Net Zero: a knot of naught
Will big climate targets help? No, unless governments and companies demonstrate one basic thing
(This post is also available as a podcast, here.)
People ask me if I believe Net Zero goals will keep us from destroying more of our environment if more companies and governments sign on. My answer is, unfortunately: No.
There is one thing I believe will help to address the ecological and societal harms that are playing out through our industrial activities, enabled by many governments at all levels. I’ll share it off the top so you can take it or leave it. (I expect most will leave it. If you stick around you get a nice cozy handknit blankie as a reward, though.)
I’ll also provide evidence to back up my answer. This is information that has been signed off by my own head of state and a couple corporate legal counsels, published on their respective websites. I’ll do this so you can see for yourself the naughtiness of Net Zero and the knottiness of even so-called leading approaches.
What’s one thing that *will* help?
Here it is. Deep breath. It’s simple:
We need to shift to an economy that works in service of life.
To do this, all governments and all industries need to ensure that they serve life—humans and the rest of the web of life—not the economy itself which is today’s norm. This is not “committing to Net Zero”. This is restoring, healing, and allowing healthy growth. This is enabling the conditions for life to thrive.
It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. But to do this, decision-makers and allocators of financial and other capital need to answer (honestly, in detail, over time):
Is the ecosphere getting healthier as a result of what we’re doing?
Are people becoming healthier, more able to look after themselves and others, more likely to live fulfilling meaningful lives in comfort and health, as a result of what we’re doing?
Synonyms: Are we restoring, allowing to heal, ending harmful behaviours, not incentivizing harm, not profiting or otherwise benefiting from harm to the biomes and people we impact?
Antonyms: Are we making things bad a little more slowly? Do people think we’re making things better while we’re actually making things worse for the biomes and people we impact?
Helpful hints: This must be core to what you do—how you flow capital, generate value, fulfill your purpose (your actual purpose not your pretend one). Do not hire consultants to analyze and report back. Do not let other people do your homework for you. Do not use a framework. Do not use ratings and rankings to get your answer.
I was that consultant for 20 years—I tried to do the work for you, alongside many others. It didn’t work. I also know many of those raters and rankers personally and they will say (at least privately if not publicly, or to those who fund them) that they’re not having any better success.
Go to the sources—those you impact. Listen with your hearts and minds. Be honest about how your policies, business models, and core activities impact these places and people, about what changes are needed in order to serve life, even if you don’t know what to do about it yet.
If you don’t understand, if it feels complicated, contradictory, obscured under many layers, keep going. Find out. Instead of spending time and effort defending the problems, press on towards deeper understanding of your role in service of life.
The comfy blanket takes time to knit.
Nonsense illustrated
In my home country of Canada we have a Net Zero plan that some would say is ambitious, but which makes ecological and social problems worse. Those living in poverty and lining up for assisted suicide, or those just breathing in proximity to decimated “managed” forests can attest. This Net Zero plan involves, for example, giving people $5000 if they buy a new electric vehicle, while providing people who choose to walk, cycle, or take public transit $0. Visit a Canadian city in the heat of summer and you will feel how vast parking lots and congested roadways (including one of the widest highways in the world—yay us!) are hotter than everywhere else—except perhaps the venting HVAC systems of the office towers.
Why are we handing out taxpayers’ money for cars which contribute to ecological damage from beginning to middle to end? Why not provide the money to people who can’t afford—or choose not to purchase—cars so they have free public transit, to help close the inequality gap? Why not reduce (or at least not expand?!) the acreage of roadways so forests, river valleys, and plains can be restored and cities can be cooled, not heated?
There are reasons for this, as the imagery of Canada’s Net Zero plan suggests (see above). The principle reason is that Net Zero is not about serving life, plain and simple. It is about serving economic growth, which many corporations are keen to oblige, because they too are not about serving life.
Net Zero incentivizes more cars on more roads with more buildings using more power and more kids thinking it’s a good thing that the waste receptacles they fill every week are bigger than they are.
What about Net Zero in Business?
As with governments, many companies are pushing hard on their Net Zero goals, too. And just like my misguided countrypeople’s policies, this is propagating business as usual, which is harmful. Hence many people believe we need to do something serious, now. Like… Net Zero?
Let’s follow some Net Zero-tagged corporate money to get a sense of what changes.
Pause for a second. This is important: what changes? If we can’t see change with clarity and specificity, then we have no assurance that anything is changing for the better. “More Net Zero targets” does not count as a change for the better.
Global meat company JBS recently signed up to be Net Zero by 2040. This is a huge company with impacts around the world, so their approach matters. They have issued billions in sustainability-linked bonds, and in the bond framework document they outline their pathway to success, which complements their Net Zero goal.
These are all the right-sounding words in corporate climate land, although many have criticized the company for greenwash (I might have said a thing or two about this myself). But the issues with Net Zero are way worse than greenwash.
