Fossil fuel companies are no longer denying the realities of climate change — which many of them reported on privately for decades. Instead, they’re attempting to position themselves as key players in the “low-carbon transition.” And key to that is the companies’ embrace of the mantra of “net-zero” emissions. As we sweat through what a climate scientist has called a “gobsmackingly bananas” heat wave — three record-breaking months from July through September — the claims of net zero emissions are becoming ever more deeply entwined with fossil fuel companies’ public relations strategies.
Net zero is the idea that emissions in one place — an oil refinery or the cars and planes using its products — are balanced out by removal of carbon dioxide in another place. The elegance in that equation, which may make sense in a classroom, gets messy when it turns out that most of those other places intended to balance fossil fuel emissions are trees, which absorb CO2 and are located primarily in tropical forests.
