon-offset markets in which they trade on their own account and set their own prices, they are also subject to massive conflicts of interest.
"We can't trust the very corporations that got us into this climate crisis to get us out of it on their terms and timeline," said report co-author Claire Kelloway, food program director for the Open Markets Institute. "Corporations are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and that's exactly what these carbon offsetting schemes will do by locking farmers into their networks, protecting product sales, and stalling meaningful regulation."
A joint statement from Friends of the Earth and the Open Markets Institute explained three major pitfalls of private soil carbon credit programs:
- Agricultural carbon markets are jumping ahead of the science to commodify something that cannot be reliably measured. There is no scientific consensus on how long carbon remains in the soil or under what conditions. Carbon sequestered in the soil can be released by changing land management practices or through severe weather events, which fails to sequester carbon on a meaningful timescale to address climate change. Without basic market fundamentals of information exchange and consistent commodities, selling and buying offsets is little more than speculation.
- Carbon sequestration verification programs allow agribusinesses to collect and monetize detailed agronomic data and drive new users to their digital agriculture platforms. This further incentivizes and promotes their products, such as Bayer's Roundup and genetically engineered seeds, entrenching corporate market power and destructive chemical-intensive industrial monocultures. Yet, use of agrichemicals kills soil organisms that support carbon sequestration.
- Carbon payment programs, especially those run by seed and chemical companies, are not designed for smaller and ecologically regenerative farms. Generally, the largest farms stand to profit the most from carbon payments, further marginalizing family-scale farms and driving consolidation. Farmers contractually commit to years, even decades, of more expensive practices that produce credits for Big Ag with minimal payment guarantees.
"There's no doubt that farmers should be supported in shifting to ecologically regenerative methods," the report says. "But the evidence shows that using carbon offsets to do so is a counterproductive and inequitable approach that will let big polluters off the hook and fail the needs of family farmers."
Davidson said that "instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing proven climate solutions."
As Congress debates the next Farm Bill, the report's executive summary calls on lawmakers and the USDA to take the following steps:
- Ensure that USDA programs do not promote private carbon payment programs and reject corporate contributions to conservation programs that require farmers to share ownership of carbon credits with corporate donors.
- Invest in existing programs with a proven track record of funding environmental improvements in agriculture, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP); channel funds toward practices that are demonstrated to enhance on-farm biodiversity, conserve water, improve soil carbon sequestration, reduce the use of synthetic inputs, and enhance farmers' resilience in the face of droughts and floods.
- Encourage tree planting as a part of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).
- Regulate air and water pollution from the largest, most polluting farms, including working with the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] to set limits on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.
- Protect farmer data by ensuring the right to port and remove data from digital agriculture platforms. Prohibit the use of farmer data gathered as part of carbon payment programs to speculate in futures markets or target farmers with personalized advertisements.
Notably, a separate report published Wednesday by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that 3 out of every 4 farmers who applied for EQIP and CSP funds in 2022 were denied.
"We do not have time or resources to waste on ineffective approaches to addressing the climate crisis, especially those that greenwash corporate pollution and risk increasing greenhouse gas emissions," wrote Davidson and Kelloway. "Congress and the USDA must channel the billions of dollars that are being invested in climate-smart agriculture toward proven and transformative solutions."
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AI Study Warns World Could Hit 2°C Within Decades—Even With Emissions Cuts
"This new study, using a new method, adds to the evidence that we certainly will face continuing changes in climate that intensify the impacts we are already feeling," said the lead author.
Jan 31, 2023
Even with ambitious action to reduce planet-heating emissions, the world could pass the two key temperature thresholds of the Paris climate agreement in the coming decades, according to new research that relied on artificial intelligence.
With the 2015 deal, nations agreed to work toward keeping global temperature rise this century "well below" 2°C and ultimately limiting it to 1.5°C. The study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a type of AI known as a neural network to predict how likely it is that the world will breach both limits before 2100.
Already, the world has warmed by an average of about 1.1°C relative to preindustrial levels. Stanford University's Noah Diffenbaugh and Elizabeth Barnes of Colorado State University found that under both low and high emissions scenarios, there is a high probability of hitting 1.5°C sometime in the 2030s. There's also a high chance of hitting 2°C in the next few decades.
"We have very clear evidence of the impact on different ecosystems from the 1°C of global warming that's already happened," Diffenbaugh told The Guardian. "This new study, using a new method, adds to the evidence that we certainly will face continuing changes in climate that intensify the impacts we are already feeling."
(Image: Dana Granoski/Stanford University)
"We confirm that the world is on the cusp of crossing the 1.5°C threshold," said Diffenbaugh. "Our AI model is quite convinced that there has already been enough warming that 2°C is likely to be exceeded if reaching net-zero emissions takes another half-century."
As CNN reported Monday:
The study's prediction is in line with previous models. In a major report published in 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that the world could cross the 1.5°C threshold "in the early 2030s."
Where the study departs from many current projections is in its estimates of when the world will cross the 2°C threshold.
While the IPCC projects that in a low emissions scenario, global temperature rises are unlikely to hit 2°C by the end of the century, the study returned more concerning results.
Diffenbaugh pointed out that various countries that support the Paris targets, along with nonstate actors, have set net-zero emissions targets for around mid-century. "Those net-zero pledges are often framed around achieving the Paris agreement 1.5°C goal," he said. "Our results suggest that those ambitious pledges might be needed to avoid 2°C."
For the study, Diffenbaugh and Barnes used outputs from global climate model simulations to train the neural network, then input previous observations of temperatures from across the globe to generate predictions. They tested the accuracy by seeing if the AI could correctly predict the current level of warming, or around 1.1°C—which it did.
"This was really the 'acid test' to see if the AI could predict the timing that we know has occurred," said Diffenbaugh. "We were pretty skeptical that this method would work until we saw that result. The fact that the AI has such high accuracy increases my confidence in its predictions of future warming."
According to The Associated Press:
Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn't part of the Diffenbaugh study but was part of the IPCC, said the study makes sense, fits with what scientists know, but seems a bit more pessimistic.
There's a lot of power in using AI and in the future that may be shown to produce better projections, but more evidence is needed before concluding that, Mahowald said.
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who edited the article, said that "the authors make an important and provocative contribution to the discussion over what is and is not achievable when it comes to limiting future warming below dangerous levels. That doesn't mean I necessarily agree with their conclusions."
Mann stressed the importance of distinguishing between physical and political obstacles to adequately slashing emissions, and that "physically, it is still possible to limit carbon emissions to levels that stay, with a reasonable likelihood, within the carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5°C."
"There is no climate 'cliff' at 1.5°C. Or 2°C," he added. "Rather, impacts increase with each fraction of a degree of warming. Limiting warming to 1.6°C is a whole lot better than allowing it to breach 2°C, and exceeding 1.5°C by a bit for a short period of time while stabilizing the climate below that level (a small 'overshoot') is a whole lot better than exceeding it by a lot for a long period of time (a big overshoot)."
The new AI-based research follows a study published last month which warned that even a temporary overshoot of the Paris targets could "significantly" raise the risk of triggering dangerous tipping points—specifically, the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest shifting to savannah, and the shutdown of the system of ocean currents that carries warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic.
Despite the world already enduring destructive impacts of heating the planet—from extreme weather to melting glaciers and sea ice to oceans becoming hotter and more acidic—the Paris agreement countries refused to agree to rapidly phase out climate-wrecking fossil fuels during the Egyptian-hosted COP27 summit in November.
The next global climate conference, scheduled for later this year, is hosted by the United Arab Emirates—which is currently facing intense criticism for appointing Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, to lead COP28.
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