Net Zero Targets: Provisionally Legitimate and Conclusively Absurd?

Net zero targets do not make sense from the perspective of earth science. Even if they did make scientific sense, net zero targets cannot proxy relationships of justice among emitters. Climate justice properly understood obliges emitters to orient their behaviour towards the goal of achieving the climate stability that might enable collective flourishing now and in the future. Rather than orienting agents toward collective flourishing under climate stability, net zero targets isolate agents from each other, offering each a sort of individual moral ledger meant to legitimate business as usual by compensating for harms directly attributable to the agent’s own activities.

The conditions of achieving climate stability include things like increasing coordination of climate-affecting actions and decreasing activities that prolong the fossil-fuel era. As presently implemented and as envisioned for the near future, net zero policies are fragmented geographically and by sector; they facilitate continued emissions far beyond the residual emissions for which they were intended; and they do not discourage transition-delaying activities such as lobbying for continued fossil fuel subsidies.

Net zero targets can only ever serve as provisional instruments of the morally substantive policies that are themselves subject to the standards of climate justice. However, as provisional instruments of policies on the way to climate justice, net zero targets could facilitate coordination, signal commitment, and even make some contribution towards preliminary emissions reduction. With continual improvement, they could evolve into less absurd instruments than they are at present.

Join the Department of Politics of International Affairs and the Centre for Climate and Energy Policy for a presentation by Professor Lisa Ellis, University of Otago, New Zealand.

A member of staff will be in the lobby of the Brunei Gallery 15 minutes prior to the event, in order to assist any attendees who are not affiliated with SOAS in reaching the room.

Host or Publisher SOAS Politics, University of London