This post was originally published on The Economic Times
In diplomacy, words matter. When the world’s richest nations got together in 2022 for their biennial energy meeting, their communique mentioned “net zero” 13 times; in 2024, the references went up to 15. After last week’s gathering? Just one occurrence — and that was to underline the lack of universal support. The word-count collapse is illustrative of the direction of global energy policy: Net zero is, effectively, dead.
The movement was designed to cut carbon emissions to a residual amount by 2050, so total emissions would be equal to those removed either naturally by forests or artificially by carbon sequestration projects. On a net basis, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would drop to zero.
Even at the peak of its popularity, net zero looked far-fetched. One had to believe, as a matter of faith, that consumption of oil, natural gas and coal would drop following stylized cliff-like curves. With current energy-related annual CO2 emissions running above 35,000 million metric tons, reducing them to something that would equal net zero was an impossible task. On current trends, emissions are
— Read the rest of this post, which was originally published on The Economic Times.