Let’s assume JBS gets 100% behind all these GHG reduction plans and achieves them on schedule. What would change? To find out, I looked at JBS’s 2021 management report where they offer details about the sustainable finance in play:
These securities are linked to carbon emission reduction targets and to monitor suppliers using blockchain technology. JBS has also invested in the circular economy, expanding its operations in recycling plastic packaging, collagen, organic fertilizers and bio-diesel – inaugurating plants that use waste and industrial byproducts as raw material." [Bolding my own]
Rewind and have a closer look. What is changing? They’ll use less power to run their facilities. Sounds like eco-efficiency, not restoration by any stretch. What else? More suppliers will use blockchain, a bureaucratic process that may or may not have impact on deforestation (I go into a lot more detail about what’s missing from their forest claims, in this five-minute video here).
Even more worrying is the financing of biofuels, something they have recently increased the capacity to produce to supply “green energy” to Europe. According to their own press release, feedstock includes “circular” byproducts of soy grown as feed for industrial poultry and pig production. Does more conventional soy for more industrial meat production heal ecosystems? (Hint: no.)
What about their increased renewable energy commitment? More renewables means more minerals from more mines. It may (*may*) offset the use of some fossil fuels, but this is a far cry from restoring and healing. It’s a license to keep consuming more.
These Net Zero activities check all the boxes to get the money and do more of the things that are causing the problems they pretend to solve.
JBS needs to fundamentally alter their relationship with the animals they “process” and the land they impact. (I offer ideas about that in the Matereality assessment I conducted earlier this year. Warning: long, detailed slide deck.)
Is any company getting this right?
Another company headquartered in São Paulo, not far down the (frequently congested on an epic scale) road from JBS HQ, offers a hint of possibility that bears mention. Suzano*, a global pulp and paper company, highlights a step towards their purpose of “Renewing Life inspired by trees” outlined in the 2022 sustainability report:
[…] 179.4 hectares of restoration for ecological corridors in our protected areas in the three focus biomes of our Biodiversity commitment […]
The mention of ecological restoration is encouraging, as is the level of transparency around how they’re proceeding. In fact, their reporting overall is refreshingly transparent, humble, and cohesive—compared to JBS, Suzano’s disclosures are from another planet.
However, reporting habits aside, we all live on the same planet. And like JBS, Suzano also has several billion in green and sustainability-linked bonds in their debt portfolio. A closer look does not suggest the money dries up if they fail in their purpose to renew life. And just like JBS and every other global, publicly listed company I’m aware of, Suzano still measures their success (and conveys it thus to their investors) based on how they are increasing sales volumes and revenue, not how they are restoring or healing anything—social or ecological.
The part of the business focused on restoration of ecological corridors and native forests in Brazil—a newly formed entity called Biomas—is little more than a coda in the Q4 2022 investor deck** presented during their earnings call.
And even more concerning, given that Suzano’s collaborators in Biomas are big companies in global mining, banking, and food (including JBS’s competitor Marfrig), each of these companies is still locked into an extractive paradigm. As there is direct mention of—and transparent reporting on—restored native habitat, it has the potential to become something greater.
The impacts of centuries of political and industrial colonization on ecological and human wellness in Brazil (and Canada too for that matter), mean that working in service of life requires structural societal change. It is multi-layered and complex. It is a lot more than Net Zero targets, sustainability-linked bonds, or cross-sector collaborations—even with leading, well-intended global players in key bioregions.
If Net Zero and its sustainably branded ilk continue to accept that life serves the economy and not the other way around, they will net naught.
We have work to do
For those of you who’ve read this far, what I’m describing might easily be called common sense, deep listening, or even learning. (Those who checked out early might call it lunacy). Yet these basic concepts are getting trampled by a push for bigger Net Zero goals, more detailed ESG rankings—anything to help us get out of this mess.
Serving life is not yet legitimately on the decision-makers’ table. We can change this.
We can do the work of tuning into what’s needed, and leaning towards that with openness, honesty, camaraderie, and persistence. Anyone can choose to stop defending a harmful system and learn new ways of being.
Here’s the cozy blankie I promised you. It took me over ten years to make it, but it is way better than the tangled useless mess of dead ends I was working with.
* I do not currently have any commercial relationship with the second company I mention, Suzano. However, I conducted several rounds of sustainability-related advisory work with Fibria (which later merged with Suzano) between 2014 and 2018, and I am friends with several people either formerly or currently in strategic roles within the company. They did not know I was writing this piece and had no editorial input.
** It can be hard to find investor presentations but I have a go-to spot, Seeking Alpha. Instead of wasting time scratching around company websites, I go straight there. This is an affiliate link. If you sign on to the premium version (which I did years ago and have been very happy with it—hence becoming an affiliate) I earn a small commission.
Disagree? See evidence to the contrary? Know examples you think we should see? Questions? Please chime in. I feel kinda vulnerable and lonely saying these things sometimes. Your feedback is helpful.
Know someone working to make the shift towards industrial healing, who might benefit from hanging around in the Matereal World?
goals drive behaviour - and with clarity and rigour you show that Lorraine. May this beautifully crafted call for life go viral.
Love the anchoring back to the core question of what should the economy be for... this is, as you hint, the promise of purpose (noted, it's often rubbish), that the 'ultimate ends' of the venture are to make 'an optimal strategic contribution to people and planetary wellbeing' (I think that's a slight misquote of Victoria Hurth's work for BSI) but you get the idea... Thanks again for your sharing.